You were dancing, I saw you dancing,
throwing your arms towards the sky…
(“Creation Dream”, Bruce Cockburn)
Dear Claire;
It seems so strange to be writing to you but I’ve been missing you lately. I’m not sure how to begin.
I’ve started seeing a counselor. Her name is Jean. I like her, but more importantly, I trust her. I have to trust her because lately I have the feeling that I don’t trust myself anymore. I don’t understand myself, or what’s happening inside me.
So on Jean’s advice, I write the story of our childhood.
I write this story for you, Claire, to share with you what I know of the time before you were born, and the time when we were together. I often felt more like your mother or your teacher. And in teaching you and explaining things to you, I came to understand them more clearly myself. I hope that this might happen again.
This is a frightening exercise for me, but when have I not been timid? You were always so strong and determined, Claire – Did you ever know fear? Perhaps you did. I know that there were times when you would hide to protect yourself, but then like a cornered animal, you would find the instinct to lash out, to attack whatever had you cornered.
I have always wanted to be like that: to bark back at the barking dog. Unfortunately I would usually react to things that frightened me by freezing – my body, my thoughts, by closing my eyes and hoping that the evil would go away. The bad stuff often did go away, eventually, not always. At other times I would make myself believe that it simply did not exist or that it wasn’t really important, and together we would enter into a beautiful story in some wonderful book and create our own world.
We grew up in an unsettled atmosphere. Before you were there, I was almost always afraid, yet I never knew why – I’m still not too sure. Then, when you came along, I felt that I had to be strong for you, to take care of you, to have the world make sense for you. This precious bond that
we shared was what kept me going through many of the hard times.
Mom and Bill met in the early ‘70’s, in a commune on an island in Lake Ontario. (When I moved east to go to university, I went to visit that place where I was conceived; it’s a sheep farm now.) It was a time and a place where their personal concepts of “Love”, and ”Peace”, and “Freedom” were valued above all other things. Mom and Bill were of a generation of people who were looking for meaning in life, and an environment where they could explore and discover themselves. I’m not sure if they discovered themselves then, but they discovered each other. Eventually I guess they realized that they weren’t too interested in sharing their intimacy with a whole community, so they moved on.
Bill would sometimes talk to me of those early days when he and mom were together. They’d made plans to travel. They left Ontario, hitchhiking west across the country, planning to continue on to Asia – Thailand, Nepal, even Tibet if they were able. By the time they made it to Calgary, it had become obvious that mom was expecting me, so they decided to postpone their plans and toured through British Columbia on their way to the coast.
Bill would tell me of how they went from commune to gathering, making friends and connections with many people who would later come to visit us in Vancouver. They were in the Okanagan Valley when I was born. Bill said that they had a big party: music, drumming and so many people, all there to welcome me as I made my entrance. Who knows – maybe it was the presence of this audience at my birth that made me a naturally shy person who avoids crowds.
A few months later, they continued on to the coast and settled in Vancouver, into an urban collective that ran a health food store and vegetarian restaurant. I guess that it didn’t take long for my middle-of-the-night wakefulness to clash head-on with the early rising schedule of the collective workers. We soon moved to a rented apartment in the lower half of an old house in a nearby residential area. It was the first of many apartments.
Obviously, I don’t remember many details of my earliest years. But I have an overall impression of extremes: times of absolute stillness and solitude when I felt that I was completely alone and at peace, followed by periods of loud, sudden, sometimes frightening movements and noises. It’s strange to try and think of what these impressions mean, but they’re very real.
I know that it doesn’t make sense, to imagine that those times of perceived solitude meant that everyone would go out and leave me by myself at such a young age, although that's what it felt like. I think that the most likely explanation for this feeling was that they were mom’s down times: times when she would lock herself in her room, to hide from the world. I saw her do this a lot later on, when I was older; I can only assume that it was the same when I was little.
One of my earliest memories is of climbing up the strategically opened drawers, onto the kitchen counter to get some fruit and crackers to eat. I remember spending hours by myself: eating my snacks, looking at pictures in storybooks, daydreaming about worlds of fairies and children in poems who were snuggled under their blankets. Sometimes when Bill came home and found me on my bed and mom in her room, he would hug me very close to him and put my coat on to take me for a walk saying that mom was resting.
I don’t remember hearing mom cry or getting any other clues that she was sad during these periods; I think that crying would have upset me. She simply wasn’t present. I probably thought that she was in her own place somewhere – as I was, and was grateful for the bond of peace that we shared during these quiet times.
