lime green musings....

this is something i wrote a couple weeks ago. Boy, was it fun reflecting on the past!!

Lime green! What a delightful color!! Reminds me of Granny Smith apples, crunchy and tart, also of crab apples – the ones we used to pick off the tree at the Margeson’s house back in the fields. At first we dared each other to take a bite without making a face; later we became more daring, challenging each other to eat whole apples—and they were huge—right down to the cores! We’d always feel sick afterwards, and our mothers would tell us it was our own faults, but that never stopped us from our childish bravery.

It was at the Margeson’s house that we first experienced stinging nettles. Somehow the name doesn’t quite portray the excruciating pain that’s involved in the process of wading through a stinging nettle patch. It seems that only England is privy to this wonderful plant; we never came across it in the “colonies,” as the good ol’ US of A was called.

There was one time that my best friend and I got into a terrible fight, and divided our whole group into two. Her revenge was sweet, however, when she stole my history notebook and threw it into a patch of stinging nettles. I waded in after it, anger overcoming better judgment (as always), and came away with a damp notebook, too damp to ever use again. It was a shame, as it was practically brand new; brand new notebooks always inspired me to “do my best” and the first drawings were my best ever. Even my teacher had remarked on how neat I had been. Now it was all destroyed over some, most likely, petty issue that was resolved only three days later. I kept that warped notebook for years, not as a reminder of my friends nor of our fight, but as a memory of how careful I had been.

The first drawings were of castle life, serfdom, how fields were divided up between laborers and crops. We colored mostly in coloured pencils, adding details later in markers. I distinctly remember the magenta marker had bled all over the pages; I also remember crying pitifully over that ruined book; but most of all, I remember how no one thought the drawings were as good as I thought they were. They weren’t crying over because they weren’t that good; but I cried over my masterpiece being destroyed. They weren’t good but they were my best effort ever, and I’ve never done anything remotely neat and careful since then.

I seem to remember getting along with my brother better in England than in any other place during our school years (with the possible exception of New Hampshire). We were an oddity, our accents were admired, ridiculed, challenged as fake, and our customs were strange albeit in a fascinating way. We introduced Halloween to our neighborhood. The kids loved it, the adults didn’t know what to give us as a treat (life savers seems to be a household standard for treats), and at one house in particular, the man had us give a 10-minute lecture on what Halloween meant; all the while we were wishing to get out of there, foregoing the treat!

For two countries to speak the same language there sure are lots of cultural differences between England and the US. Most of the time diversities were comical. For example, during our first week in England, we saw a kid with a shirt that read, “I shot JR.” We were mystified; who was jr., and why would this kid boast having shot him? Imagine our surprise to find out it referred to J.R.’s shooting on the show Dallas, yet imagine the shock of our friends, who assumed that everyone in America watched the show!! We had never even heard of it before! They wanted to know what was going to happen next, and we were clueless, again much to their amazement and dismay.

The influence of Dallas was widespread; obviously we really weren’t from the States because we didn’t sound like JR or the other characters. It was impossible to explain that New York was far away from Texas (thank God!) and people spoke differently there (again, thank God!). Accents in England vary, almost from town to town, so you’d think they would understand this concept!

So my brother and I stuck together because we were “different”; we played with the kids on the street (pom-pom, curb ball, a fun variation of dodge ball, Mother-may-I, and other fun games), we walked to and from school together, built spaceships and space stations with his Legos, performed a magic show for our parents and grandparents (he was the magician, complete with bow tie; I, his lovely assistant, with floppy hat and sun glasses—the pictures are hilarious!!), even wrote an Easter egg hunt consisting of riddles. We had a tree house in the back yard, which we rigged up with a low-tech pulley system (a rope tied to a bucket) to transport things up and down. He would ride his bike while I rolled skated alongside as we made our way to the local sweet shop to buy bags of our favorite sweets. We destroyed our English garden playing “football”. And in the bott*m of the garden we played school in the Wendy house.

I remember one time we were hitting golf balls and over the back fence our neighbours had a glass green house. It had to be an act of God, that in His mercy the balls flew by every time while we held our breath and closed our eyes. It was a miracle we never hit it, with the amount of balls that went over the fence. One time we were inspired with a brilliant idea; rather than risk hitting the greenhouse, we would turn around and hit balls towards the house! In the middle of a Bible study, someone (I just can’t remember who…) hit a perfect line drive, crashing a window in the door, and the ball landed right in the middle of the group! Weren’t they surprised!! And weren’t we chagrined that we could hit such a small window with such agility and miss the entire glass house next door!!

I had my first boyfriend in England, although it was more of a friendship than anything else. I panicked if ever he tried to hold my hand. We went roller-skating together, brother in tow, at the community center. He practically lived at our house from the time school ended until his mother called to tell him to come home. We did our homework together, brother included, on the living room coffee table. He was an incredible artist (no, he never saw my serf fields!) and drew constantly on everything. My younger brother received “Freddie the Frog”, framed and signed, and I wonder if he still has it; it meant the world to him back then.

Yes, he was my boyfriend, we went to the same school, and yet I vehemently denied his boyfriend status, even more violently than Peter denied Christ. I would get into a fight faster than anything else if someone were to point him out to me on the school campus. We could be seen anywhere else together, just not at school.

When we returned to the US, I longed to know how he was, but was never brave enough to ask my parents for his address, and I never heard from him again. Years later, in my 20’s, I heard that he was an artist, still single, and my family and I joked that was because he and I had never broken up, and he was still waiting for me. But I think in reality that I was growing tired of him by the end of our time there.