Making memories

"Each day we make deposits, in the memory bank of our children" (Source Unknown)

A few days back I was reading a post written by a friend about the difference between her childhood and that of her 8yr old daughter, and it got me reminiscing about my own childhood. 

I was a weird, not too social child, lost in my own little world of books. I hated all forms of sports, moped around by myself and didn't have too many friends. Nevertheless, each time I remember my childhood, the memories that come floating in always leave me with a smile on my face, the memories of - 

• of summer afternoons spent with my best friend stealing lemons from our neighbour's garden and making lemonade with salt & green chilli which we would then gulp down with tears were streaming down our eyes, 

• of creating my own little graveyard for dead ants and mosquitoes in my garden (didn't I just warn you that I was a weird kid), 

• of teaming up with my buddy, every monsoon, to create a raft by tying together the barks of my mom's banana plants and then trying, extremely unsuccessfully to sit on the contraption and float when our garden flooded in the rains, 

• of flying kites and getting into fights, 

• of convincing my little sister she needed a haircut and then mercilessly chopping off her pretty curls, 

• of looking forward to the once-a-week movies at the club where the highlight of the evening used to be buying a hard boiled egg, served with black salt, (which tasted out of this world), 

• of praying every monsoon morning, that the culvert on the way to our school be flooded so that our school bus would be forced to return half way, and then of the joyful whoops and the sharing of our packed lunches inside the bus the minute we saw the flooded culvert, 

• of sitting by the pukur (pond) in my uncle's house and watching the hired help catch fresh fish which was then cooked for lunch 

• of being woken up in the mornings and of having dim-sheddo and bhaat forced down our throat, before going to school (boiled eggs and rice with butter - Bengali staple food - no self respecting Bong mother ever sent her child out without having fed him/ her this) 

• of my dad telling us ghost stories in the dark whenever we had power cuts 

• of driving my grandmother insane by polishing off jars of pickles before she could finish making them 

• of sitting in my grandma's kitchen and eating rice and macher jhol (fish curry), while she cooked on the coal stove. Till date, even the slightest whiff of the woody, smoky smell of burning coal (so rare these days - last time I smelt it was a few years back on a official trip on some consumer connect to a village) immediately takes me back to my grandma's kitchen where I picture her and my aunt cooking and nodding approvingly as we polish off everything on our plate. 

In my own way, I did have a memorable childhood. 

Cut to the present. 

The first time I took my sons to India, they went ballistic just looking at the cows on the road in my home town. My hubby and I, both having grown up in small towns where there were cows aplenty, just couldn't stop being amused & surprised! Never before had it occurred to us that there could be people on this planet for whom the sight of a cow would be a novelty!!! 

That is when it began to dawn upon me just how starkly different 'childhood' today has become (in some ways rightly so, I guess). For my boys there will be no running wild, no long summer vacations with the grand parents, no catching dragon flies & rescuing humming birds, no stealing pickles and building rafts; instead there will be play dates and stay overs and tennis and if I am lucky, more books than video games!!! I wonder just what of these will treasure and reminisce about. 

Someone wiser than me once said, "Life brings us simple pleasures each day and its up to us to turn them into wonderful memories". So they may not be able to do everything that we did as kids, but we can atleast attempt to create some memories of our own. 

We may not be able to build banana rafts but we can still grow our own tomatoes, water the roses and pick damsons and apples from our own little garden and pick beans and corns and strawberries from a pick-your-own farm.

We may not be able to see cows on the roads but we can still feed them and sheep and goats at the nearby farm!

We may not run wild but we can still run around parks, picking wild berries and looking for fox holes. 

And I must admit that we are blessed to have the good fortune of being around plenty of amazing places - Deen City farm, for instance is a must do weekend ritual for my boys - we go there every weekend, feed the billy goats, the sheep and the alpacas, stare at the pigs and the chicken and geese, pet the rabbits and ape the horses. And then eat a lunch of fries and chicken nuggets at the farm restaurant before driving back home. 

Howdy Llama!

One for you and one for me, Bhai!

Bacon!!!

The best part of our trips to the farm is that the boys
attack the chicken on their plates with great gusto,  while cawing like a rooster!

The Billy Goat is the favourite animal!
He is gentle, he eats the feed out of their hands and even lets them pat him!

Got milk?

Another of my favourite places to take the boys to is Garson's Pick-Your-Own Farm, a farm where one can pick fresh vegetables and fruits and pay for them by weight. Watching my little fruit loving V1 pick fresh strawberries and gobble them up always brings back memories of me of following my mom around in our kitchen garden, helping her pick eggplants, tomatoes, gourds and plantains and watch her struggle with her cauliflowers and pineapples and I feel happy. 

My boys may not be gathering lemons but I am hopeful, they are gathering memories that will hopefully last them forever!

Boy! This sure gets 'corn'ier by the minute!

"When you finally go back to your old hometown, you find it wasn't the old home you missed but your childhood"  ~ Sam Ewing

Post Script - 

A couple of months back, I met an old couple who were there at Garson's pick-your-own farm with their grand children. They told me they started bringing the grand kids to the farm after one of them mentioned that tomatoes grow on supermarket shelves!!! Hopefully with all the gardening we do together at home and all the visits to nearby farms, that is an answer I don't get to hear any time soon!!!