Poached eggs and English muffins

This morning for breakfast we had bacon and eggs, and I had an English muffin. So what?

Fresh squeezed orange juice...

When I was a little girl I spent a lot of time at my Grandma and Bill's house. We lived in Thousand Oaks, California about 30 minutes away from their home in Ventura. When I was 17 months old I went to stay with them while my brother Kirk was born. I followed Grandma around everywhere and would ape her saying, "Bill, Bill," and so my grandpa was called Bill from then on by my brother and I. My cousins called him "Grandpa" and I thought, "Huh? Who's Grandpa?"

We used to eat poached eggs and English muffins for breakfast at my grandparents' house. The house sat in a quiet cul-de-sac off of a street we always recognized by the house with the wagon wheels that we called "Wagon Wheel Road." They had orange trees in the back yard and we had fresh-squeezed orange juice in the mornings, too. On the refrigerator lived several magnets shaped like ladybugs. In the cupboards were white bowls with scalloped edges. I remember so many details about that house and my foray into English muffins this morning brought some flooding back.

My Grandma and Bill died in the early 1990s within six months of each other. Along with Bill went "Old Yeller" - a cat he, well, somehow adopted (??) after my grandma died. That was a very sad year in my life. What I remember most, though, are these memories. Snippets of memories in some cases. Sometimes when I'm feeling pensive I close my eyes and imagine myself going up the steps into the house and hearing Grandma say, "Well look who's here!" followed by an important question for Bill: "Do you really have elephants in the back yard?" I "walk" myself through the house remembering all of the rooms and all of the associated memories - dressing for the beach or to eat at the Pierpont Inn, playing with paper dolls from the chest in the living room, and watching Lawrence Welk on the bed with Grandma.

All these memories brought on by a slice of English muffin and some eggs (scrambled, not poached).