Then, without warning, she would emerge from her room, ready to take on the world. These were the other times, the times when the apartment was full of sounds and movement, when mom wanted lots of people around her and lots of activity to keep her busy. She seemed to invite everyone that she met home for dinner. The phone would ring a lot and she would laugh and dance to the sounds of the stereo. Everyone loved her.
Despite those occasional periods of extreme quiet, most of my early impressions of mom were of power and energy. When she worked, she worked long and hard. When she played with me, she would swing me up in the air till I felt that I was so high, the sheer force of descent would take my breath away. And when she fought – with Bill or anyone else – she had the strident intention of a wild cat, hissing and snarling; any object near to hand became a likely weapon or a missile.
The collective’s kitchen was where mom really came into her own, taking charge of their cooking and baking operation; and for the most part she seemed happiest there, running the show. Although I liked the warmth and the smells that were everywhere in the big kitchen, I remember that I had to learn where the safe places were: if mom was making her way across the room you did not want to be in her path. When she had somewhere to go, she had an energy and precision that was almost violent.
Bill did many odd jobs during those early days in Vancouver. He drove taxi, made deliveries, worked with the collective now and then, and played guitar in a band that had a few bookings each month. I even remember a period when he was pumping gas – I don’t think that lasted very long. I remember the greasy chemical smell of his dark grey uniform shirt as it lay on the floor each night beside my toys: I would pretend that it was the smelly factory of the imaginary village that I was building with my blocks.
But Bill’s main love was his activism. As a teenager, I once wondered what Bill would do if he suddenly woke up and the world was a perfect place: if the old growth forest was not threatened, if the waters were not being polluted, if animal and plant species were no longer endangered. What would he do with his life?
Bill became focused on environmental issues around logging and fishing. I would go along with him to the many rallies, meetings and sit-ins. I remember some of these outings from when I was a little older. I was often the only kid there. Bill would explain to me where we were going and I was happy to do my part for the salmon, or the forest, or whatever we were supporting that day. I would bring my colouring book and crayons and sit at his feet. Sometimes I would take my blanket from his backpack and find a corner where I would curl up. Some friends tell the story of a time when he got all the way home before he remembered that I had gone with him to the meeting – and he had forgotten me there. I don’t remember it and he denies it completely of course, but knowing Bill, I’m sure it could have happened.
Before you were born we spent our winters in the city, living a very urban life. But in the summer we were on the road, in solidarity with their back-to-the-land friends. We would travel from one gathering to another, with a few music festivals in between. We slept in our tent, living as part of a great collection of “flower-children”.
The collective in Vancouver had mom run their food operation for these events. There were hundreds of people there and the “Sunshine Collective’s Food Emporium” became the place to eat at each gathering. Bill always came with us, although he spent most of his time jamming with other musicians and listening to music on the stereo system that he ran off a car battery. He would do odd jobs for the festival organizers or the craft booth operators. He never got cash for his work but we always had lots of exotic jewelry, candles and clothes that he received in barter.
Mom’s food operation produced hundreds of muffins, nut burgers, pasta plates and a truckload of salad each day. She would often work well into the night, catching a nap now and then –just enough to refresh her for the next day’s work.
Because these were such large gatherings and tents are not reliable landmarks for a child, I soon learned that the safest way not to get lost was to stay in the outdoor kitchen with mom. I would build a nest under the makeshift shelving with our sleeping bags and a collection of my toys and books. There I would spend my days, watching the world parade before me from beneath the lifted edge of the canvas or polyethylene walls. I loved the spicy smells that surrounded me, or the comfort of a warm muffin on a damp chilly morning. Now and then, one of the other kids might coax me from my hiding place but eventually we would become separated and I would live long, worried moments as I scanned for the cook tent, trying to remember what it looked like this time.
From everywhere there came music: different timbres – sometimes clashing, sometimes blending, with songs and riffs and trills colliding between campsites well into the night. But mostly I remember the soothing unity of the drumming and its constancy in our lives. When the drums got going, other instruments might try to join in to add some melody, but always the drums would maintain their rhythm and power. The light dancing of the hammers across the Jamaican steel drums, the passion of fingers on the bongos, the warm trill of the stick on the Irish bodhran, and the slow deep heartbeat of the native drum. They were all part of the pulsing rhythm of my days.
