Carefree

  This week it was asked: What is your fondest childhood memory?

 It is very funny that just  last week thoughts occurred to me of lazy summer days and sometimes how carefree my life was. It wasn’t all the time. I will not go into  the problems that came to me on several fronts, but there were many days in, well, looking back I see that it wasn’t  many  years,  but days when there wasn’t much to do, but also  there was nothing pressing to be done and I was free.

I thought harder for times of total delight and I have to say that when I was very, very young on Christmas Eve and inevitably woke up in the wee hours to wee, I would smell the turkey slowly roasting, smell all of the goodies my mother  had been making for days. I would see the Christmas tree artfully decorated by my mother, and see that Santa had come, leaving all the perfectly-wrapped presents under it, along with our filled stockings. I still remember one of them vividly, because the Tree that year at the wall opposite the hallway to the bedrooms and bathroom. With the house dark and only the Tree shining, it was wondrous. I was four.

The holidays were fun. We always had family, sometimes unannounced from out-of-state because they knew that there would be plenty of food and everyone was welcome. By the time I was 6, I was helping make the many foods my mother presented and there was also pride in that, but it was the family stories that I devoured.
I probably mentioned it here before, but it was like the many Thanksgivings in the movie “Avalon”.

Watching it with me, The Husband questioned the family’s bickering over which story took place when, and who was there at the time. I said, “You didn’t grow up with your immigrant family. Had you been in Pueblo or Palm Springs, you would have heard stories and arguments like this.”  Mine-Italian, His-Croatian and Slovenian. (It is funny how his Croatian relatives are/were so much like my other’s Italian family. We literally had corresponding aunts!)

There were more times of the long summer vacations when I was happy. I was a good student, but not comfortable in school. When there was no major family stress, I had no set bedtime, no set time to get up and with being in just a small house in the suburbs, no real chores. It could be boring, without A/C it could be hot and muggy, but I remember  days when I was not stressed, when I was without a care.

Carefree.

Some of those days I was care-free.

Right now, that would take me to as close to total happiness as I could ever desire.

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