intimations of childhood

I don't know why this has always been a strong, permanent item stored in my memory -- but for whatever reason, it is -- my grandparent's scale in their lower bathroom. They had a strange house, but I loved it more than I've ever loved any other place in the world. It is the one place from my childhood that I can still conjure up almost exactly every detail and while doing so, it is powerful enough that I can nearly glimpse the way I felt when I was there. I realize now that the feeling I felt was safe.

The lower bathroom was nothing glamorous -- but there were weird things that were so intriguing to me as a kid. The first, the scale, had a sticker that said "Don't Tread on Me." I would sit on the toilet (sorry -- but that's usually why you're in a bathroom anyway), opposite the scale and stare at that sticker. I didn't know what it meant. It took me YEARS to figure it out -- why I just never thought to ask anyone else in the house -- I don't know. There was no Google back then and maybe it was just part of my personality as a kid, I didn't want to seem dumb by not knowing what that meant so I literally sat with that question brewing in the back of my mind for way too long (despite the fact that my grandmother had dictionaries spread throughout the house the way other people place boxes of tissue). Why this scale, that sticker, that bathroom (which also had a cool crawl space in -- totally random as well) had such a mysterious hold on me is really perplexing to me now. I also think back and realize that is something I would do as well -- put a goofy sticker on a scale. Anyhow, it clearly stuck and now, whenever I see that word, tread, I think of that bathroom, that house, and my very beloved, totally unconventional grandparents that were, to be honest, probably the most impressionable and stable part of my childhood. Oy -- where is that scale now? (Don't worry -- that is not a cry for help -- I truly just wonder where it ended up when we moved my grandmother out of that house to the senior party home -- Freedom Village -- which Andre thought sounded like a nudist colony).