50 Things I Do and Do Not Miss From Childhood

25 Things I Do Not Miss From Childhood

1. Eating my peas
2. Having very little privacy
3. Going to bed while the sun was still out
4. Not having my feelings and ideas taken seriously, even when my whole heart was in them
5. The stiff, overly thick, 1970s, corduroy pants that made loud shooshing noises when you walked
6. Bullies threatening me with physical violence and following me home from school
7. Group showers after Phys. Ed. classes
8. Feeling hopeless about The Bomb and praying fervently that the Russians and the Americans wouldn't push the button
9. Rugburn
10. My mother picking out my clothes
11. The feeling of devastation that relatively small events could cause
12. Navigating the complex world of female relationships
13. Being teased by grownups without any real ability to get away
14. Wanting to read far above my maturity level and not being allowed to
15. The awkwardness of other children's birthday parties
16. Organ lessons
17. Being continually supervised
18. How much elementary school played out like Lord of the Flies
19. Always outgrowing clothes that I loved
20. How everything I wanted seemed to be arbitrarily kept away from me by future ages
21. Show & Tell in front of the class
22. That time I lived in fear of my mother for a few days after I found her collection of what I thought were trophies from her alien kills in the fridge (olives stuffed with pimentos were new to me at the time)
23. Loose teeth
24. Religion-induced anxiety that my soul might be at stake over some inadvertent sin
25. That people gave me dolls as gifts, which I was alternately disinterested in or terrified by

25 Things I Do Miss From Childhood

1. Jumping on the bed
2. The soft clatter pennies made in my pink, plastic piggybank when I rolled it over the shag carpeting in the hallway
3. Cardboard boxes exciting the hell out of me
4. Giggling through church while adding "under the covers at night" to the end of every song title in the hymnal
5. Bug funerals
6. Putting everything in my mouth to taste it
7. The deep satisfaction after getting a perfect mark on a spelling test
8. That the dentist gave me a sparkly ring after each visit
9. How my fingers fit perfectly into the grooves meant to hold cigarettes in plastic hotel ashtrays
10. That a garden shed could be the center of whole kingdom
11. Climbing up high into a tree to read books
12. Rootbeer popsicles
13. The feeling peculiar to my mother cutting the tops open on a new set of finger paints
14. Lying around in deep states of boredom
15. The smell of my grandfather on a cotton pillowcase after he and my grandmother stayed the night
16. Wearing my father's old shirts as giant painting smocks
17. That lies felt like satisfying stories told well
18. Those giant Lip Smackers chapsticks that smelled like bubblegum
19. Reading books with a flashlight in the back of my closet where the carpet was still relatively unworn
20. The beach ball smell of my rain slicker and a new umbrella
21. Playing hard like it was my job
22. That everything my future self could possibly be, from a secretary to a heroin addict, seemed like equally dramatic and grand adventures
23. Learning to yo-yo while standing on a kitchen chair, because the string was too long and I was too short to do it from the floor
24. Hiding nuts in my hair at the lake for the squirrels to find
25. Long days stretching out ahead of me over which I had fairly free reign to invent ways to fill them

Home Is Quite Different Than House, And I'm Finally Home

We moved into our new home about a week-and-a-half ago. We're slowly getting it all unpacked and painting finished before I show it to you. Above is your sneak peak at a radiator!

I keep wanting to write about it, because it is exciting to have our first ever piece of real estate, and it is lovely to boot. We're now living in an apartment that was built in 1914 with all its gorgeous original windows and hardwood floors, which makes it so much easier to claim that all our aging, secondhand furniture is on purpose. I am seriously in love with this place. Yes, I have kissed its walls.



As is my usual style, though, I am having many feelings about this whole home thing, which requires much introspection and deep thinking and eating of dark chocolate with sea salt.

Sometime around the age of four, I lost my sense of home, or at least that is when I became aware of feeling like a visitor everywhere. Maybe it was because I was becoming conscious of my discomfort with my body, or maybe it was because we moved to a new house at that time and it interrupted my chi. I grew up in a stable home with relatively happy parents, but I was still somehow stuck with the keen awareness that all things were temporary and that I did not belong.



