In retrospect, growing up poor had its advantages. Many of my long summer days were spent without being planned and structured every day. I was allowed to have time to use my imagination and dream dreams instead of the way some small children today live their frenetic summer days, being transported from one activity to the next.
I also now appreciate having grown up in what, then, was "country." In fact, a city-residing uncle, whose daughter was my best friend, always called me "country girl." And that was before "country" was cool.
This cousin of mine, whose mother died when she was just five years old, lived a good part of her young years next door to me with my grandmother (Mama) and great aunt Lizzie. These ladies were Carrie's mother's sisters.
In so many ways we were lucky kids because we had a large empty space that we called the field where we could lie in the grass, using our imaginations by making pictures of people and things in the beautiful white soft clouds under a bright blue sky. We rarely tired of "picturing" in the clouds. We dreamed and talked of what we wanted to do next and what we wanted to be when we grew up.
This cousin of mine wanted to be a nurse. So we often played nurse and doctor. Over the summer we learned that the yellow substance on yellow butterfly wings was not really butter. We caught the unfortunate butterflies, thereby getting the yellow stuff from their wings on our fingers. The poor butterflies soon could not fly. Then they became our patients.
For these patients we made small beds from either grass or rag remnants, imagining we were helping the butterflies to restore their health. A remedy was getting soft butter from Mama's pie safe and smearing it on the wings of our patients. When they died, we dutifully buried them, having a small funeral.
But butterflies were not our only casualties. We also caught houseflies. We "surgically" took off one wing of each of our patients, then stuck it back on with a flour and water paste. Soon, of course, we had another funeral.
Not only did we have "critters" as our patients, we also "doctored" each other. My cousin grew up with a tiny scar on her arm where I, as her "doctor," had vaccinated her with a sharp stick for her childhood ailments.
Carrie grew up, trained as a nurse at the old Sacred Heart Hospital, and became a Registered Nurse, a profession she practiced all her working life, but she had her first real-life laboratory training in the field near where we lived during those long, unstructured summer days.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Being poor had its advantages