Before I had my dream, I lived in a small brick house in the middle of a tiny town. We lived by two parks and one of my aunts. My aunt had a yellow house and a basement full of laundry. My cousin and my older siblings would play down there- cowboys and indians…that kind of thing. I would sit at the top of the stairs going down to the basement and watch the goings on. Sometimes they invited me to play, so I would make my ponderous way down, clinging to the rickety rail and sort of double-stepping down as my children do, because my legs weren’t long enough. There was a great wooden rocking horse down there, and they would let me sit on it and pretend to be the indian running away form the cowboys.
It was the greatest thing, and I always imagined that I was going rather fast on that rocking horse, though I never got anywhere.
Childhood exaggerated the world, but I can promise you that there were mountains of laundry down there, taller than my head. Lots of gray clothes. I loved the smell of freshly clean laundry, just out of the drier. So warm. I don’t know if there is anything in the world better than a pile freshly washed clothes. Sometimes I think it would be nice to put my whole wardrobe in a giant washer and drier, and make a pile out of it, and just bury myself in the warmth and the scent of fabric softener. I could adapt. I could become a burrowing animal…
As I sat at the top of those steps one day, I ate the first thing I can remember ever eating: a lollipop.
It was of those big knobby things with gum in the center. It was red, and when I bit into it with my young sharp teeth, I felt a satisfying crack and sank my teeth into the soft, sweet center. The gum was a surprise to me at the time.
“Gum,” I said. It is the first word I remember saying.
My mom was in the kitchen washing dished with my aunt. She heard me speak, and assumed that I was demanding something of her. “I don’t have any gum,” she said plaintively.
Exasperated, I had to explain that I didn’t want anything from her, that I had simply been pleased by my discovery.
My aunt had this dog. It was like a mythical creature.
Big and yellow, the same yellow as her house. He had the head of a lion and the body of a sheep. He was a Chow, you see, with thick fur and wide pointy ears and a large purple tongue that looked as though a slug had slithered into his mouth and suffocated there. His fur was matted, and though “matted” is the proper term, it almost seems more correct to say his fur was clotted. Clotted, like his fur had a flow to it. His body was clumpy and patched with wads of dead fur, giving it the appearance of a sheep. The tufts of fur around his head and neck were also wild and clumped, giving him a mane.
He had impish black eyes, and though he wasn’t very smart, I could tell that there was still something going on in there. I could tell he had a sense of humor.
I remember standing in my aunt’s back yard, and he was staring at me through the back door. Contemplating me. His little black eyes shown. His tongue twitched with each panting breath. His tail swished from side to side. All of a sudden, he charged forward, bumping open the screen door. He padded swiftly down the steps of the back porch, and began to lick me on the face. Madly, as if he had waited his whole life to taste the salt from my face.
“Ma-ax!” I giggled, pushing him away.
I remember vaguely the screen door opening again, or at least I imagined that it was about to open, and my aunt would come out and scold him and drag him inside. But I didn’t want her to. But my memory stops there, so anything could have happened.