There was always lots of dancing too: the swirling of hair, beads and robes of bright colours and textures. Part of me wanted to dance with them but there were so many people out there that I usually stayed where I was, beneath the counters of the kitchen – watching, dancing with my fingers.
In the evening, I would sit nestled in the hollow of Bill’s lap as he sat cross-legged before the huge bonfire. There would be hundreds of people along the beach, the waves would add their own rhythm to the steady beating of the drums and Bill’s heart. I would play with his beads and hair as they fell over his shoulder and dangled in front of me, intriguing me for hours until I fell asleep and woke up to find that the sun had once again risen above our tent and I was in my sleeping bag.
I enjoyed being on the road. The tent and my sleeping bag became my own burrow where I felt safe and comfortable. But by the fall, when we would come back to Vancouver, I was ready to settle down again in another basement flat where our lives would fall into a more predictable routine, and my bed looked the same every night. Later on when I was in high school, I became obsessed with the books of John Steinbeck and would often feel such sympathy for those weary travelers, carrying all that was dear to them in their truck, on the road.
The fall that I was five I started at Mandala Rising, or what I later called the hippie school. It was very strange to me as I had had very little exposure to other children on a regular basis. Of mom and Bill’s friends who came around to our place or whom I knew through Bill’s meetings and at the collective, there were very few who had children. I was an oddity, like an exotic pet at a party that everyone wants to play with. For the first time, school allowed me to be a member of a majority; I came to appreciate the anonymity that being one within a crowd could offer me.
Not only did school bring a whole new world of children into my life, it was the first time that I would be without one of my parents in view. As I walked into the school on the first day, Bill was telling me how much fun I was going to have with all of my new friends. I tried to smile for his sake but I had serious doubts about the suitability of playmates who would hit each other to grab some toy. I kept trying to smile at Bill as he was leaving but I wanted to hold on fast to his hand and the cuff of his sweater. I wanted to smell the traces of incense and cinnamon that had settled between its stitches and hug that cuff to me all day. But I had to content myself with hugging my backpack that held a change of clothes, my lunch and a new pencil case full of colouring pencils. While the rest of the city’s schools were filled with children carrying Barbie and Grover lunch kits and wearing plaid cuffed bell bottoms, Mandala Rising was an urban school that looked like it was populated by disheveled children who might have escaped from the set of “Little House on the Prairie”. We all wore tattered and brightly coloured clothing of cotton or wool, sandals or hiking boots and everyone had long hair, the boys usually wearing it in a ponytail, seldom combed, the girls, loose around our shoulders.
At the school, we learned to read and write of course, but it’s my impression that there were many more hours spent on art than on math and science, to my great frustration in later years as I struggled with these subjects my whole academic life. We gathered in the basement of a large former church that was converted, to be used as a community centre. Our “school” was based on the open concept theory of education without walls where centres were identified for specific activities and teachers acted more as facilitators.
I once went to a church bazaar with a friend from work, after I started teaching and it reminded me of Mandala Rising. The bake tables, the book stall, the white elephant table were where I would have expected to find the reading corner and the macramé station.
The teachers, who all had names like Willow and Rujella, earnestly concentrated on helping the kids get the most out of each station that they went to. There were only about forty kids who attended the school, so there was little distinction between grade levels. One year we all learned about geology when they hired a tree planter who loved rocks. Another year we all learned to juggle and would have had a world class Frisbee team if we had been allowed to lower ourselves to be tainted by the evils of competition. It was a fun school and many times, especially in the later years, it was a haven for me. I learned quickly the definition of boundaries as they apply to an environment without walls: narrow your focus to what’s close to you and ignore the rest.
Reading was my main goal right from the beginning. I knew my alphabet and could recognize and write a few words when I arrived at school. I could see that this pleased the teachers very much so it made me feel good about being there. I wanted to learn to read, to unlock for myself the secrets beyond the pictures in my books that only Bill had been able to reveal to me before this. I spent most of my first year sounding out words and looking through books to find words that I knew. It was a good place for me.
One of my most vivid memories from the early years at school, is sitting in a circle next to a little girl with beautiful red curls. Her name was Amber. She let me touch her curls. They looked like fire reflecting the sun that poured in from the window high above us, but they felt like running water as I threaded my fingers through them. It was hair just like yours, Claire, and I loved it. Do you remember how I would pet and play with your curls when you would lie on your blanket with your head on my lap? I loved those times when we were alone together. I so appreciate being able to talk to you again.
I will write more soon.
