you know how little kid minds work. sometimes the lines between reality and fantasy are a little blurry. when my parents told us that we were moving, i was maybe 5. i probably dreamt this, and then believed it to be true, which has happened on several occasions afterwards in the not-too-distant past. well. either way, i thought that when you moved, a moving van came to your house, and the movers opened up the back doors, and this blue sparkly dust poured out. it somehow lifted up your house and moved it to wherever you were going to live. i don't know how. when i was about 7-ish i guess, i thought i made up the word "itch". as it turns out, no i didn't. one of the popular pastimes at the lakehouse was always fishing. well, my brothers had set up a seine (our seines were always ghetto-rigged. like everything we have. it was leftover kite string tied to the ends of old window screens) underneath the boat dock, and my mother and i were in charge of checking it while they were out on the boat. i was maybe 12. we dutifully went outside, grabbed the strings, and pulled up to see what awaited us. as my memory goes, inside the seine was a big yellow fish with large purple polka dots! it looked like a handkerchief, but turned out to be a festively-colored gar! i found out some years later, after still holding on to that memory, that it was not yellow and purple, it was that murky greeny brown mildew color that all lakefish are. i don't know where i got that. one of my earliest memories is of me, perhaps 3 or 4, sitting on the windowsill in our dining room at our first house, just looking outside. i would do that for pretty long periods of time. i remember looking through the gauzy curtains and how i was kind of too big for a windowsill. i remember the gently sloping green yard, and the street, and our neighbor's house, and i remember how it looked from far away, like in another room looking in. how that whole thing looked, i mean. how i looked. i don't know, a lot of the things i remember have weird camera angles to them. the fish one i remember from slightly above and behind me.