This past week Kim asked "If you could go back to any point in your life - not to change anything but just to experience/enjoy it/whatever - again, when would it be?"
I honestly had to contemplate this for a very long time. There are so many moments that I want to experience again, particularly if I could remember them in better clarity the second time around. It would be interesting to see how my childhood memories are different from my adult memory or perspective. I talked last week in my Favorite Fives about my favorite moments in time , so I won't use any of those. That being said, the moment I want to experience again is the summer of 1979, the whole summer. I grew up without any family close by. My mom was from Idaho and my dad California, so we sort of transplanted here and still had our family - grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc. living in those two places. There were a few years that either an uncle or aunt on my dads side moved in with us, but other than that we just had each other for family.
This meant that every summer we would fly down to California, my brother and I by ourselves, for 3 weeks. During that time we got to hang out in beautiful Tehachapi, California with my grandparents and also spend time in the always lovely Bakersfield with the cousins and my aunt. It was so great, waking up to the birds singing and my grandpa winding the old clock every morning at the top of the stairs. We would rush up there and get toothless kisses from him while grandma got our breakfast ready. We spent the days catching lizards, helping my grandpa polish rocks, bowling with my grandma, and just having a great time. In Bakersfield with the cousins we spent literally all day in their pool. We even ate in there a few times. When we weren't swimming we were hypnotizing the chickens they had in there backyard as part of their 4H project.
People, I am telling you, if you have not spent time in Bakersfield, you really should. It is something that can only be experienced and once you have, you never forget it.
Somewhere in that trip, every year, my grandpa took us to Disneyland. He always insisted that we do Small World and the Hall of Presidents first, but after that we could do whatever. It was such a great experience and looking back on it I realize just how fortunate we were.
For the other part of the summer we went to Idaho, a very small town up north that had about 300 people in it at the time and the one school in town was an elementary, junior high, and high school all combined in one building. It was also three towns going to this one school, my mom's graduating class had 24 people in it! So that gives you and idea of how tiny it was, compare that to Bakersfield that had over 200,000 people at that same time.
This little town was right out of a Rockwell picture. Everyone knew everyone, we could walk to town from my grandparents house. The grocers was a grocery and sundry (dry goods, like jeans, cards, toys) combined in one little store. The surrounding area was all farm land and prairie, with pine covered mountains all around. You always had to wear layers as once a cloud covered the sun, it would drop about 10 degrees...so no pool there! But, we did go fishing with my grandpa, my grandma always made cookies the day we were due to arrive and she put out a new toy on each of our beds for us to play with. My grandma kept lists in the house of what food we liked and she would tailor it to each of us. At night we got to watch TV in our jammies and eat ice cream. We usually went there in June when they had their big town picnic, which made it even more of an Americana experience.
I truly loved those times spent with my grandparents and cousins. I know that I learned to value my time with them more as it was such a rare occurrence for me to see them compared to most people I knew. So to my grandparents (and my parents for arranging it) I am very grateful for the time and love you showed us. It helped shape me in ways you cannot imagine and I treasure every moment spent in your company. To my cousins I say, "want to hypnotize some chickens? Yeehaw!"
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