My experience as a 5 year old growing up in Spokane Washington |
At five years old and peering into a narrow culvert, a certain fear came over me. I'm not sure if I was more afraid of going in or not going in. looking back now it scares me to think of what would have happened if I would have been stuck in that corrugated tunnel. Like most things I did, I explored things like critter inhabited culverts, because I could. Dangerous freedom, curiosity, and heartache, are some of the fortunate events that shape who I am today. I've been back as an adult to the place where I spent my first seven years, to see if the sizes of things I remembered, had been embellished or diminished by the distance of time. It turns out that most things where more extreme than I had reminisced them to be. With the exception of the house I lived in, the street I lived on, and myself, every thing was as big or bigger than I had recalled. I honestly never considered my early childhood to be abnormal until at the age of thirty-eight, when my therapist asked me if it would be o.k., for my five year old son to do as I did, at that age. It was then I considered the true perils or darting across N.W. Blvd. in Spokane Washington, causing wrecks, and wading in the Spokane River unsupervised, all before the age of seven years old. |