4. The House

My sister and I were out happily playing in our back yard with our dolls one day.  We were rather young, I was probably about 4 or 5 which put her at about 7 or 8, when a giant bumble bee came flying through the yard, now you never saw two little girls run so fast but we forgot our dolls outside.  We begged our mom to go and get our "babies" until she finally relented.  I'm sure that the bumble bee was long gone, but there was no way we were going back out there to find out.  She was our hero that day, yeah mom!

That was also the house we lived in where I fell out of a moving car.  My grandfather had an old 4 door sedan, I can't remember what it was, but it was big and it was pink and white.  My dad was driving us home with our cousin, and my sister and I were in the back.  I thought that I was rolling the window down when I grabbed the door handle and out I went.  Into gravel rolling and rolling until I finally came to a stop.  I hadn't realized how close we were to the house, but all I could think of was that they were leaving me behind so I got up and started running after the car.  My sister had been standing up in the back of the car looking out the back (no seat-belt requirements back then) when she saw me rolling and getting up and running.  I guess the spectacle looked rather funny to her so she started laughing and telling my dad that I was rolling down the hill.  My dad stopped the car and came and picked me up and took me home.  It was bad, but not too bad.  They had taken me to emergency, I can still remember those big round lights in the examination room.  They had to scrub the gravel out of my knees and elbows.  My mom was changing bandages on me for weeks it seemed like.

I have a lot of memories of that house, our neighbor was always doting on us girls, she was older and I think all of her kids had left home.  And I had my first "boyfriend" there (I was about 6), our families were friends and we used to go swimming in their pool.    I cracked my head open one day when my sister was playing airplane with me and I collided with a brick wall.  Our alligator lizards that we had ran away when we lived there.  They were beautiful white colored lizards about a foot long and I think we had two of them.  That and the wolf spider on the property who we used to feed flies to was the extent of our animal entertainment there.  But the wolf spider was really cool.  I can still remember him running out to catch the spider or potato bug that we would throw into his web.  So many memories in that house.