Random 5 Friday: I remember a lot of things

I’m linking up with Nancy’s A Rural Journal for Random 5 Friday. Today I’m sharing five random facts about my childhood.

1. I am the youngest of three children. I have two older brothers. Though my immediate family was small, I have a large extended family. My father was the sixth of nine children, my mother the third of ten. Their parents also had large families. So I have many first cousins, first cousins once removed, second cousins, and on and on.

2. I grew up on a farm in central Virginia. When I was very small, we had beef cows, milk cows, pigs and chickens. I remember my mother making butter, gathering eggs and pasteurizing the milk in a small pasteurizer on the kitchen counter. I also remember the milk tasting like green onions if the cows had eaten the wild plants.

3. I didn’t learn to ride a bicycle until I was about 8 years old. My father was a rural mail carrier, and he bought a blue bike from one of his mail customers. He brought it home and called me out on the front porch to look at it. The next day, my second oldest brother taught me how to ride it.

4. I loved jewelry even as a child. In the baby picture above, I’m wearing a cross necklace and a baby ring. I still have both pieces of jewelry. I was allowed to get my ears pierced right before my twelfth birthday. I had it done at a local department store. The piecing was free if you bought the 14 karat gold earrings, which were eight dollars.

5. I was a bookworm as a child (still am). I especially loved mysteries and devoured Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden books. I loved going to the public library in Rustburg, the small village and county seat about six miles from the farm. Sometimes when my mother had her hair done in Rustburg, my brother and I were allowed to walk to the library from the beauty shop, and she would pick us up when she was finished.

Thank you for joining me on my walk down memory lane! If you’d like to join the Random 5 Friday link, go to A Rural Journal.

Please share one fact about your childhood in the comments section. I would love to read about you!