A Portrait of the Blogger as a Little Girl

This was the 2nd writing assignment from my class. We were supposed to pick an item that stood out in a childhood memory.

Lazy Susan Brigade, Spice Division

My grandmother’s house in Nashville was a treasure trove. In her bedroom sat a tackle box full of sequins, buttons, and red silk thread. I would wander down the hall to my great-grandmother’s bedroom and spend hours there as she showed me her collection of 1920s costume jewelry, which featured rings with stones as big as my pinkie, sparkly purple and green clip-on earrings fashioned to resemble bunches of grapes, and a bracelet with a row of little gold beetles, each with a different colored shell.

But one object captured my attention more than the others. I first noticed it when I was 5 years old. Made thirsty by the unairconditioned southern heat, I had awoken in the middle of the night. I carefully made my way downstairs to sneak a Coke. And then it caught my eye. It was sitting on the china hutch, this little circular wooden platform with a center pole topped by a delicate gold loop. Best of all, it had 12 blue and white china bottles around the circle, which looked to me like a group of soldiers making a last stand against an all-around attack. Each bottle had an unusual name imprinted in black letters. “T-h-y-m-e” one said. “Sage” said another. Strangest of all, one was named after my cousin Rosemary.

Forgetting for the first time in my life about the nearby presence of a Coke, I reached out my hand to pinch the gold loop. The base, and the bottles with it, moved slightly. Encouraged, I turned the loop and let go. The bottles quietly clacked as the base made a full rotation. I was interested. I turned it again, this time a little faster. The clacking noise increased. So did my curiosity. I carefully pulled it down from its perch on the hutch and placed in on the kitchen table. I climbed up into a chair and spun it again. Harder. This time, one of the soldier-bottles fell off. I plucked out the two soldiers who had been next to him, and they wept over their friend’s body. But, when all hope was lost, I made him jump up, and ta-da! He was alive! Undeterred by the near fatal carnage, I put them all back for another run. This time I spun it really, really hard. We lost several men that time as they flew off the platform and made pretty good distances across the kitchen. When I retrieved “Bay Leaves,” he was not in top form. A bit of a nick across his top. I remained unfazed.

Normally, breaking something would have made me nervous. All my short life, I had been a fairly obedient kid--the sensible one--as opposed to my hellian older brother, Matt, whom my mother sometimes described as “the best argument for Ritalin” she’d ever come across. While Matt’s rampages could usually be stopped only by actual punishment, the slightest narrowing of my mother’s eyes would deter me from any wrongdoing. I sensed that now I was being very, very naughty, but I couldn’t stop. I had been drawn in by this game of my own making.
I readied the soldiers and sent them on another launch mission. This time one of them made a terrific noise when he crashed into a nearby brass pot. When I had just finished setting them up again, I saw my mother appear in the doorway looking sleepy. As she surveyed the scene, her eyes began to narrow. Against both instinct and reason, I said “Look Mommy!” and sent those bottles flying.