The Butterfly Hours Memoir Project: PLAYGROUND

For 2019 I'm running a year-long series on my blog in which I share my responses to the writing assignment prompts found in THE BUTTERLY HOURS by Patty Dann.

I welcome you to join me, if you like! I've divided the prompts by month, and the plan is to respond to 3 (or so) a week. For some of these I may write poems, for others prose. The important thing is to mine my memory. Who knows where this exploration will lead?

For links to the prompts I've written on so far this year, please click on The Butterfly Hours tab above.

This month's prompts are pipe, playground, prayers, recipes, ribbon, rice, road, saltwater, sandwich, school, sewing.

PLAYGROUND

wee me hanging from the (very old!)
swingset in my Dykes Grandparents'
side yard (Port St. Joe, FL)

Most vivid in my mind: the backyard swing set and our church playground (where I brokemy arm).
Also the time in 6^th grade when I was on top of the school monkey bars, and my mom walked past me unexpectedly. (She was there for something regarding my brother Ken.) This might not have been a big deal, except that day I wasn't wearing the clothes I left home in. On the bus ride to school I had changed out of the uncool homemade dress into a friend's much cool-er outfit (which I can no longer remember, but I do remember shimmying into the pants... good thing about a dress is it's easy to be a quick-change artist!). So when I saw my mom, my heart froze. I knew I was busted. She greeted me with a tight mouth, and I had the rest of the day to imagine the punishment waiting for me when I got home from school.
This was a dramatic moment in my relationship with my mother, who was hurt and disappointed in me (and wrote me a 4 page letter I still have expressing all of her feelings). But. It was essential in me becoming... me.