My friend Lisa is someone who comes up in this blog occasionally and in my thoughts a lot. This is for good reason. She is my oldest friend and was as much an integral part of my childhood as my own brothers. I knew her before I even knew my brothers and considering our mother’s became friends when they were pregnant with us, one could argue that Lisa and I knew each other before we were born.

My earliest childhood memory of Lisa goes back to when we were 2, maybe 3, years old and her toy stove. Lisa’s dad built the stove out of a big wooden box painted white and big enough to fit a couple of kids inside. Flat coiled coat hanger wires were fastened to the top to make burners along with a few discarded dials, either from a real stove or maybe a TV. Best of all, the stove had small wheels attached to the bottom and a small door on the front side of the box which was supposed to be the oven. But Lisa and I did very little pretend baking or cooking. Instead we would climb into the box via the oven door and scurry across the kitchen floor, pretending we were in a car. Once we got to our destination we’d close the oven door so it was pitch dark and pretend we were at the movies.

A few years later when Lisa’s family moved to another house the stove was given to my brothers and me. It lived in the playhouse we had in our backyard and it became the main prop in a game we called Witchy-Witch. I believe that Witchy-Witch was the invention of one of the neighbor kids, but I’m pretty sure Lisa and her sister Lynda played the game with us many times as well. Witchy-Witch was our version of Hansel and Gretel. One kid played the witch and chased the other kids around the yard trying to catch them. If you got caught you got stuffed in the stove.

Lisa always tells me that I remember everything from the past and it’s true. My head is filled with great childhood memories and she happens to be in the majority of them.