As an adult, it's likely that I have moved over ten times, I've had roommates and I've lived alone, and I've never had a home. I have been squatting on borrowed space. I let the dirt accumulate, I let the appliances deteriorate, and when I have had enough, I move on. Now, though, I am quite unexpectedly experiencing that feeling that I am sure is what everyone has been talking about when they say they feel "at home". I always caught the gist of that sentiment, but I never really knew the flavour. Now I do.

I had no reason to believe, no faith, that I would come to this place and discover this kind of animal comfort. I just thought it would be a place that I would treat better because it is an investment, but now I sweep the floors because I love this place. I sweep the floors because the Palinode lives here, and I love him. I sweep the floors because we are family here: the Palinode, the cats, the apartment, and I.



All of you with homes, or with the memory of homes, be thankful. Home is quite different than house, and we all have this sense. It's really a unique and incredible feeling. It's safety, it's calm, it's a nest for those I love, and it's liberating to have this space. There is a vigilance I have long held in my chest, an anxious watchfulness, because no place was mine. All places were merely borrowed or lent, and anything could be taken away, but that vigilance is mostly lifted here, aside from my normal fears of home invasion and fire.

And now I am here, home and wondering how long this feeling gets to hold out. Does it last? Can I fall out of it?

After 35 years of wandering, I have a physical space that is mine in the world, and this gratitude I feel makes up for all the time that I did not.

There Would Always Be a Becky and Some Damned Kite

I had a kite I'd won in the city newspaper's colouring contest. I was 13 years old, standing in a field still dusted with dry snow that blew in late during that early spring, and I was a little embarrassed by the win. It felt terrible to stand there with that kite.



I never won in contests. I had only wanted to win something, anything, once, and so I had entered a contest for which I felt I was a shoe-in. When I dropped off my entry, I was two weeks away from aging out of the running, and, at 12 years old, colouring was easy. I coloured in the requisite drawing of a hot air balloon with markers and mailed it in to the newspaper.

When I got the phone call telling me I was the winner, it was anticlimactic. I expected to feel whatever emotion it was that people looked like they were feeling when they won something, but I didn't feel the urge to beam or gush about my news. I just felt kind of bored. The prize of a kite emblazoned with a giant Canadian maple leaf barely interested me, and I wished it were as easy to win other things that interested me more. I knew that I was a complete asshole for feeling this way, because I had won a kite, goddammit! But I didn't really care.

A couple of weeks later, I went to pick up my prize, and the lady at the desk told me about how the the second prize winner, Becky, had nearly won, but I had just squeaked by. I couldn't stop thinking about Becky after that, and when the first, second, and third place winners were announced in the paper the following weekend, I looked at Becky's second-place picture and bio and felt sick. She was two years younger than me, and I was now technically aged out of the contest, having had my 13th birthday two weeks after the contest closed. I was a fraud. I imagined that Becky really wanted the ugly kite that I now held, and I was a thief.

I needed to pay some kind of penance for being such a jerk, so I regularly took the kite I didn't want out to a field near my house. I told myself that I would treat it like prayer, that I would let my kite fly up there into the sky, and I would think about Becky. I would hope good things for her. I would hope that she would win something and feel the feelings you are supposed to feel when you really want something and get it. I would hope that I would only take what I wanted in the future, that I wouldn't try to artificially create what was better to come by honestly.

I spent hours in that field during my 13th spring reeling out string and squinting against the sun, waiting to appreciate what I had taken and worrying that this was how things would be, that I would always want and then regret wanting. The field only punctuated my thoughts, stretching out flat and dusty and unforgiving until it abutted the peeling fences of suburban yards.

I finally found some relief one afternoon when the wind twisted the kite into a nosedive. It pulled and jerked in powerful loops that yanked my arms hard enough to drag my feet until it pounded into a dirt clod and collapsed under its own force, its spine busted in two. I was calmed as I wound up the string for the last time, watching it snap out little dust clouds, and folded the broken toy under my arm. I was so tired of thinking about Becky and wanting and not wanting.

I couldn't just win and be happy winning, because this was how things really were. I knew that now. My hairshirt was done, but the fact remained: there would always a Becky and some damned kite, and I would always be a thief with broken spoils.