Storm Cellar

STORM CELLAR by Betty Peterson I once told my mother that I could remember things from when I was a baby, but she said I couldn't. She said she had told me all the things I thought I was remembering, and that I could only remember things from when I was three, which is probably the normal age for memory to begin. My mother just wanted everything to be normal. So when I was three I stuck my little toy broom in the stove and went running through the house with it, setting the curtains on fire. I wish I could remember what made me do that. My mother threw it out into the snow, a black, ugly mark on the whiteness—ruined. There were no little girls my age on our street, so I played with boys. One named Billy Boy always pushed me in mud-puddles when it rained, and I would come up fighting and he would run home laughing. The other boys were a little older, and they let me help them make cat traps out of the culverts in driveways by blocking up one end and rigging up a screen that would fall over the other end when the cat walked through it. I remember that, but I can't remember why we did it or what we did with the cats once we trapped them. There was this big kid who lived at the foot of Water Tower Hill, which was just at the end of my street. He told me about four-leaf clover and helped me find one once when it was hot and bees were all around. I remember that for 54 some reason. I learned a song about it, and I could sing all of it too. My mother was proud, I could tell, but she didn't show me off much. She just wanted everything to be normal, like I said. My mother was pregnant when we went to the veterans hospital to see my Uncle Elbert, and I remember a nurse sticking scissors up a young man's nostrils . He had tubes in him too. Then we went to the nursery to see the babies, and my mother held me up to the window and asked me if I'd like to have one. I picked out the one I wanted, only to leave it crying. My grandmother scolded my mother for doing that. An old lady next door used to take chewing gum out of her mouth and give it to me to chew, but when my mother found out about it she stopped me from going over there. She was afraid I would get some kind of disease, always afraid of disease, and didn't want me playing with cats because they carried disease, she said. This stoop-shouldered old man used to walk by our house and try to get me to take some of his candy, but my mother said there might be dope in it and made me promise not to take any from him, ever. I would stand back under the willow tree in our front yard and watch him pass. A man like that could choke a little girl to death and she'd never make a sound. No one would know until it was all over. If she didn't take his candy, he might do that. I had nose-bleeds a lot. There was no reason for it, and they were always unexpected and scary. I remember my mother coming towards me with a pair of scissors during one of these times, and I thought she was going to stick them up my nose. I started screaming, with blood going everywhere, and it was a long time before she was able to make me understand that she only wanted to put them on my back. The coldness of them there was supposed to help stop the bleeding somehow. It's strange though, the way this other memory just seems like a black flannel board holding all the other memories to it. I know we didn't spend that much time in cellars, but it is a memory that...