I remember when there was only one Starbucks across the street from the Public Market and it also sold chocolate from Belgium and spices in little baggies as if cumin were something that could get you high and maybe it did.

I remember when Nordstrom only sold shoes.

I remember when the Smith Tower was enormous, instead of a dwarfish little icon fading from Seattle’s skyline.

I remember when it was free to visit the Woodland Park Zoo and the Seattle Art Museum was on Capital Hill and a walk along the waterfront smelled cold and thick with creosote and import stores sold seamen’s chests and incense cedar screens carved with a thousand gods.

I remember before we went to war with Vietnam and it was still Viet Nam before the American War.

I remember Jack Kennedy’s funeral and the balcony where the Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior was shot.

I remember long, slow evenings in suburbia.

I remember my father’s gold wedding band, thick around his finger, and holding his index finger as we walked, stretching my stride to match his. 

I remember the small chest in the living room with two shallow drawers at the top holding broken tools and orange index cards, a fountain pen needing ink, dental floss and model airplane glue, keys to doors and boxes the family no longer owned, ticket stubs, a pocket knife, and a miniature chess set in a folding wooden case. 

I remember my mother’s hands crimping piecrust and mashing potaoes in a white glass bowl, meatloaf and tomato soup with toasted cheese sandwiches and tuna noodle casseroles and green peas barely warmed from the freezer. 

I remember the gingham dog and calico cat salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen window sill, the clock that creaked as it marked the passing seconds, bread kept in a drawer, the junk drawer with mucilage and four brown pennies and a bent spoon, a red capped shaker with cinnamon, and the toaster that always burned the toast. 

I remember rain on the roof and the softball through the front window in an exploding star. 

I remember my brother’s cap pistols and the bright smell of burnt powder, roadway scars in the back garden for Matchbox trucks and sedans, and the juniper bush six feet across, a spiral of prickly green. 

I remember our dog Roo circling and circling to carve her space on the carpet and my mother’s slip-covered chair in the living room revealing a warm depression when we came home from the store. 

I remember the reading lamp over my bed with butterfly wings embedded in the fiberglass shade, and a bright line of light under my door and hushed voices in the living room, the blush of dawn sunlight above the neighbor’s house, condensation on the glass, and the clutter of school papers and lists of horse names marking a landscape on my desk. 

I remember scum in the corner of the bathtub, mold on the wall of my closet, the sound of the furnace coming on at night in winter because it was especially cold, the plastic cups we used for KoolAide in the summer, and the crisp pale fungus that grew between the boards of the picnic table. 

I remember cracks in the driveway. 

I remember the hollow creak of the mailbox door, splitting open an orange with my thumb, sunflower seeds in their shells, card games, bare oak floors, the World War Two surplus search lights scraping across the sky in the summer, and moths beating against porch lights all up and down the block.

I remember.

I remember how it was. The Bad Word scratched into the stop sign post. Women fired for failing to wear stockings even in the back room. The man on the block who stripped his kids’ shirts and beat them with a strap. The bullies up the street who made it dangerous to walk that way. The open gutters and frost throwing the soil up into sparkling shards. Empty lots gone to tall grass. Cows grazing in a field. Climbing trees. The shack in the woods mouldering back into the past. Tree stumps broad as foreign cars. Foreign cars so rare their drivers stop to compare notes.

I remember laughing with my brother and my children as infants. I remember what youth was like. I remember songs from their first notes and cranberry sauce from cans and the color of my mother’s eyes.

It was everything and it’s every bit gone, and if someone told me I could start over and have all that back again, I would not stop crying.

How old does that make me? If I think I could not bear to have it all again? If I can barely contain all that has happened since?

If that is how old I am, I do not want to start again.