Recognizing Happy Times

This is something my therapist wants me to work on, the ability to recognize happy times in my past (as well as, of course, the present). She doesn’t want me to always dwell on the negative, but to see that there were moments of peace. Plus, I suppose, by acknowledging the good times in my own past, I can build a foundation that allows it to be more prevalent in the present. Or at least easier to spot.

So today is a happy memory:

My family lived in Arizona until I was nine-years old. We lived in what was, to me, a very big house. Across the street from us was a house with an in-ground pool. People often jumped the fence to swim during the hottest weather, and the owner didn’t like coming home from work to find cigarette butts all over her backyard. To stave that off some, she allowed my family access to her pool when she wasn’t around, and we took full advantage of that.

I had a friend, Rose. That wasn’t her real name, but that was what she thought her real name should have been, so that’s what I called her. My house had a big backyard and, behind that, some type of trees. It was a huge maze of branches and leaves and flowers. It was here that Rose and I played.

We crawled and climbed through every inch of those trees. We created stories, told each other of wild imaginary adventures. And there was one constant path we went through. It involved one branch that was bouncy and our ‘trampoline.’ We had to always hold the branch above it, and then jump up and down. Then there was another branch that we used to swing across the tiniest of clearings. Then we ended up on the top of a shed in someone else’s yard. It was completely overgrown, and our fort. We’d sit up there and read comic books, color with our crayons (or, more often than not, melt them) and paint each other’s nails with polish snuck out of her mother’s drawer. Basically, we were kids.

I thought Rose was very beautiful and smart. She had long black hair, everyone in my family was a blonde or redhead. She was taller than me, braver than me. She knew about make-up and there was never any in my house. She knew about boys and rocks and I think had a rock polisher. Sometimes we traded stones, or stickers. The smurfs were popular ones then and Lisa Frank I think was just starting out with her colorful creations, so we would trade those.

I remember the happiness, the freedom. When we were swinging from those branches we weren’t just kids, we were the next generation of Tarzan, we were Wonder Woman, we were super heroes, we were independent, and we were laughing. It was Rose and me on the fort.

And oh how our biggest dream was to decorate that fort. We were never pink Barbie girls, but we did recognize the power of a good makeover, even if we couldn’t afford it. I think the most we got was a sheet to cover the top of that shed and maybe some crackers to snack on. But it was still magical, it was still ours.

And it’s still a happy memory.