Making Memories

Today I filled my house with one of those memories that you never forget. I baked bread. Immediately I was transported back to my grandmother’s house and the smell that woke us in the mornings from the bakery a few doors down. Where would we be without all those things that helped to make us who we are? I never cease to be amazed that our memories are like a little store room full of little boxes of everything we have experienced and everyone is ready and waiting to be opened and looked at again and again.
Then I think that maybe that is why I had to be a writer, there are so many little stories in my boxes that it would be a shame not to write them down. Well that’s what I thought until I spoke to my mother. I think it was one of those genes that has been passed on from my ancestors. Apparently my great, grandfather was a fantastic story teller and used to spend hours talking to the grandchildren telling tales that they never knew were true or not but were thoroughly interesting to listen to. Once again, memories pop into my head of maybe films I have seen, or perhaps it was the stories I used to read and tell to my own children. It doesn’t matter which because the important thing is the sharing.
To me I think that is the most wonderful thing about having children, we as parents are responsible for the making of memories that will help to develop the future of each and every one of them. Too easy we forget that the world looks and sounds so different through the eyes and ears of a child and that what we teach our children will be passed on to the next generation. I remember walking home from the school run with my three year old son and showing him all the flowers as we passed them. We smelled them, touched them and talked about the colours. After a little while he ran off ahead and stopped to call back to me. He was so excited that he too had found a flower he wanted to show to me. As I reached him and bent to look to where he was pointing I saw a dandelion. For that instant I saw the world through my little boy’s eyes. I had been showing him cultivated garden flowers full of colour, shapes and perfumes and yet to him, this little flower, this weed, was no less beautiful. And do you know something? He was right. How often we fail to see the little things in life because the bigger brighter things get in the way and tempt us. He taught me a valuable lesson that day and from that moment on, the whole of our world became a far more interesting place.
I look now at one of my younger daughters with her little girl. She lives in Spain and I cannot share all the things I know with her but when I see the photographs and hear the things they do together I know that I don’t need to be there because the memories of my daughter’s childhood were important enough for her to want to share with her child. Before Maica was very old she experienced sand in her toes much to the horror of the Spanish people who think children should be dressed up to show off, she was taken into the mountains to look at leaves and play with sticks and fir cones, she listened to the sound of windmills that clacked and made her laugh, watched birds and animals and smelled the world around her. She doesn’t say many things yet but my daughter taught her to sign from an early age. What a wonderful thing to do. She knew that the things she had shown her too had made an impact when at a few months old she signed ‘bird’ as one flew over head. Now at 18months she is aware of the singing of birds and lets her Mama know, she asks to go look for bugs, and is able to communicate that she recognises smells. They live in a fishing village and as they passed the factory where the fish are processed the smell was strong. Little Maica Poppy shared that with her Mum who was delighted that she was able to not only recognise a smell but to find it ok to communicate it…’ishy, ishy’
So I know that I was right to make childhood the beginning of a memory store and to think if I hadn’t had those wonderful memory triggers from my childhood, my granddaughter today might have missed a world of sharing in the little things that so many of us miss. Well done to my son for showing me the real world and my daughter for noticing the little things in life, the important things that are real and cost nothing yet give so much pleasure. I know too that it won’t be long before she will be showing her daughter the delights of kneading and baking bread and she will remember my kitchen in the country and know she is passing on a goldmine of memories for many generations to come and hopefully a pattern for their future too.