One of the stories that mom told me about my childhood that I have meant to write down but have forgotten to, goes back to when I was an infant, and she was poor and single. She could not afford much, so I was put to sleep at night in a dresser drawer that she would take out and set on the floor and made up into a bed for me with a pillow as a mattress. Not a particularly defining fact for me, but it is interesting, and reminds me that mom was poor, and the 70’s were quite a time. Simple solutions for things were acceptable back then. And I suppose that if anything of this is defining, it is the idea of simple solutions being acceptable.
We moved around a lot back in those early years. We once counted addresses I had lived at up till my eighth year and come up with 18 of them that I had spent more than a month at. I was a bit of a gypsy spirit, spending my time between mom and my grandparents. They were a funny little unit who followed my grandfather’s work in construction around. This was mom’s stepdad. The years were spent in California, Utah, and Texas. I don’t know how long I was in that drawer for, but I do remember a short while when I was around six that mom and I slept on her dad’s couch in his living room in Salt Lake City. We slept on opposite ends. Man, that house looked old and run down back then, and now it still stands and houses my uncle. It was a tiny house with two bedrooms and a garage that had been converted to a third. Another uncle moved into that room for a short while with his wife after his duty in the Army. I remember when he came there. They did not stay long as they found a lovely house about a mile away that she still lives in to this day. That uncle died in 2007.
Some parts of my family were stable, and other parts were nomadic, and that was a defining part of my life, and part of why I have settled and am uneasy with moving around anymore right now. Born into a dresser drawer. Hos funny.