I was born a few weeks early in the middle of a month near the end of a year just a handful of years past the mid-century mark. Leaves were changing colors and falling from the trees on the day of my birth although I was born a quarter past the stroke of midnight. With no doctor or hospital nearby, my father did the best he could as directed over the telephone by the funeral home director who was also the ambulance driver in what was then a small town. I survived. My twin, who was born later in a hospital, did not. While my beginning was somewhat unexpected, fast, furious, and joyous, it was also terribly sad, marred by tragedy.
There are pictures of the infant who passed. Black and white pictures of her in what would have been her coming home outfit as she lay in her tiny coffin padded and covered in sateen and silk. There are no pictures of me prior to the age of six. Not even school pictures. Yet, I remember those days. I remember as far back as to the first thing I understood. It was the light bulb in the socket in the ceiling in my granny's bedroom where she kept the cradle I spent so many of my early days there. I remember knowing that if I opened my eyes and that light bulb was glowing then the granny would soon thereafter be looking into my face and she would make me happy. I remember making forts out of grass in the field between my house and the neighbor's house. I remember firecrackers by woodland streams and bottle rockets at the lake. I remember tall sunflowers, turtles tied to rosebushes, tins of sardines at summer camp, morning glories growing on fences. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and finding my mother in the kitchen sewing Barbie doll clothes for my Barbie. I remember my mother and I going for long drives and her and I talking about parakeets. It isn't like my parents didn't interact with me or love me. They simply did not capture an image of me. It only seems odd because I know my father to have been very much a photography buff. There are thousands upon thousands of pictures and slides of him and my mother and my older sister and brother. But, I did not appear in any such medium until I was about six.
Just about the time I seemed to appear as a child in my parent's realm of recognition, my mother died. It was sudden. I remember that too. I was playing with my Barbie dolls in the backyard. I could see her through the window of her bedroom. She was sitting in a chair talking to my father who was laying on the bed. That was common practice. My father worked from very early in the morning to early afternoon and would often come home and take a nap. I remember liking looking at my mother and while playing in the backyard would look up from time to time to see her through her bedroom window. The night that she died one minute she was sitting in front of the window and the next time I looked up she wasn't. Not long after that my sister ran out into the backyard yelling at me to come inside, that something had happened to our mother. I remember thinking my sister was crazy, and that wouldn't be the last time I thought that about her.