Truth is, if I’d been writing at age three, my crayon masterpieces would have detailed my action-packed tricycle ride and careening crash into a thorny mean rose bush at the end of our family’s driveway. Yes, I still have a scar on my ankle. And yet, I have NO idea if that house was in Pasadena or Canoga Park or Thousand Oaks, the three areas we lived in while spending only a couple of years in California.
Fast forward several months and I might have waxed poetic about the oh-so-cool baking set, complete with plastic egg beaters I received for my fourth birthday.
After another move we landed in Butte, Montana, for the next few years. (Are you sensing a nomadic pattern here?)
Kindergarten brought some simple sentences to my chubby pencils. Perhaps I could have written about freezing rides my brother and I spent clutching our dad’s snowsuits riding on his snowmobile, bouncing over deep white humps and valleys in the closed drive-in theatre lot he managed. Brrr.
I wonder what YOU would have written about as a skilled child writer. Do tell! Pondering those things might polish a memory or two that you can expand into an article, poem or devious murder mystery.