Do you ever wonder why some stuff sticks in your brain, while other stuff does not?
For example: I “organized” our garage a couple of months ago and I put an old, now-seldom-worn pair of hiking boots in what seemed at the time like a logical place. When I looked for the boots last week, I had no idea where I’d put them...yet I can remember, rock-by-rock and vista-by-vista, many of the hundreds of trail miles I walked in those boots.
And there’s this: When I was in high school, I took a geometry class and the teacher was a sweet, gray-haired woman, kind of grandmotherly, and I liked her and really studied for her (my inclination at the time would have been to give only minor effort to anything that even smelled like math.) Yet today I couldn’t solve the simplest of geometry problems.
I do remember, however, that when I was only about three my parents went to visit friends of theirs named Rockwell, and today, I can clearly recall that visit, and that the Rockwells had no kids but they did have the coolest toy box in their dining room...and I can remember the layout of that dining room and how the toy box was next to their walnut china cabinet, and what a great time I had in that house where people had no kids but there was a toy box.
So what's the deal with this memory of mine?
Now that I’m an adult, I’m of the belief that, when kids come to our house to visit, we’d better have some toys on hand. And if the kids tire of the toys and decide they’d rather play our piano, we let them do that. Even better, we have kid-friendly farm animals outside, a veritable petting-zoo.
Our niece from Montana and her husband and two children stayed here for a couple of days this week. We played inside for hours, and we also made countless trips out to our barn to gather eggs. One of my neighbors said we could come over to his place to see his turkeys and ducks and pigs, and another neighbor said we could give his horses treats.
I can’t speak for the kids, but I know that, as unpredictable as my weird brain might sometimes be, I’ll always remember what a great visit we had.
