I was lying in bed a few days ago and my mind was doing that thing where it wanders around, looking back on all sorts of things. I started thinking about our old house in Fontana and remembering what it looked like. Then I remembered the garage.
I remember when my brother and I were little, my dad would set us up with wood, a hammer and nails in the garage. He would work on his projects and we would work on ours. I remember wearing ear muffs and feeling special.
I remember feeling like I was creating something, just like dad was. It would be cold in the garage, so we'd wear sweatshirts. Dad had an old sound system he would turn on, loudly playing music from the radio or a cassette tape. It smelled like sawdust most of the time. To this day I love the smell of sawdust. It reminds me a simpler times, of cold evenings spent in the garage with dad.
My dad was also the person in charge of teaching me pre-algebra. I had a desk set up in the garage and we would sit in front of graph paper, textbook open, sharpened pencils in hand. I don't remember what I was taught or how I was taught it, but I remember the lamp that was set up.
Who knows if the way I remember things is the way it actually was.
But I think remembering your childhood with a bit of rose colored tint
is probably a good thing.
***Side note: I have a job interview next week! I'm already nervous for it! :)
Childhood Garage
Summer:
I love summer. I do. I love it. The pool, the beach, vacations, the heat, tan skin, having to constantly have clean shaven legs. :)
Today I am going to my aunts pool with my brother and friend. I suspect that it's going to be great. When we all get along, we have good times.
But nothing will beat summers spent at my grandparents house in Claremont, CA.
They had this crazy big pool shaped like a weird ant. The head was the shallow end, a circle with a 12 foot diameter and a depth of around two and a half feet. We used to walk with our hands, pulling our bodies through the water like we were water snakes. 
In the middle was a huge, odd shaped circle that gradually went from four deep to around 7 feet deep. It was in the deeper part of this section that the slide ejected you. I'm not sure when the water houses in the slide stopped working, but we didn't mind. We improvised and tied the hose at the top. There was this patch of flowers behind the stepping stones by the pool and when you chewed on the stems of the flowers, they emitted a slightly sweet but mostly sour tasting liquid. We could swim and chew on those for hours upon hours. The deep end always scared me. It was around nine feet deep and at the bottom was this drain thing. When we played mermaids (which we played a lot), that was where Ursula lived. The memories I have of this pool are things I will never lose. Sounds and smells that I associate with those memories easily take me back to a time where it didn't matter how much you weighed, if you had acne or if your bathing suit was bought at a thrift store.
I'd give up a lot to have summers like that now. I know it's not possible to have 3 solid months of that, so I'm going to attempt to recreate that feeling for one day.
Sorry for my poor drawing, but I knew that my words just wouldn't do it.
