I have so many memories from the time when I was little. I mean really little.
One vivid memory I have is of watching my sister walk to school - leaving me behind at home.
She went to afternoon kindergarten so it was middle of the day when she left. That sleepy, quiet time when you have to work up the energy to think of something else to do the rest of the day. She walked the four blocks alone - a five year old.
I must have been just two years old if she was on her way to kindergarten.
The front door of our house was in a little alcove next to the garage door. The screen door was a pressed aluminum sharp-edged thing with three panes and a handle that pinched your fingers. An aluminum kick plate at the bottom with a texture that made the greatest noise if you rubbed it or scraped it (drove my Dad nuts one day doing that - almost as good as plucking the teeth of a comb only without the tinkly drips at the end), a glass pane in the middle and a screen in the top section. I think both the top two sections were interchangeable - glass or screen. Eventually the glass was changed to Plexi-glas when my sister put her arm through it as she chased someone outside.
I was just able to see over the aluminum section to the outside.
From the porch door you could see across the street, but only kitty-cornered as they say. Across the street was 'the Ditch." A place we played almost ad infinitum as kids. Anything and everything could be found in "the ditch." It was a drainage ditch that ran criss-cross through the neighborhood. The stream was never more than three feet wide and never more than a foot deep, but it held so many treasures, distractions, filth and tragedy  . . . well, that would fill an entire book right there.
I stood there - my two year old self - and watched my sister walk to school. Her back to me by necessity. She wore a red bandanna across her platinum blond hair. Her white shoes so visible against the green grass marking each step in her progress. She soldiered along the dirt path that bridged the gap in the sidewalk between Steve DeVore's house on one side of the ditch and that Barker kid who was always in trouble ("The children of single mother's are always bad news!") on the other. No man's land. Our own neighborhood demilitarized zone when we got old enough to have Fort Wars between the sides.
It was a beautiful, clear sunny day. The sky was light blue - too bright to be really brilliant and dark.
She'd be gone for hours.