My Childhood

As Related to Elise By Her Mommy

When I was a kid, we lived on the moon. We had our own little moon colony house where we lived very happily. Of course, I was much, much bigger then and have shrunk down as I've gotten older and we've moved back here to Earth.

At any rate, one of the best things about living on the moon was that we drank coffee and ate brownies all of the time. You'd think we'd have got tired of eating brownies for so many years, but we didn't.

Sometimes, Grandma Char would get fed up with all of the noise Uncle Peter and I were making in our relatively small house and she'd tell us to go outside to play. "Go make some noise out there in the vacuum!" she'd say. So, we'd spend a lot of time getting into our spacesuits, grab our Trader Joe's grocery bags, and head for the air lock.

I've told you about the air lock, right? So that all of the air didn't go "swooosh" out of our house we had an airlock on the door. To go outside, we'd open the door to the airlock, walk into the airlock, close the door to the house. When that was sealed, we'd open the door to the outside, walk out and close the door.

Collecting rocks on the moon is fun because it's a lot easier to bring a bunch of them home at once. For one thing, they're not as heavy! For another, with gravity being what it is you can go "boingy, boingy, boingy" all over the place and cover a lot more ground than you could just walking on Earth. Uncle Peter and I used to have contests to see who could fill their grocery bag first. The only rule was that you had to pick interesting rocks. If they didn't look like meteorite fragments or something left over from when the moon was first formed, it wasn't fair game. Anyway, we'd fill our bags and head back home.

When we got home, we'd go back in through the air lock. Once inside, we'd take the rocks to the living room to compare and see who had found the best collection. This was very important. Very, very important.

At some point, Grandma Char and Grandpa Karl would want the living room to be picked up. This meant that somebody had to take the rocks back outside. Whoever had the least interesting or most boring collection had to get back into their space suit and take both sacks of rocks back outside. It takes an annoyingly long time to get a space suit on, so I always tried to get the best rocks so that Uncle Peter would have to take the rocks out.

The thing about taking rocks back outside when you live on the moon is that your mom almost always has rules about where you can put them. No dumping them right outside the airlock, because we need to be able to get in and out without tripping all over piles of rocks. Don't dump them near the house because it will block the view out of the windows. Finally, Uncle Peter found a place to put the rocks that didn't get us in trouble, so we always put them in a big pile not too far from the house. One of these nights, we'll take out the telescope and I'll show you just where we left that pile.

Oh, and when we were not playing with rocks, we played a lot of board games. I know that Candy Land is your very favorite, but we didn't have that one! Can you believe it? Of course, we had something very similar. It was called Hydroponic Land. Living on the moon, you have to grow your own plants so we didn't even know what candy was. Hydroponic Land was all about growing and collecting nutritious things to eat. Same game, different characters.

Of course, Elise knows that this is all made-up but she loves it and requests this story right along with all of the "real" stories about when her parents were kids. It's fun to make this one up, and I can remember exactly where we were and what we were doing each time I added another element. It's going to be fun to see where it takes us next.

In case anyone imagines that I've somehow lost my background in education, this is actually a part of my ongoing space "unit." All of this is part of being stoked for an event at Ames next weekend. Of course, one could also argue that it's an excuse for me to engage my kiddo in my new hobby so that we have something fun to share.

Or maybe I did live on the moon, drinking coffee, eating brownies and collecting rocks.