Childhood.....

and memories. Memory is a funny thing. Not in the ha-ha sense, but in that our minds alter our perception of what "was". The scary monster, the defeat, the victory...all soooo much bigger or worse in our memory than in reality. And the same with good memories. They remain just that, good...maybe even excellent, but our minds have embellish them to fit our needs. I was reminded of that last week when I posted the picture of Christmas 1951. A modest size tree, but my younger sister remembers it as being 15 feet tall..*S*. You get my point. A quilter friend of mine, and one who has had a book published by That Patchwork Place, Carol Fure, did a series of quilts about summers spent on her grandparents farm. I have really excellent notes from the lecture she gave at our guild meeting, but those are not at hand today. There were several quilts in the series, but the one I remember was a pattern called "Crosses And Losses". She did it in blues and gold. The conclusion she had drawn was that our memories are neither as good(gold)nor as bad(blue) as we remember.
And maybe for me, it stayed in my head because it's how it is with almost everything....somewhere in between.
As with many children, I can't say my childhood was ideal, or magical or even always fun. I fell into a category of kids who are "too old for their years", the ones with a slightly "too adult" view of life. The normal magic of imagination isn't there. At least not as a plan of action. I created the magic I needed. I found it inside my head and in words. In the angle of sunshine slanting through young green leaves and making patterns on the water. In the way the wind whips the snow in tiny tornadoes, and in the endlessly fascinating blinks of the fireflies(or lightening bugs as we called them). I found magic everywhere, but not in the hands of society or my parents.
What YOU remember is truly YOUR gift from the Universe, chances are, it was neither as good, nor as bad as you remember. And there is nothing wrong with that. It's personal. It's yours. Whether it's a gift or a lesson, it's what you do with it that matters.