When I was five years old, my family moved from a big old farmhouse in Iowa to a little new house in a small town in central Florida. We had moved to Iowa when I was a baby, because Daddy got a job working in a fertilizer plant there. We lived in that old farmhouse free of rent, as part of his pay, and he walked to work on a dirt road that led straight to the plant from behind our house.
That old farmhouse was a two-story house with a creepy basement. The garage was a separate building that could hold only one car. There was a barn and a pump house. We had chickens, and I remember Mama going out to feed the chickens. In that big house, we had only one bathroom, with a toilet, sink, and a huge bathtub with feet. The bathroom itself was a pretty large room. Within a year after we moved away, we heard that old farmhouse burned to the ground. It made our whole family sad to hear the news.
I think I remember only fragments of the time we lived in Iowa, but once in a while, a memory will appear out of nowhere, and I will remember in detail something that happened during that time, like the time I rode down the basement steps on my tricycle, or the time my cousin and I dragged tree roots to the top of his dad’s brand-new car.