Memories from my childhood...PT. 1?

I've seen a lot of posts lately about memories from childhood. Up until I was 15 I could not remember any of my childhood...and what I thought I remembered turned out to be a dream I may have once had. No one could validate anything I remembered and the reality that they offered me was hard to believe because it was nowhere in the memories of my mind. Its funny...most people block things out when something bad happens. I began to remember things a month after my rape. Which makes me wonder: Did something happen to me as a child so I blocked it out? and...Why did the rape bring everything back? Did it come full circle - a bad moment hides and similar (?) bad moment reveals? I am still missing huge chunks of time...but here are some of the things that I remember.

• Playing baseball with my friends in a church yard
• Sitting under a bush in the same yard eating chapstick with by best friend. (don't ask me why...but I think it was flavored?..)
• Watching a huge dog pull a turtle out of its shell while I was walking up the street to my Grandmother's house (it was a mean dog)
• Getting my first sunburn and it being so bad that my shoulders were one large mass of puss (no lie...I wish I had pictures). It came from riding in the back of a pickup truck for 4 hours in only a tanktop.
• Trying to ride the tilt-a-whirl with my sister at the carnival with nasty shoulders.
• Spending many days at Shepard of the Hills (in Branson, MO). My entire family worked there. I loved watching my dad make pork rinds during the fall festival. The owner would give me buscuits and gravy for breakfast and mashed potatoes and gravy for lunch. I remember riding around on his shoulders eating an ice cream.
• My father's big black van that only had wooden, carpet covered benches along the walls in the back.
• Finding, on different occasions, a brand new big bike and a kitten in that van.
• A wooden outbuilding beside the house that I used as a playhouse and the man across the street asking if I'd gotten my air conditioner yet.
• Playing cops and robbers with my cousin and not being able to use his guns because I was a girl.
• Playing in the leaves at my grandmothers
• My father spanking me for the first, and last time....he only ever did it once.
• Having imaginary friends...my first one was named Cheaty. I have no idea where I got the name :)
• My father teaching me how to ride a bike. It was nightime and I had just gotten the bike (from the van :) )
• Believing that a monster lived in the alley between my house and my best friend's and it would get me when I crossed the driveway to go home at night.
• My first camera was a slim 110-film black thing. It had an orange shutter button. My father gave it to me...and I used it well. A LOT of film passed through that thing :)

I'm beginning to zone out...there may be a part 2 some other time. Perhaps that is enough about me for now :)