People have told me I can’t really remember things that happened when I was two. People are wrong. I can remember all the way back to the cradle, but that memory was quite by accident, due to an unfortunate misunderstanding about a pill. After my first husband returned from Vietnam, many of his buddies were still in the habit of using what we now call recreational drugs. I declined because I’m such a lightweight, my paranoid fear of getting punched in the shoulder outweighed the odds of hilarity and hunger. The last time I accompanied my husband to his buddies’ holdout, I was handed a tiny pill described as perfectly harmless peyote. I’d been such a disappointment to my husband since his return, disagreeing with him about everything, I felt compelled to be a good sport. What I ingested may have been LSD. Everyone else had a happy evening, whereas I talked nonstop for twelve hours and then slept for 48. In the process of my monologue I discovered that the brain retains whatever it hears, sees, and experiences, forever. It’s all stored in neat little compartments, ready to trot out when the brain decides. You may not remember what you ate Tuesday evening two months ago, but your brain has the menu inscribed on a parchment scroll shoved into an alcove for possible future use. There I was, expounding upon my existence to a floor full of people who wanted me to shut up so they could get some sleep. They eventually crawled off to other rooms, leaving my poor husband listening to me recite all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, all of them. I’d given them a cursory reading in college and then totally forgot them. Yet there they lurked, each and every line, waiting for the right chemical trigger to turn me into the Orator of the Ages. Somewhere near dawn, my husband was able to doze off because I had regressed backward in time to nonverbal infancy. I gazed at my fingers with the mind of a newborn, delighting in their novelty. I discovered toes. Thank G-d no one in the room had a camera. This why I’m fairly certain that what I remember about the chicken ranch from first-hand experience and stories told later are true events and not figments of my imagination. After WWII, waves of returning GI’s decided to buy plots of sand in the deserts near Los Angeles and raise chickens. Many had never seen a ranch before, let alone work one. My parents fit into this category. If he could rivet airplanes together, he could raise a chicken, said my father, and so they followed the gold rush to San Fernando and beyond. It so happened someone was selling a ranch fully stocked with chickens, turkeys, a cow, and a parcel of pigs. What could be better? However, the first thing my mother insisted they had to do when they settled into their new paradise on earth was get rid of the pigs. That was easy. A neighbor drove over with his pickup and issued instructions to her and my eleven-year old sister. (Daddy was conveniently unavailable that day.) They were to stand one at each side of the pen’s gate and shoo the porkers up the truck’s tailgate ramp while the neighbor prodded the pigs from behind. The stage was set. My sister gathered her courage and nodded, “Ready!” My mother stood her ground…until the first pig exited the pen. Then she turned tail and ran for the house, slamming the door behind her and leaving my sister, the neighbor, and the pigs to save themselves or drown. Pigs are not stupid. They saw the doorway to freedom and made a mad dash for it, scattering full speed in every direction but the truck ramp. The neighbor was furious, said my sister, who made him angrier by hanging over the fence in uncontrollable laughter. It took him days to hunt down all the escapees. Needless to say, he never spoke to my mother again. Ma redeemed herself by rescuing my father. You see, on a farm, you’re supposed to be able to kill the occasional bird for dinner. Daddy had read up on it and went forth with the best intentions. He managed to catch a squawking hen and tie her legs to a backyard tree. However, when it came to the awful deed, his nerves failed him. He made a cut or two and was so traumatized by the gore, he threw down his knife and fled into the house, leaving my mother to stride forth and put the poor creature out of its misery. Daddy never tried it again. That he went from chicken rancher to chicken retailer to chicken wholesaler boggles the mind. Then there was the turkey that fell in love with my mother. Every time Ma stepped out the kitchen door, it was waiting for her, following her every step. Ma was fond of it, but not so fond as to take it with her when they sold the ranch. Still, she always smiled when she spoke of it, I think because it reflected well upon her ability to attract admiration. One evening my sister thought it would be a good idea to hoist me into her arms and take me into the barn to meet our cow. I remember it clearly. A squeaking door, a dark, scary chamber, a huge cow head staring at me. Then the cow said “Mooo” and I burst into shrieks of fear. That was the end of my barn days but since mother had no intention of becoming a milkmaid, the cow didn’t stay in our barn for long anyway. Mother made a sweet deal with our next door neighbor. If they would house, feed, and milk the cow, Ma would give it to them for free in exchange for half of the milk produced. There are many other things I remember about the ranch, but two stand out vividly. The first was giving chicks a bath. I liked to bathe things. When my sister spent all her allowance to buy me a Madam Alexander doll, I promptly shoved it into a pail of water and its wig fell off. This upset my sister almost as much as when she saw the live, cheeping chicks I’d gathered to the left of my water pail, and the quiet, limp pile I stacked to the right once I’d give them a good wash. Two-year olds don’t understand that chicks drown when held under water, at least not until their sisters start yelling at them to stop. The second memory is a teaching moment. Beware, parents! Children too young to talk may not show it but they understand everything you say in front of them. My crib was in my parent’s bedroom. A pretty gold-framed clock sat atop a chest of drawers near my crib. I pointed to the clock and grunted my desire to hold it. Daddy started to give it to me, but Ma said, “Don’t give her the clock. She’s only going to drop it.” My father, being the sucker that he was, handed it to me anyway, saying, “You can play with it but don’t drop it.” Then they left me alone in the room. I have a clear vision of standing in the crib, leaning against the slats, holding this golden treasure in my hands with an entirely new concept in my head. It had never occurred to me that dropping the clock was an option. I stared at the clock; I stared at the floor; and then I opened my hands. You know what happened next: a loud crash, a sense that maybe I’d made the wrong decision, and my mother’s voice, “See? I told you she’d drop it!”