Love always,
Starla
throwing your arms towards the sky…
(“Creation Dream”, Bruce Cockburn)
Dear Claire;
It seems so strange to be writing to you but I’ve been missing you lately. I’m not sure how to begin.
I’ve started seeing a counselor. Her name is Jean. I like her, but more importantly, I trust her. I have to trust her because lately I have the feeling that I don’t trust myself anymore. I don’t understand myself, or what’s happening inside me.
So on Jean’s advice, I write the story of our childhood.
I write this story for you, Claire, to share with you what I know of the time before you were born, and the time when we were together. I often felt more like your mother or your teacher. And in teaching you and explaining things to you, I came to understand them more clearly myself. I hope that this might happen again.
This is a frightening exercise for me, but when have I not been timid? You were always so strong and determined, Claire – Did you ever know fear? Perhaps you did. I know that there were times when you would hide to protect yourself, but then like a cornered animal, you would find the instinct to lash out, to attack whatever had you cornered.
I have always wanted to be like that: to bark back at the barking dog. Unfortunately I would usually react to things that frightened me by freezing – my body, my thoughts, by closing my eyes and hoping that the evil would go away. The bad stuff often did go away, eventually, not always. At other times I would make myself believe that it simply did not exist or that it wasn’t really important, and together we would enter into a beautiful story in some wonderful book and create our own world.
We grew up in an unsettled atmosphere. Before you were there, I was almost always afraid, yet I never knew why – I’m still not too sure. Then, when you came along, I felt that I had to be strong for you, to take care of you, to have the world make sense for you. This precious bond that
we shared was what kept me going through many of the hard times.
Mom and Bill met in the early ‘70’s, in a commune on an island in Lake Ontario. (When I moved east to go to university, I went to visit that place where I was conceived; it’s a sheep farm now.) It was a time and a place where their personal concepts of “Love”, and ”Peace”, and “Freedom” were valued above all other things. Mom and Bill were of a generation of people who were looking for meaning in life, and an environment where they could explore and discover themselves. I’m not sure if they discovered themselves then, but they discovered each other. Eventually I guess they realized that they weren’t too interested in sharing their intimacy with a whole community, so they moved on.
Bill would sometimes talk to me of those early days when he and mom were together. They’d made plans to travel. They left Ontario, hitchhiking west across the country, planning to continue on to Asia – Thailand, Nepal, even Tibet if they were able. By the time they made it to Calgary, it had become obvious that mom was expecting me, so they decided to postpone their plans and toured through British Columbia on their way to the coast.
Bill would tell me of how they went from commune to gathering, making friends and connections with many people who would later come to visit us in Vancouver. They were in the Okanagan Valley when I was born. Bill said that they had a big party: music, drumming and so many people, all there to welcome me as I made my entrance. Who knows – maybe it was the presence of this audience at my birth that made me a naturally shy person who avoids crowds.
A few months later, they continued on to the coast and settled in Vancouver, into an urban collective that ran a health food store and vegetarian restaurant. I guess that it didn’t take long for my middle-of-the-night wakefulness to clash head-on with the early rising schedule of the collective workers. We soon moved to a rented apartment in the lower half of an old house in a nearby residential area. It was the first of many apartments.
Obviously, I don’t remember many details of my earliest years. But I have an overall impression of extremes: times of absolute stillness and solitude when I felt that I was completely alone and at peace, followed by periods of loud, sudden, sometimes frightening movements and noises. It’s strange to try and think of what these impressions mean, but they’re very real.
I know that it doesn’t make sense, to imagine that those times of perceived solitude meant that everyone would go out and leave me by myself at such a young age, although that's what it felt like. I think that the most likely explanation for this feeling was that they were mom’s down times: times when she would lock herself in her room, to hide from the world. I saw her do this a lot later on, when I was older; I can only assume that it was the same when I was little.
One of my earliest memories is of climbing up the strategically opened drawers, onto the kitchen counter to get some fruit and crackers to eat. I remember spending hours by myself: eating my snacks, looking at pictures in storybooks, daydreaming about worlds of fairies and children in poems who were snuggled under their blankets. Sometimes when Bill came home and found me on my bed and mom in her room, he would hug me very close to him and put my coat on to take me for a walk saying that mom was resting.
I don’t remember hearing mom cry or getting any other clues that she was sad during these periods; I think that crying would have upset me. She simply wasn’t present. I probably thought that she was in her own place somewhere – as I was, and was grateful for the bond of peace that we shared during these quiet times.
