Carrots and cabbage leaves

I was an only child for my first five years and then my brother came along. It is very strange but I have almost no recollection of him as a baby at all. Someone would probably find some deep seated psychological issue in this. I remember one day my mother was pushing him in the stroller. She had this cashmere coat on and she reached in the pocket and pulled out a petrified piece of carrot. The last time she had worn the coat was when I was teething and she always had carrots for me to gnaw on. I remember the coat and the carrot but not my brother.

I had a music box that was blue with a red cord and you hung it around your neck. It played "pop goes the weasal" and something popped up out of the top of it. For some reason my brother whacked me in the nose with it one day. For years I blamed him for my nose being broken. It wasn't until I grew up that I realized that I had a deviated septum which had nothing whatsoever to do with that toddler tantrum.

There were some pictures of us together as children but even they don't stir any memories of us growing up. We were told that Irish children came "out from under a cabbage leaf". That was the explanation for where we came from and we believed it, at least I did anyway. One of my earliest recollections of my mother is in her bedroom. It had massive mahogany furniture with a four poster bed with pineapples on the tops and a bureau with a large mirror. My mother was not a morning person and was not to be disturbed when she was in bed. My father, on the other hand, had his bedroom on the other side of the house. It had a great big bed and not much else. Needless to say, they never shared the same bed or the same bedroom as far as we knew. So there you have it. We came out from under a cabbage leaf.