A Much Simpler Time

Last night after work, I went down to spend time with my cousin who is eleven days younger than me and who just turned 21 earlier this week. She was having a little get-together at her brother's house and I had the time, and wanted to spend time with her, so I went.


On the drive home this afternoon, memories hit me as I drove through places I used to spend a lot of time when I was younger.


You see, when you're a kid, the world is so small. You think that the few places you spend time in are it. You believe that the people you see everyday will always be there and the house you live in is where you'll spend the rest of your life. You build up these walls that make you feel safe and sound.

Nothing like playing with beer boxes in the kitchen :)

I passed the site where the first house I ever lived in used to be. When I was eleven, the golf course next door bought the house, let the fire department use it as a practice house and burned it down. They now have it nicely landscaped as part of their front along the busy main road. But remnants of that time in my life still remain. The 2 large pine trees that stood next to my house are still there as is the tree fort my brother built (with 6 inch carpenters nails) still hangs onto the oak in the back.

Mom, Erin and I in front of that house (and the pine trees) when I was little.

That little house was my fortress when I was little. Metarmora was my town. See, when I was a small child, I barely left that small town of Metamora. I went to school in Metamora. All my friends lived in Metamora, so when I went to their house it was in Metamora. I knew the town like the back of my hand. My friend Cody lived on the adjacent to the only corner with a light in the town (and still is the only corner). The White Horse Inn made the best fish that my mom used to take us to get when she felt like going out to somewhere nice. I always remember getting the Shirley Temple's when I was a child as well. My aunt lived a couple streets from downtown and we went to her house every year for trick or treating. 


Lapeer was so foreign to me. Though my mother worked there, I didn't spend a lot of time there. It was so big to me. When I was little, I thought Lapeer is big. Now I just laugh at that thought because I have seen much bigger places. But when I was a child, Lapeer was the place I went if I needed school clothes and to go out to dinner with family on weekends. We didn't spend a lot of time in Lapeer. 


Metamora was the place where I was okay walking around. It was the place I knew everyone. I went to the doctor's here, shopped for groceries here and spent all my time here. My grandmother's house was across the road from the school I went to when I was little. A lot of my time was also spent at my grandmother's house...but it was in this little town that was home.

Some of the cousins and I at grandma's.

It's funny how everything changes so fast when you get older though. Once my brother hit middle school, Lapeer wasn't so foreign. Lapeer was still "big" to me but as more doctors came into my life, I was in the car with my mom as she drove places like Flint, Detroit and Ann Arbor. These places were huge compared to Lapeer and my world expanded. When I was eleven, we moved into Lapeer after that golf course bought the house and life was never the same again.


But it's always weird when one of those memories hits you and you remember how simple everything was compared to how life is now. Then I didn't know what a cell phone was, I had dial-up internet, I never heard of an iPod and a laptop was something out of my reach. I owned a Sega Genesis. My favorite shows were Rugrats and Hey Arnold. I spent afternoons stealing dining room chairs out of the house so I could climb to the top of the apple trees in our backyard for the best apples and watching my brother hit golf balls with a bat into the fields behind our house. These were the golf balls that he and his friends "found" in those fields behind our house.

My brother and his friend after trick-or-treating at my aunt's house.

These memories are what made you, you. These are the stories of your childhood, the things you laugh about now with your friends wondering what you were thinking when you were a kid. Like the time that my friend Julie ate as many pieces of gum as she could stuff in her mouth and then couldn't breathe and spit it out the window into the front yard. Or the time my brother and I ate our way through one very large canister of Fruit Punch Kool-aid when our father was supposed to be watching us...and tried to get away with it. I think our hands were red for a week. There were the Saturday nights at Ponderosa where we knew all the waiters and waitresses, the managers and even the cooks because we were always there (mom always got the sirloin tips). 

Molly and I buried Riverdog at Aunt Linda's.

These are the memories that will always make me smile. These were the times that life was just so perfect and it seemed as if nothing would ever change.


But it always does. I'm not saying that change is a bad thing, because things can't always stay the same all the time. But the memories shall never fail to bring a smile on my face. Here's to the days of sandcastles on the beach, smiles, country music, driving the back roads with the windows down, burying each other in the sand at Aunt Linda's house, girl scouts, my pink Aruba hat and being a kid.


My Playlist
1. Paradise- Coldplay
2. Survivor's Guilt- Rise Against
3. Bounce- The Cab
4. Crawling Back to You- Daughtry
5. Heaven- 3 Doors Down
6. Probably Wouldn't Be This Way- LeAnn Rimes
7. Mercenary- Pania! at the Disco
8. Us Against the World- Coldplay