I was a Tom Boy When I was a Little Girl
I was a Tom Boy. I liked to catch mice in the woodpile and show them to the neighbor, climb trees and fight with the boys in my neighborhood.
When I was a young girl I lived in Coon Rapids, MN. My Grandma, who lived in Minneapolis, thought we were moving to the backwoods of Minnesota, "It was so far away!!" I was a Tom Boy. I liked to catch mice in the woodpile and show them to the neighbor, climb trees and fight with the boys in my neighborhood. I had an idyllic life until my Mother decided that I was too old to fight with the boys and the neighbors didn't want to see my mice.
We lived on a dirt road with only a few houses. I learned to ride my bike on that dirt road. And when I fell it didn't hurt as much as concrete or tar. All I really had to worry about was when I was going to call my Mother by her first name. (That worry put in my head by the boy next door.) So after I pondered his question, "When will you be able to call your Mother by her first name?" I said with all the authority I could muster, "When I am 11." I must have thought 11 sounded old.
When I started kindergarten, I thought I had found the be all to the end all. I loved school. But my best subject was reading. I could read through the books in the school so fast, that I ran out of the books in the box. It was then that I found a love that I have to this day. Reading. I learned about other countries and how people didn't all speak the same language or or have the same manners. When I was in my English royalty phase I was just devastated that we didn't have to curtsy to the Queen. I wanted to have a reason to curtsy. So I taught myself to curtsy and used it every chance I got.
Life was pretty easy in those days. I really didn't think about much more than what I would read next or if we should go play on the prairie. We lived next to Bunker Prairie. There was nothing there but sand and trees and flowers. That is about how I lived my life until I turned 12. Then we moved to the "city." The rules changed a little and I became a teen- ager.
