In response to Suleika Jaouard, I am trying to journal about the same topic for 100 days. I chose writing anecdotes about my childhood with my sister, mom, and grandma. My plan is to record them here as I go along.

Memory 1: The hair dryer built into the floor

When Misty and I were young, we lived in a little house across the street from my Grandma Silvey’s house on High Drive. Our little house was heated by oil kept in an oblong silver drum in our backyard. During the year, my mom would set aside money each month so that when fall came, she could order enough oil to fill the drum that would provide heat all winter long. I am talking 1970’s and very early 80’s here. We lived in that little house until the spring of my 7th-grade year, when we moved into an apartment across town. My parents sold the little house for around $32,000, if I remember accurately. My mom just couldn’t find the right house for the right price when they sold the little house, so we lived in an apartment for a year while the money from the first house drew interest. A year later, they bought a fixer-upper in Hickory Hills, but that’s another story.

I have so many sweet memories of our time in the little house on High Drive, but the heater vent right outside my bedroom door ignites a visceral memory, one that still burns my feet if I think about it too long.

My mom often bought Misty and me matching nightgowns, sometimes made of flannel, but more often cotton or polyester, even though we were four years apart in age. The bottoms almost always featured curvy, rolling hems that grazed our ankles and sometimes caught our bare feet to send us tripping forward if we tried to move too quickly while wearing them. I remember artistic renderings of our favorite dolls, like Holly Hobbie or Raggedy Ann, or a pretty design of flowers or rainbows in frill-lined frames on our chests.

We always took our baths at night back then, right before we went to bed. We often spent the night across the street with Grandma Silvey, all three of us – my mom, Misty, and me – when my dad was on one of his long-distance hauls (he was a truck driver for Atlas Van Lines). When we slept at our little house, though, our nightly bath routine included hair washing and vent drying. My mom made sure we washed and rinsed our hair thoroughly, sometimes requiring us to stick our heads under the faucet until there were no suds visible. Then she covered our heads in what she called “creme rinse.” She said it would help her comb out the tangles. I guess she was trying to prevent me from screaming the next morning when she raked that wire hair brush across my forehead and down the back of my head, yanking at the knots that had formed overnight. She even bought detangler in a spray bottle for the morning brush routine.

My hair has always been stick straight, which also meant instant static electricity. My second-grade class photo featured a dynamic show of electricity with fine strands floating upward, fanned out around my head and behind the plastic white hair bows on either side of my middle part. My sister suffered worse, though. Her golden curls were often referred to as rats’ nests when my mom started her morning brush routine. Yet, she was also the one who received all the adoring comments: “What beautiful blonde curls! She will be a heartbreaker someday!”

I, with my stick-straight, fly-away, sandy strands, was known as the “Smart Sister.”

At night, though, after our baths, when Momma had all the tangles combed out of our wet hair, she would pull our long nightgowns over our heads and tell us to dry our hair on the vent.

That vent seemed to take up the whole corner of the hallway between my bedroom and the bathroom, so it had plenty of room for both my sister and me to stand on it. I know that it didn’t run all the time; it would cut on and off periodically, but when it erupted, our little feet could take the heat for about 10 seconds at a time. We often stood just long enough for a whoosh of hot air to blow out our polyester gowns as we cackled and poked each other’s bellies like they were balloons. Then we’d jump backward onto the carpet and toss our heads forward so that the heat would reach our hair and not our feet.

Sometimes a hopscotch match would ensue, a game of jumping patterns in and out of the fiery center. Or we would play follow-the-leader around the corners, faster and faster, until I inevitably tackled my younger sister or she screamed for my mom to rescue her. I can’t say for sure how long it took for our hair to dry from gushes of hot air from that black metal vent. It had to take at least 30 minutes, and I am pretty sure my mom was aware that it would wear us out enough that we would fall asleep the minute we crawled into bed together, right after my sister hollered, “let me in the middle,” as she always did.

Memory 2: Come on, Baby, light my fire

Among all the different ways we might have celebrated the Fourth of July in my childhood, one memory pervades them all. I knew that when we started lighting fireworks, my momma was going to do two things: she was going to tell the story about her mean brother Larry, and she was going to sing when someone lit her sparkler.

