apple juice childhood, part one

If you’re reading this, you probably at least know my name and that I’m of some relevance to your life, but I would like to tell you some other things, including pictures, which make everything more fun and provide an excuse to convince you that I was an adorable child at one point in my life.

Everyone has one of those things most like to call a childhood, and here is mine (up to this point). Here we go! Ahem.

Once upon a time, Bob and Joy of Williamsville, New York, had a beautiful baby girl they called Barbara. Barbara eventually became my mother.


So, once upon a time, my cute future-mother


met my cute future-father, Ray (this picture I feel is pretty indicative of my father as a whole character. Sorry, Dad)


and Barb and Ray decided to have a life together.


Which is where I enter the scene, just before the end of the glorious 1980s, after one Paprocki child had already been birthed and before the dawn of the final Paprocki offspring.


I was a very cute middle child with early proclivities for looking demure,


being academic and cutting my own hair (something I put on hold until age 15 after this rookie pre-K attempt. Sorry, Mom).


I was a pretty peaceable child, very shy and into artsy crafts and books when I wasn’t playing the typical little sister.


I was also very into sweets. What else is new.


We lived in Buffalo, New York until the summer I was 7, when we moved to sunny, rural Aguanga, California


at the encouragement and with the help of my favorite Aunt Diane and Uncle Dwight (charmingly dubbed AD and UD, who here are falling in love a few years earlier in Diriyah, Saudi Arabia). They are two of the most whole and loving people in the world, and their generosity is a lot of why my life is as good as it is.


Needless to say, that was a pretty big jump for little Rachel, who was used to running around in humid green backyards in the summer and being thrown wholesale into copious Buffalonian snowbanks in the winter. This part of California lacked both. But, ranch life had some definite benefits, including but not limited to big sky sunsets


and horses (Nick and Jed) who considered our swimming pool a perfectly acceptable drinking trough.


I learned how to ride those horses (maybe not as well as AD and UD may have liked, but at least I was decent at mucking out stalls, for a little skinny kid) and run around outside constantly. I was therefore super tan for a long time, which led church ladies to ask if I was adopted whenever I stood next to my bright blond siblings.

So, we lived on the front hill of Aunt Diane and Uncle Dwight’s 11-acre parcel of land, which was full of mustard and sage brush. Very pretty-but-not-on-purpose herbal. So, I had some birthdays and things,


(yes, that is a mouse/cheese motif birthday cake. AWESOME) and I grew up there. So did my brother and sister (their birthday cakes were less mousey). The three of us went to a tiny rural public school, and we all read a lot and won too many of those honor roll-good student awards. We wore a lot of mucker boots and crispy blue jeans. Very cool. Anyway, Aguanga was hot and dusty but very beautiful, and besides for hanging out in the pepper trees/grape vines I always had distractions like reading and sewing and knitting (look at the iron concentration on my face)


to keep me busy inside. You know, normal active 9-year-old things. Honestly I was (am) a huge nerd—totally the teacher’s pet and the kind that gets teased for it because I didn’t know how not to be. So that sucked. But I was (am) kind of a dreamer child, and we all spent a lot of time doing club things through church, so there was a little outlet there. Not that I didn’t have friends! I did, I swear, and we had our fair share of adventures. Anyway, I always, always loved reading and drawing and I wanted to be a teacher or a writer or something bookish.

I feel like this is a good stopping point for now, about halfway through the skim-milk version of my life up to today. And by skim-milk, I mean there are little nuances of things you don’t blog about, but skim milk will still give you a general idea of what baby cows experience, if that makes sense. In any case, we’ll return to the rest of my thrilling life at a date in the near future!

Until the next tea,
Rach