Back home from home, and a 6 word memoir

I am just back from a trip down to my parents' house in Arlington, VA, and find that I've been tagged with a meme by Cheryl Rainfield:

1. Write a six-word memoir.
2. Post it to your blog including a visual illustration if you would like.
3. Link to the person who tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere.
4. Tag 5 more blogs with links.
5. Don’t forget to leave a comment in the tagged blogs with an invitation to play.

This is rather a timely meme for me, because my mother asked my sisters and me to clean out the attic, which we did yesterday morning, while she was out of the house, and I found a box of my old journals from college and grad school. They were rather melancholic ("I wish I were dead"), which I think is simply a reflection of my age (young) and my youthful tendency to write when less than sober, but still, reading it all made me appreciate very much the place I am in now.

So, Memoir 1 -- "Sentimental"

"Happy, then lonely, now very happy."

Finding that too cloying, I moved in the opposite direction with Memoir 2 -- "Bitter"

"Past years, weeding. This year, weeding." (actually, I like weeding).

So here is my final attempt-- "Realistic"

"Not now. Go away. I'm reading."

My journals can easily be put away in my trunk here in my own home, but I'm not sure that my mother envisioned all the Nancy Drews (lots and lots), the complete Black Stallion series, and many more of that ilk, all taken down from the attic, unpacked and shelved in my grandfather's old room. This was made possible in part by putting some of his American history books carefully in stacks in the closet (they are rather nice books, and if one our children were to become a historian, it would be a shame if they had to buy them all over again). We put my mother's own stash of childhood books (mostly in French, so of little immediate use to any of her grandchildren) in a tidy pile on her chest of drawers. As I said above, she wasn't home. I wonder if she has noticed yet.

The meme says I have to tag five people, but that seems excessive, especially since it's not book related. I shall just tag one person, Cloudscome at A Wrung Sponge, because I bet she'd write a good memoir, and probably post a good picture.