Saturday mornings started around seven. Not officially. Just the smell of bacon moving through the trailer like an alarm clock. Eggs. Toast. Coffee for the adults. Rice Chex for me, which is apparently weird, though Lucky Charms still entered the rotation like visiting royalty. The television already glowing. Big wooden floor model. Twist dial channels. Antenna rotor turning somewhere outside trying to catch civilization from fifty miles away. Three channels if the weather cooperated. More static than certainty. And sunlight. God, so much sunlight. Wyoming sunlight pouring through thin curtains, landing on shag carpet the color of old mustard and brown corduroy. We sat on the couch in pajamas wrapped in blankets while cold air pressed against the trailer walls. On really cold mornings we'd drag the blankets over the heating register and trap the hot air underneath us like we had invented luxury ourselves. And honestly, it worked. Bugs Bunny was already teaching me opera before I knew what opera was. The Barber of Seville. That ridiculous rabbit running circles around everybody. No wonder I ended up at the Washington National Opera and Kennedy Center someday. The path probably started there. Cartoons. Coffee. Wood stove heat. A coyote somewhere outside. Dad moving through the kitchen half awake. Mom already fully operational somehow, because mothers in the 1980s apparently never slept. Robin Hood mattered. Not because it was important. Because it felt good. That whistle song. Little John laughing. The snake getting his chops smacked for being sinister and dramatic. I loved all of it. I had the book too. Speech therapy reward. Every time I got the letters right, I got closer to the story. Funny how life works. You spend years trying to learn how to say words correctly and eventually you build an entire life out of them. We didn't stay up late much. Farm families don't. There were tractors to drive. Animals to feed. Buses to route. Schools to open. Eggs to gather. Cats to feed. Bills to survive. But Saturday mornings belonged to us and Rolly Polly. Safe. Warm. Ordinary. Which I now understand is another word for holy. Back then I thought those mornings would last forever. I think all children do. You never notice history becoming memory while it's happening. You just sit there half buried in blankets, watching sunlight hit the carpet, while a rabbit sings opera through television static in a trailer ten miles outside town. And somehow, without realizing it, your whole life begins.