A Lifetime of Story Telling

I’ve always enjoyed telling stories, but yesterday I found out just how early my story telling days began. My mom just came across a few pieces of paper on which she had copied down a story I dictated to her in March of 1990 at age four. I’m not sure many people will care about this besides me, but I wanted to preserve it while I had the chance. Here it is as copied down by my loving mother:

*The Swampflower*

Rose The Unicorn Wiff Starbrite
[I’m assuming Mom thought it’d be cute to copy down “with” the way I actually said it.] By Katie Johnson

The swampflower eats all animals except those that are magical, like the white unicorn with the colorful mane and tail. It eats raccoons, crocodiles, elephants, giraffes, bunnies, mouses, people, even eagles, bears, tigers, even clowns. It eats strangers, policemans, policegirls, and toys. The heart is the unicorn’s hill to climb up. And the horse (unicorn) was Starbrite’s horse. And she was really pretty like the horse because she was magical. She had two horses to ride on, so she had a magical man called Starboy for her to marry. There was a cat named Hazel that was nice to everybody, except it screeched and scratched the swampflower. It walked a long ways away from the swampflower because she heard it was mean. When the swampflower tried to get Hazel, Hazel scratched its arm, back, and hands. She has a little collar to lick. And both horses have collars too, so it would be fair. Then the horses started liking the magical cat called Hazel. And then Starbrite was scared of the monster (swampflower) and went into the house with all the kids because the monster shook off Hazel’s magic (though she still had her collar.) Then Hazel went into Dog family’s house. Mrs. Dog didn’t bark at her because there she was, all striped black because the flower monster made her all black, and she coughed and coughed and coughed. Then she went to her comfortable bed [at?] her own house. There was a Christmas tree out in the field because Christmas was coming. And it was a green tree with fresh fresh leaves for deers to eat, but the branches looked real mad because they didn’t want anything on the grass to be green. But Mrs. Dog gave the people a ride and stopped in front of Lamb. Lamb showed them the way, and she hopped and hopped until she got real tired. Then Pig showed them that they were going the wrong way. They had just passed where they were going and didn’t know it. It was on the Island of East. Rabbit sniffed and sniffed but he didn’t know what they were doing. The people tied a rope to the animals so they could go much faster. The white horse knew the way to the gold that they were trying to find before the monster did. Horse knew a lot of ways to get there because she had a horn on her head. She never went anywhere without her horn. There were walls, and there it was hanging in a box, and she didn’t know that either. But accidently, someone had stolen it already. Then out came a piece of mail because it was a mailbox on the wall. There was a wall leading, but you couldn’t go anywhere. There was a stop sign hanging out of it. The mail said “Piece of gold – someone has stolen it. –The Swamp Plant” Then Starbrite came with her magic and it made her fly all the way there. But she tried with no magic horn or wings or anything. But she never did anything without her yellow stars so twinkly and brite. Then they started a fire right by the Swamp Plant. They started the fire away from it and blew it over there. Then the swampflower turned into a tulip, and she was never grouchy. Then their saving the world was over. The End.

I hope you enjoyed that.