Innocence upon a time.

And perhaps it was an anomaly, the torrents of grasshoppers, one after the other through a crack in the backyard fence, flooding your insect catcher-the prize of your childhood. Beyond the fence, the marsh, and the surreal parade of grasshoppers. They were your first true friends. As many the catcher could hold was the claustrophobic fate of the grasshoppers, but you were young and ignorant, you did not want to be alone in your room at night and the constant flicker of insect legs  against plastic reminded you that there was life:time did not stop when you were alone. By morning they were gone. Mother and father said that the grasshoppers had to go home. You knew they had let them go. You stared at the crispy exoskeleton, all that remained inside the plastic: a grasshopper had molted while you slept. A strange loneliness passed through you. The remains of a friend, quite meaningless once the life has ceased. This did not deter you from collecting grasshoppers: it became your ritual. Your first real bond, separate from the nexus of daughter, mother, and father, was with the continuous flow of orthopteran insects. The grasshopper: advocate of intuition. The grasshopper totem: never silence your inner musings. The grasshopper chooses the innovator, " forward thinkers that progress in life by unorthodox methods." When you accidentally dropped the bug catcher onto the pavement of the driveway it cracked and broke. Your first little devastation: it was never replaced. The bond, however, did not break, and you would be amongst grasshoppers come the first blaze of summer and every summer to come. Such an anomaly, how they hopped, one after the other, through the crack in the fence. Their parade was endless.
You were the first, the novelty, the bliss of an only child, first daughter, first granddaughter. You were fortunate enough to see the love between your mother and father glow, a utopia of affection they displayed before you with long kisses and caresses.  Unbeknownst, that love would turn bitter as human complications surfaced, reared their ugly nightmares and sullied the insulation of the perfect landscape of innocence. You remember that gift, the fantasy of immortal love, all the skeletons dormant in the closet burst out years later, a cyclone slap of ugly reality and circumstance. The human condition.
Oh! but remember the graveyard? Your father was caretaker of the graveyard. Daddy's little girl accompanied him to play, to observe, to dash about tombstones and the ancient sinking stones engraved with bizarre tales of death adjacent to the railroad tracks. The stone of an infant. Mortality came early. Too early. Was it possible to die before living? Yet play and run and ecstatic glee of being among the cats that inhabited the caretaker's shed. Their names now distant, aphasic, the tongue loses its sharpness when time piles a million other names, stifling and overcrowding the memory with what becomes more significant as time passes. But there were cats, such joy they gave you as a child, the novelty, the first.
The master of the graveyard, old Mr. Merwin, occupied a large lavish home with his aged wife. The wallpaper, floral, lavender, your favorite color, and the old woman a shock of white hair and wisdom. Father maintained their home and property as well. The great white house on the hill you rolled down, over tufts of fresh clover and busy bees, oblivious, disrupting their feast, again and again, laughter and light, the sun, your eyes, ripe with life, on the lawn of the Merwin estate. They were always kind. The Merwins. The rosebush, pinkish-white petals, fresh and aromatic, stood for years on the Merwin family plot. The old woman was the last of the Merwin line. The rosebush waited patiently for her to be put to rest and then withered itself into the ground: the death of a family and the rosebush faithfully gone with the last.
Remember the swinging on the fourth of July. The fireworks visible, ebullient and bursting over the marshes. It was well past dark, late evening, but mother and father allowed you the privilege to remain outdoors past bedtime. And as the colors erupted brilliantly in the sky, you pumped your legs harder and harder, higher and higher, the ecstasy of mini-explosions and the soft whipping of the breeze against your face, immortality and youth, the luxurious privacy of the only child accompanying you as you rose through the night air. To soar through the air as if over the marshes and the trees themselves, to have no fear, to be untainted from the dirty mouths of the older children that would harass you in the new neighborhood, later. How fantastic was the silent electric pleasure pulsating throughout your limbs: the joy and the peace of the simplicity of the moment.
You did not resent the birth of your brother and sister. There was no jealousy. They were an interesting phenomena to me having been the solitary first, the novelty, the little princess. I loved and tormented them, I perfected the art of the brat, but with a curious detachment and disconnection that would only intensify when I was put amongst other children. Nursery school. I hated school the moment I was forced to attend. The presence of other children made me uncomfortable; my perceptions were quite mature fro my age and I found it hard to relate to "the others." This is when the blackness became more acute. My world was disrupted by teachers, and pestering assignments and horrid group participation. I felt like a black spot of ink on a backdrop of white. The disconnection and lack of "belonging" rang in my head like a migraine and I just wanted to carry on with my freedom, but instead I was pushed into a mass of oozing noses and silly ideas about what I was supposed to know. The hollow and aphotic voice took over my sub-conscious. A constant nag everyday, "something is wrong," "something is wrong," perpetually created a shadow that infiltrated my perception. I rarely smiled. I hated the children. They were wicked and cruel. They blotted out the golden age and made everything that was beautiful to me seem foolish and dead. The anxieties, the highs and devastating lows, hyper-elation and thoughts of death. Did every child feel this way? Was every child as impulsive and moody and in tune with what was wrong with the world? Did every child threaten suicide at age five and keep a knife under his or her pillow? Persistent and violent nightmares. Almost kidnapped when I moved to the new neighborhood. A man following me as I walked home alone. The perverse men that had exposed themselves to me, stared at me, invaded my sacred innocence. I was a constant hall-flower in elementary school. I was almost expelled. I couldn't sit still. I was bored to tears. The human condition had pervaded me!