Tactile

I have one of those vivid memories. I'm about 7 years old and have become the owner of a pair of Bantams, Dick and Polly. A proud owner, because my mother gave them to me; I understood she wanted me to love them and I truly did. We would come home from school for lunch in those days, and in that first year of the chickens, I would eat my lunch as fast as possible and run out to my chickens where their coop opened onto a fenced yard. I would climb up onto the flat roof of their coop and lie on it to watch the bantams, fascinated by the way that Dick would find something on the ground and call Polly over to eat it. There were giant sunflowers planted around the coop, and the huge heads would hang over me as I lay on top of the roof, supplying shade if the day was hot. Girls wore dresses to school back then, and I remember pulling the skirt down to shield my knees from the roughness of the sanded tarpaper roof. I don't remember anyone else being there with me. My brother and sister would have been home from school at the same time: I suppose they were busy forming their own memories. It seemed that time was endless,and of course that was wrong because lunch time could not have been very long. It seemed like heaven and that may have been right because I don't think I've ever been any closer than that.