When I Was Five

Yesterday Mr. Blue slept late (till 8:45! It was a miracle!) so I had some extra time to write. I pulled out a book called What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers and started one of the exercises:

"Ask yourself, what did I care about when I was five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, etc.? What do I care about now?"

As sometimes happens with seemingly random exercises, the idea took off as soon as I put my fingers on the keyboard. I chose to write in the first person, trying to use the mindset and "voice" I would have used at that age. Since I have always written about my life, and writing things down is how I remember them, I was able to recall quite a bit of what was important to me at those ages. I've already written the first two and will keep working on the next ones (admittedly, it will be harder to express my emotions as the years give you more complex issues to deal with.) Since I was long-winded even when I was five, I'll just post one at a time. Here goes!
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I love my mommy and daddy and my baby brother. Although my brother is not as much fun to play with as I thought he would be because he doesn’t listen to me when I want him to sit still and play school with me. He doesn’t even want me to read books to him! But that’s okay because I can read books for myself. My favorite books are the Little House on the Prairie books. I wish I could ride on a covered wagon like Laura. But I do have a sunbonnet that Mama got me. I like to go outside and pretend that I live on the prairie. I collect nuts and make mud pies and fun stuff like that.

School is pretty fun too. My work is easy for me. I’m the littlest one in the whole school and I wish I had someone my exact age to play with but the bigger kids are nice to me even though when I say things they sometimes laugh and I don’t know why they’re laughing. I don’t like my teacher much though; she’s kind of mean and she doesn’t explain my math so I can understand it. I wet my pants one day because she took too long to find out what I needed. She felt bad and told me if I needed to go that bad, just to go ahead and go to the bathroom. I wish she had told me that before!

My daddy is a pastor so we go to church a lot. He’s the one who gets up in the pulpit and preaches and everyone has to sit there and listen. Sometimes he kind of yells but it’s not scary because my dad is not at all a scary type of person. I AM scared of the church when it’s dark inside. A teenage boy told me there’s a boogeyman in there and I can’t stop believing that even though Mama told me there isn’t. But then why do they talk about the Holy Ghost so much?

Oooh, cookies! Can I have one? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease? Okay, you're my favorite bestest friend in the whole wide world!