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One page a day makes for 365 pages of your memories in one year! Are you up for the challenge? Email us anytime for inspiration
and motivation! Free!
Here is where I will highlight someone's page a day! Be sure to let me know the number of pages you have completed!
We lived on Florida Mango Street, a typical street of suburban houses that all looked the same. Don’t ask me the
year we moved there – midsixties somewhere. A place of backyard barbecues, cookie baking housewives, and mammoth cars
of various pastel colors. Everything was pastel – the houses, the cars, and the women. My world was a swirl of muted
pinks, blues, greens, and yellows. We had two concrete swans that stood sentinel watch at the front door. The driveway was
a half moon. The back yard stretched for an eternity in my child’s eye, muted green grasses waving invitingly and daring
my father to take out the mower and slice paths through the tangles. Which he did from time to time, sometimes waiting for
the grass to reach a height of almost out of control. A metaphor for our lives, for life in general, out of control.
Daddy would plod along in long strides pushing the mower through the overgrown field of grass while we trooped along behind
him in the paths he made. The towers of grass on either side of us formed the walls of a maze and it was our job to follow
our leader while he led us to safety. I was always depressed when the job was finished and the jungle became just another
postage stamp yard like everyone else’s. Common. I never wanted to be common.
I was a baby – the baby. My brother and sister were so close in age that they formed one body with me as the unwanted
appendage. They were three and two years older than I was, respectively. I wasn’t supposed to be there. The doctors
had informed my mother after the birth of my sister that she could not have any more children. When she discovered me, they
told her she would never carry me to term. When she carried me to term, they told her one or both of us would die. My mother
never listens to anyone. Five foot two and quite ready to slap you upside the head if you don’t do as she says. We both
almost died. I owe my life entirely to my mother’s stubbornness and give the doctors who said I was an impossibility
no credit at all. My mother’s will alone brought me into being and has kept me here ever after.
- Karen Hamilton 2003
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