To celebrate Independence Day when I was a little girl, we always had family cook-outs at my Grandma Silvey’s house. When I was a teenager, and my mom married my step-dad Paul, they started going to the beach over the holiday because they worked at Arkwright Mills, and the cotton mills only shut down during the week of the Fourth. When I was a little girl, however, the Fourth of July meant grilling hamburgers and hot dogs at my Grandma Silvey’s house, which was conveniently located across the road from our house, that same house with the oil heater in the hall floor that I described in Memory 1. More often than not, my Grandma Silvey would haul her old ice cream maker down from the attic and mix us up some homemade ice cream – probably banana or strawberry, maybe peach, but my Grandma was reluctant to buy peaches just yet. She always told me that the crop picked later in July was sweeter than those picked in June or early July. We made peach cobbler later in the month.

We also usually bought a few fireworks at a local fireworks stand. We didn’t spend much money on them because my mom was meticulous with her budget, and she just couldn’t see burning through money with firecrackers and Roman candles. I remember perusing the cramped aisles of the makeshift store, combing through packages displaying photos of monster-sized explosions, looking for the “real ones” that would look just like the professional ones we may have seen at the beach or at ballgames. Of course, those “real ones” didn’t exist at the pop-up vendor trailer, but each year, we were convinced that we just needed to try a different one that costs just a little bit more because it would surely be one of the good ones. Any money my mom had “put back” to spend on fireworks was all the money we were allotted, so we would try a couple of big-box items, but we always made sure we had plenty of sparklers, bottle rockets, Roman candles, and regular, run-of-the-mill firecrackers.

We could hardly wait for dark to shoot them because it didn’t get dark enough to see the Roman candles and bottle rockets until at least 9 pm, and of course, we had to save the bigger ones for last. That meant all afternoon, my cousins and I watched the black snakes hiss and curl when we lit them on the asphalt, and we squealed with delight and covered our ears when the whistlers soared down the driveway. Oh, and that one time the whistler made a crazy turn toward Grandma’s car! We just knew it was going to blow the car up, and boy, were we going to be in trouble then!

We also lit and threw firecrackers at each other in Grandma’s front yard. We knew the drill: light, throw, and run. We scattered and screamed, but then we turned right back around to gather and light the next one. Inevitably, someone would gain enough confidence to twist at least ten firecrackers together and light them so we could hear the sequence of pops that thrilled us, but also made us tiptoe slowly back to the launching site just in case there was one straggler that had not exploded just yet.

This was just about the time we heard the story about mean brother Larry. Oftentimes, he was there and denied my mother’s version of the story, which went like this:

“Y’all be careful lighting those things. And do not hold on to it when you light it. Place it down on the asphalt, and then light and run. And if it doesn’t blow up right away, don’t pick it up! You know what happened to me that one time. I will never forget Larry telling me to hold on to a firecracker that he said was a dud. I was stupid and believed him, and next thing you know, that thing blew up in my hand. It was swoll up for days, and all he did was laugh about it.”

When Larry said that he didn’t do it on purpose, she called him a liar. She never agreed to light the fireworks or hold a firecracker because of that memory. For a long time, it had to be one of the men to light them instead of the kids, which frustrated us because they never wanted to get outside in the middle of the afternoon heat to light firecrackers for us, but we could usually talk some grown-up into helping us.

Momma told us that story every time we started lighting firecrackers, but the song didn’t happen until it got dark. The song was reserved for sparklers only.

Now before I tell you the song she would sing, I need you to know that my momma was a child of the 1960s, a bona fide Jesus hippie who gave birth to me when she was just 18 years old; she said I was her living Vietnam War protest (I can tell y’all that story in another post). She trained me to love her music, too, because being a teen mom meant we listened to records together.

And every Fourth of July, as soon as someone lit her sparkler, she would twirl that sparkler in the air, creating designs on the night sky in rhythm to the Doors.

“Come on, Baby, light my fire. Try to set the night on …”

And we would all join in, dancing around with our red, green, blue, and gold sparklers, throwing our heads back and bellowing, “FIRE!” as loud as we could.

Until the sparks fizzled down to the metal wire, and we dropped them in the grass and ran to open the next box – burning, dancing, and singing until all the sparklers were gone, and it was time to load bottle rockets into a glass Coke bottle and work our way up to the “real” fireworks.

In case you want to listen along, here is a link to “Light My Fire,” by The Doors, and tomorrow night, I will sing that song one more time in honor and in memory of my mom.