Memories Full Circle

    There's a place somewhere in my mind that holds all my happiest childhood memories. It's fluffy and warm there. I remember everything about those moments. Sometimes the memories come to me randomly and others by a tone, a look or a smell. The memories now come back to me in the form of my children. Right now, my two oldest girls have a glimpse of a memory that shaped many of my younger years. They are watching, for the first time, Anne of Green Gables.

   I remember the first time I saw it. The day was warm, maybe in April or May. In Texas, spring is well sprung by May and sometimes by late May, the temps have reached 100 degrees. I know it was warm and not cold or hot because I sat in my Grandma's kitchen. If it had been cold, I would have been curled up under a quilt in the living room, nearest the wood burning stove. If it had been hot, well, it would have been hot. My grandparents don't have air conditioning. They have a swamp cooler, a type of window unit that cools by forcing outside air over water to cool it before sending the cooler air into a room. On a hot day, it is cooler, but you sweat buckets in the humidity. The day I first watched Anne of Green Gables, I was just warm.

    I don't know what I ate, but being at Grandma's house, I would have had my favorites, namely a V8 or Texas grapefruit juice that came in a small can with a peel off tab, or black olives or pickled okra. I know, it's unusual, but these things were only found at Grandma's. It was during the good old days of VHS and the tapes had been made by a friend of my Grandma's from the recordings that were on PBS. The movie was broken up by some commercials and other short blips denoting the place where the recorder had been stopped for a commercial and then restarted moments before Anne Shirley's imagination filled Grandma's kitchen. There were several tapes and there was a rush to put the next one in before Anne's world slipped away.

   I remember doing this several times in my childhood, in what I would like to think was an annual basis. But the memory is so timeless and replayed so  many times, that it could have only happened once. I remember the tragical moments, the gossip, the bosom buddies, the life changes, the heartaches... And when I didn't have the movies, I had the books, now tattered, yellowed, the bindings of the paperbacks brittle, almost broken. One Christmas several years ago, my Grandma gave me Anne of Green Gables on VHS, not the TV recordings but the real thing with the green box casing, two VHS tapes. That's what my girls are watching now. I don't know if the memory will be as deep for them as it is for me, but I hope so. Anne was magical, my dream friend, a sweet part of childhood.