I’ve been tagged by Joy for the “Five Things You Miss About Childhood” meme, and the timing is pretty appropriate, considering that as of Friday I’m into the second quarter-century of my life. So here we go:

1. Falling asleep in the car and being carried up to bed by my dad.

Or even pretending to fall asleep, really. My parents always knew when I was faking, but being great parents, they carried me up anyway. The house is up on a knoll in the woods and we used to park the cars down below, so my father would scoop me up against his shoulder and take me up the winding path with the mostly broken footlights (they didn’t stand much chance against falling branches, but we all knew that path by heart, even in total darkness). It was the best feeling, to have someone else slip you into your pajamas and tuck you snug into bed. On late nights out in the city, I savor those memories.

2. Baking days.

Every now and then my mother would find the time to bake fresh bread. And she always let me have a piece of the dough to shape into an animal or a heart or, once, an airplane a la Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. In my ideal life, I’d get up early on Saturday mornings each week and bake bread.

3. Catching frogs under the dock.

My aunt and uncle had a fabulous pond on their property, and we’d be over there all the time in the summer. My favorite part was clambering into the cool dark under their dock, clay squelching delightfully between my toes, in pursuit of the big bronze-speckled pond frogs that lived there. We had great times at that pond. My mother likes to tell the story of how my little “boyfriend” (I didn’t think of him that way, I assure you) convinced me to go out with him in the tiny inflatable boat. He proved to be pretty inept with the oars and I got tired of aimlessly bobbing around in the middle of the pond, so I ditched him and dog-paddled back to shore. I think my mother reads something about my character into this, perhaps. We were probably about four.

4. Dad’s woodshop and the lumberyard.

My parents owned a lumberyard for the first sixteen years they lived on the island, and I grew up scaling the lumber trees that hold the big stacks of boards, playing hide-and-seek among the giant coils of plastic pipe, riding the forklift at my father’s side, and playing games with screws and bolts and wing nuts as counters. Even better was my father’s woodshop at home, in which we lived for the first three weeks of my life before the house was finished enough to move into. He’d set nails in a piece of scrap wood for me to practice hammering, and I couldn’t have been more entertained. He helped me make birdhouses and secret mailboxes in which to leave coded messages for friends and handsome boxes to hold the brushes for my horse.

5. Summer outings on the Aimee-O.

My best friends growing up had a fishing boat, the Aimee-O, a seiner they took up to Alaska every summer to fish the salmon runs. There were four daughters, the eldest my own age and my closest companion. When the boat was in Friday Harbor and the weather was fine, a number of families would go on picnicking trips to smaller islands. We’d scamper all over the boat named for my friends’ mother, wearing our weather-worn and salty orange life jackets. Then we’d row ashore in the dory my friends’ father built with his own hands, and the grown-ups would ferry coolers across and build driftwood cookfires while we children dashed off for the tidepools. Minnows, rock crabs, hermit crabs, sometimes a small eel – we’d capture them in our hands and put them in buckets attractively furnished with seaweed and rocks to make them feel at home. There was hardly anything more fun to do on a summer’s day. And then there would be Polish sausages and hamburgers (none of us were vegetarians, then) ready on the fire, so we’d put the creatures carefully back in their tidepools and rinse our hands in the sea. Later we’d jump off the Aimee-O into the shockingly frigid water, a long plunge of about fifteen feet, and splash breathless around to the ladder to do it again. That was island childhood at its best.

I’m tagging Mia, if they ever let her put down the laparoscope long enough to update her blog.