When Grandma Betty was a little girl...

Kira loves family stories about when people were little kids. She's pretty much exhausted my own childhood, knows everything I know and then some about Nicole's, and has memorized many of the classics we tell about when our parents were kids.

Since posting about my great-grandma Betty on Saturday, I've been trying to remember stories about when she was a little kid. I know there are at least a handful in a book some distant cousin of mine put together with stories about the Holliday family Betty came from (yes, that's the same as Doc Holliday, who was her great-uncle or something), but I can't remember any.

The only story I remember is one she told me. In fact, it's not much of a story at all. It's just that she mentioned once that when she was a very small girl and they lived in Arizona, they'd usually go to school barefoot.

When I look at Kira's school, where you can't even share treats unless they're pre-packaged, that story alone makes even my only American-born great-grandmother seem foreign to the country in which we now live. Maybe memory makes us all immigrants: maybe the past is another country we make maps of when we tell these stories to our children.