Then, without warning, she would emerge from her room, ready to take on the world. These were the other times, the times when the apartment was full of sounds and movement, when mom wanted lots of people around her and lots of activity to keep her busy. She seemed to invite everyone that she met home for dinner. The phone would ring a lot and she would laugh and dance to the sounds of the stereo. Everyone loved her.
Despite those occasional periods of extreme quiet, most of my early impressions of mom were of power and energy. When she worked, she worked long and hard. When she played with me, she would swing me up in the air till I felt that I was so high, the sheer force of descent would take my breath away. And when she fought – with Bill or anyone else – she had the strident intention of a wild cat, hissing and snarling; any object near to hand became a likely weapon or a missile.
The collective’s kitchen was where mom really came into her own, taking charge of their cooking and baking operation; and for the most part she seemed happiest there, running the show. Although I liked the warmth and the smells that were everywhere in the big kitchen, I remember that I had to learn where the safe places were: if mom was making her way across the room you did not want to be in her path. When she had somewhere to go, she had an energy and precision that was almost violent.
Bill did many odd jobs during those early days in Vancouver. He drove taxi, made deliveries, worked with the collective now and then, and played guitar in a band that had a few bookings each month. I even remember a period when he was pumping gas – I don’t think that lasted very long. I remember the greasy chemical smell of his dark grey uniform shirt as it lay on the floor each night beside my toys: I would pretend that it was the smelly factory of the imaginary village that I was building with my blocks.
But Bill’s main love was his activism. As a teenager, I once wondered what Bill would do if he suddenly woke up and the world was a perfect place: if the old growth forest was not threatened, if the waters were not being polluted, if animal and plant species were no longer endangered. What would he do with his life?
Bill became focused on environmental issues around logging and fishing. I would go along with him to the many rallies, meetings and sit-ins. I remember some of these outings from when I was a little older. I was often the only kid there. Bill would explain to me where we were going and I was happy to do my part for the salmon, or the forest, or whatever we were supporting that day. I would bring my colouring book and crayons and sit at his feet. Sometimes I would take my blanket from his backpack and find a corner where I would curl up. Some friends tell the story of a time when he got all the way home before he remembered that I had gone with him to the meeting – and he had forgotten me there. I don’t remember it and he denies it completely of course, but knowing Bill, I’m sure it could have happened.
Before you were born we spent our winters in the city, living a very urban life. But in the summer we were on the road, in solidarity with their back-to-the-land friends. We would travel from one gathering to another, with a few music festivals in between. We slept in our tent, living as part of a great collection of “flower-children”.
The collective in Vancouver had mom run their food operation for these events. There were hundreds of people there and the “Sunshine Collective’s Food Emporium” became the place to eat at each gathering. Bill always came with us, although he spent most of his time jamming with other musicians and listening to music on the stereo system that he ran off a car battery. He would do odd jobs for the festival organizers or the craft booth operators. He never got cash for his work but we always had lots of exotic jewelry, candles and clothes that he received in barter.
Mom’s food operation produced hundreds of muffins, nut burgers, pasta plates and a truckload of salad each day. She would often work well into the night, catching a nap now and then –just enough to refresh her for the next day’s work.
Because these were such large gatherings and tents are not reliable landmarks for a child, I soon learned that the safest way not to get lost was to stay in the outdoor kitchen with mom. I would build a nest under the makeshift shelving with our sleeping bags and a collection of my toys and books. There I would spend my days, watching the world parade before me from beneath the lifted edge of the canvas or polyethylene walls. I loved the spicy smells that surrounded me, or the comfort of a warm muffin on a damp chilly morning. Now and then, one of the other kids might coax me from my hiding place but eventually we would become separated and I would live long, worried moments as I scanned for the cook tent, trying to remember what it looked like this time.
From everywhere there came music: different timbres – sometimes clashing, sometimes blending, with songs and riffs and trills colliding between campsites well into the night. But mostly I remember the soothing unity of the drumming and its constancy in our lives. When the drums got going, other instruments might try to join in to add some melody, but always the drums would maintain their rhythm and power. The light dancing of the hammers across the Jamaican steel drums, the passion of fingers on the bongos, the warm trill of the stick on the Irish bodhran, and the slow deep heartbeat of the native drum. They were all part of the pulsing rhythm of my days.
