A memoir--my first memories--in Chattanooga, of course

I adored my beautiful mother. We got to stay home together for three years after my older sister Lynda started school.

Some of the threads of the tapestry of my life have been woven by the twelve places that I lived as I was growing up. From Charleston and Camden, South Carolina, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, ere I was five years old. Early childhood was a happy time for me.

I do not remember South Carolina--not Charleston nor Camden--but I loved Chattanooga. We must have moved there when I was three or four. It was surrounded by those tall, misty mountains that I still love today. Constantly, I played outdoors there, sliding down the clay red hills. If memory serves me well, the neighborhood where we lived was even called Red Bank. Much to my mother’s dismay, my shorts’ and pants’ bottoms were forever stained red.

At four years of age, I rode my stick horse with my best friend and next door neighbor Marshall Cook. Actually my first boy friend, Marshall left me a big chocolate candy heart on the back stoop on Valentine’s Day that year. Back then, we kids didn’t get much candy, so I loved Marshall immediately.

This snapshot was actually taken in Richmond, VA, once we left Chattanooga. My sister was three and one half years older than I, but because she was always tall and I was always short, she looked even older. Here we are at six and ten. I had forgotten that my mom used to sew our clothes and dress us alike at times. We were all very proud of our shiny, new Buick.

All summer long I ran my heedless ways, but when my older sister and the other older kids in the neighborhood went off to school in the autumn, not even Marshall’s company could console me. Indoors, I would play paper dolls with my mom, and when she was busy with housework, I would set up all my dolls and teddy bears and play school, with me always as the teacher, of course.

But the outdoors would beckon me once again, and out I would trot to the red hills behind our house. One of the neighbors had a old swing in their backyard hanging from a tree--a swing on which the whole neighborhood played--and this one day, Marshall was not around, and I was playing by my lonesome. I had seen my sister and some of the older kids swing high and then when the swing was at its pinnacle, they would jump out and come back down to earth, landing on their feet! I thought that that was the coolest thing that I had seen them do.

It must have been in Chattanooga that I began to develop my love of animals. We got our first pets there, a couple of cats. Later we almost always had a dog. Our first one was a red cocker spaniel named Candy. Still later I got hamsters and guinea pigs. Mom even had a blue parakeet named Luke. Look at that little plaid suit that I'm wearing! My legs still look exactly like that!

I felt particularly brave that day, so I climbed into the swing and began to pump it as high as my short legs would carry me--which was higher than I had ever gone before! Then at the swing’s zenith, I screwed my courage to its sticking place, and I let go of the ropes and jumped down, down, down! There I stood on the ground and on my feet, and for a few seconds, I felt so proud of myself. Yes, proud for as long as it took the swing’s wooden seat to swing back around and strike me with its full force on the back of my head, for I had not noticed, or forgotten, that the older kids ran after their feet hit the ground!

The impact of the swing at least knocked me out of the path of its next circuit. Somewhat in shock, whether by my stupidity or the blow, I don't know which, I stood there and reached around to the back of my head and felt the warmth of the blood and then saw its deep red color dripping from my fingers--a color that rivaled the color of the red clay. Boy, I knew that I was in big trouble then! And I was afraid--petrified--not of my injury--but of my parents’ wrath!  They were going to be so angry at me!

I slowly made my way through several back yards and went up the stoop to our back door. I knew that I had to tell and to show my mother what had happened. The superficial head wound was bleeding profusely. Of course, when my mom saw me bleeding, she was frantic. It was 1954, there was no 911, and we had only the one car that dad had taken to work. On that black phone that sat on a small table in the kitchen, she called my father, who drove home immediately. They took me to the local hospital, where I got a shot in my head and a head full of stitches!

Apparently, my sister and I were still sleeping together at four and seven. I recall my mother converting her sewing room into my own bedroom in our next move to Richmond, Virginia, when I was six or seven.

And I never, ever even so much as got in any trouble that day! But it was soon after that experience that my mother enrolled me into White Oak Presbyterian church kindergarten (there was no public kindergarten in Tennessee in 1954), where she felt that I would be safer. It was the only private school that I ever attended, and it awakened in me a lifelong love of school and of learning.

Here I am nearly 60 years ago at a birthday party in kindergarten, looking quite much like the contemplative teacher that I would become! From kindergarten on, I pretty much loved school!

There I am in the middle with the plaid dress. Story time out of doors in kindergarten.