I am just going to skip ahead to the Vassar days, as that is where my earliest memories truly are. We lived in a little house on Shirley Street in Vassar. Vassar is a small town, still a small town, in Tuscola County. The nearest big city, the city with "the mall", was Saginaw where Grandma and Grandpa Rice lived. My father's two sisters, Aunt Joanie and Aunt Sue, also lived in Saginaw or just outside in Saginaw Township. Much of my mother's family was also still in the Saginaw area, though Grandma and Papa Pieschke lived in Florida and both my mom's sisters, Aunt Jan (Florida) and Aunt Debbie (Missouri) lived out of state.
Where we lived in Vassar was at the edge of development. I say this because my earliest memories involve sitting out in the sandbox next to these open fields of nothing, land just waiting for some cookie-cutter houses, or walking down the street with hardly any traffic coming by. I really do remember walking down Shirley Street alone, and I could not have been more than three years old. (My times have changed, haven't they? To be fair to my parents, I am sure that for the most part, they were outside too, keeping a casual eye on me. In fact, I do recall one time getting into trouble for wandering away even though I was in the undeveloped lot kind of caddy-corner to where we lived.)
My brother B.J. (Robert L. Rice, III) was born when we lived in Vassar, May 16, 1977. I have a memory of him as an infant, probably not long after they brought him back from the hospital. My mother was nursing him in her bedroom, and I made the comment that he was "licking frosting from her cupcakes". Breasts were "cupcakes" to two-year-old Benjamin. Now I know that story was probably told to others a dozen different times while I listened, so there is the possibility that I created this memory, except that I can still see the bedroom and the way the light came in through the window. I can remember the little rocking chair my mother sat in. I know my earliest memories came from before I turned three years old. We moved to Frankenmuth shortly before my fourth birthday.