Aunt Mary's Memoirs: I

Was it March or April that early spring morning nearly seventy years ago? I played in the warm sunshine sheltered from the wind behind the picket fence outside our yard. There was a protected spot where we could sit cozily together, the big grey housecat and me. The skies were very blue, white clouds floated by, and I looked out across the road past the springhouse to the hill beyond and the distant woods. This is my oldest memory.
Our small farmhouse was surrounded by a yard enclosed with a fence, and two very large trees stood in the front towering high above the road. There had been three of those butterball trees at one time, Mother told me, but the third had ben struck by lightning and so was cut down leaving a two-foot high stump which she had hollowed out and filled with earth and planted with geraniums, petunias, or portulaca.