There was always lots of dancing too: the swirling of hair, beads and robes of bright colours and textures. Part of me wanted to dance with them but there were so many people out there that I usually stayed where I was, beneath the counters of the kitchen – watching, dancing with my fingers.
In the evening, I would sit nestled in the hollow of Bill’s lap as he sat cross-legged before the huge bonfire. There would be hundreds of people along the beach, the waves would add their own rhythm to the steady beating of the drums and Bill’s heart. I would play with his beads and hair as they fell over his shoulder and dangled in front of me, intriguing me for hours until I fell asleep and woke up to find that the sun had once again risen above our tent and I was in my sleeping bag.
I enjoyed being on the road. The tent and my sleeping bag became my own burrow where I felt safe and comfortable. But by the fall, when we would come back to Vancouver, I was ready to settle down again in another basement flat where our lives would fall into a more predictable routine, and my bed looked the same every night. Later on when I was in high school, I became obsessed with the books of John Steinbeck and would often feel such sympathy for those weary travelers, carrying all that was dear to them in their truck, on the road.
The fall that I was five I started at Mandala Rising, or what I later called the hippie school. It was very strange to me as I had had very little exposure to other children on a regular basis. Of mom and Bill’s friends who came around to our place or whom I knew through Bill’s meetings and at the collective, there were very few who had children. I was an oddity, like an exotic pet at a party that everyone wants to play with. For the first time, school allowed me to be a member of a majority; I came to appreciate the anonymity that being one within a crowd could offer me.
Not only did school bring a whole new world of children into my life, it was the first time that I would be without one of my parents in view. As I walked into the school on the first day, Bill was telling me how much fun I was going to have with all of my new friends. I tried to smile for his sake but I had serious doubts about the suitability of playmates who would hit each other to grab some toy. I kept trying to smile at Bill as he was leaving but I wanted to hold on fast to his hand and the cuff of his sweater. I wanted to smell the traces of incense and cinnamon that had settled between its stitches and hug that cuff to me all day. But I had to content myself with hugging my backpack that held a change of clothes, my lunch and a new pencil case full of colouring pencils. While the rest of the city’s schools were filled with children carrying Barbie and Grover lunch kits and wearing plaid cuffed bell bottoms, Mandala Rising was an urban school that looked like it was populated by disheveled children who might have escaped from the set of “Little House on the Prairie”. We all wore tattered and brightly coloured clothing of cotton or wool, sandals or hiking boots and everyone had long hair, the boys usually wearing it in a ponytail, seldom combed, the girls, loose around our shoulders.
At the school, we learned to read and write of course, but it’s my impression that there were many more hours spent on art than on math and science, to my great frustration in later years as I struggled with these subjects my whole academic life. We gathered in the basement of a large former church that was converted, to be used as a community centre. Our “school” was based on the open concept theory of education without walls where centres were identified for specific activities and teachers acted more as facilitators.
I once went to a church bazaar with a friend from work, after I started teaching and it reminded me of Mandala Rising. The bake tables, the book stall, the white elephant table were where I would have expected to find the reading corner and the macramé station.
The teachers, who all had names like Willow and Rujella, earnestly concentrated on helping the kids get the most out of each station that they went to. There were only about forty kids who attended the school, so there was little distinction between grade levels. One year we all learned about geology when they hired a tree planter who loved rocks. Another year we all learned to juggle and would have had a world class Frisbee team if we had been allowed to lower ourselves to be tainted by the evils of competition. It was a fun school and many times, especially in the later years, it was a haven for me. I learned quickly the definition of boundaries as they apply to an environment without walls: narrow your focus to what’s close to you and ignore the rest.
Reading was my main goal right from the beginning. I knew my alphabet and could recognize and write a few words when I arrived at school. I could see that this pleased the teachers very much so it made me feel good about being there. I wanted to learn to read, to unlock for myself the secrets beyond the pictures in my books that only Bill had been able to reveal to me before this. I spent most of my first year sounding out words and looking through books to find words that I knew. It was a good place for me.
One of my most vivid memories from the early years at school, is sitting in a circle next to a little girl with beautiful red curls. Her name was Amber. She let me touch her curls. They looked like fire reflecting the sun that poured in from the window high above us, but they felt like running water as I threaded my fingers through them. It was hair just like yours, Claire, and I loved it. Do you remember how I would pet and play with your curls when you would lie on your blanket with your head on my lap? I loved those times when we were alone together. I so appreciate being able to talk to you again.
I will write more soon.
Love always,
Starla
Copyright 2003
