Another food fight, this time with Mom

Part 2

On my website and in my class I recommend not writing about early childhood.  So often memories of those times are fragmentary and lack a narrative thread.  Now, however, I am trying to tie together scattered childhood memories under the umbrella of food.

One of my earliest memories–before Grandma Anna’s oyster stew–was about oatmeal.  I clearly remember sitting in a high chair in the kitchen of the little house in Camas, Washington.  I must have been about 3 years old.  My mother served me a bowl of oatmeal.  I refused to eat it.  She told me I would have to sit there until I ate it.  I outlasted her.  And I have never eaten oatmeal again in my life, although I love oatmeal raisin cookies.  She also regularly served me lunch of spinach and chopped eggs–which I enjoy even now.

I also recall pulling up carrots and beets from our neighbors’ garden, washing them off with water from the garden hose and eating them raw.  My partners in this garden theft were the neighbor’s two sons.  I must have been 4 at the time because I also remember their parents and mine telling us that World War II was over.  We kids ran around the front yard yelling and hollering about it.

Other memories from the mid 1940s:  having to wear hand-me-down clothes because of rationing, Buster Brown shoes, being sick with whooping cough, taking tap dancing lessons, the death of another little neighbor boy by drowning in the Columbia River, and the birth of my sister, Joy.  I started kindergarten while we still living in Camas, then we moved to Washougal in the middle of that year.

Next: blackberries and more blackberries…

(This post is part of an experimental memoir.  I teach memoir writing and will edit your memoir to make it better.  Learn more at www.onedaymemoir.com)