Exercises in Writing

Four short paragraphs from prompts about childhood:

1. I remember tormenting my younger brother in the mornings before school.  I was in junior high and he was a lowly elementary school kid.  I woke up and prepared myself for school while he moped around missing our parents and complaining about the cold.  I clearly recall him putting on one of our mother’s sweatshirts and perching himself on top of the heating vent in his room.  What odd behavior, I would think to myself as I buttoned up my coat and affixed my mittens to my hands.  Now, as an adult, I find myself pulling the blankets around my head in the morning missing my family.
2. I remember walking around my childhood neighborhood in the summers with my best friend Kelli.  We lived in a small town and when we were too young to drive but too old for things like summer camp and swimming lessons, we spent our days walking to a huge field that was near my house.  It had a dirt path that became full of “crackle-mud” after a rainstorm had dried up.  It also had a huge hill made entirely of dirt; perhaps the start of some construction that was never finished.  We’d sit up on that dirty hill and look out over our town and talk about absolutely nothing.  At the present, there are rows of attached houses sitting where she and I spent so many summers.  I often wonder if the dirt misses our simple conversations.
3. There is a picture of my when I was around six years old holding our black cat.  The cat was named Booger (thanks Dad) and she was dressed in a pink dress. The cat looked miserable with her claws sticking out and a scowl on her face. I remember pushing that cat around in a doll stroller after a maniacal case through the house to catch her. That cat hated me and today, I hate cats. That cat was like a doll to me which usually emulates practice for motherhood and today, I couldn’t be more pleased to be childless and catless.
4. When I was little, my dad used to write things for work on this big black typewriter. I would hear him tapping away on it’s archaic keys and then the inevitable *ding* would sound and it would snap back to start a new line. I wrote a few stories on that stone age machine and remember going to my school’s computer lab and trying to type as quickly as my dad could. It never sounded as impressive as he did and in today’s line of small-keyed notebooks and laptops, when I really get going with my writing, it seems less satisfying without the heavy clunk and familiar *ding*.