Chapter 1. The Introduction
Ours was a wonderful childhood, a childhood spent at sea. My sister AppleBloom, my brother Big Mac, and I AppleJack. grew up aboard the Sweet Apple Express, a four masted sailing bark that carried cargo all over the world. Our father was the ship's captain; the ship was our home. Only when the cargo was coal, which is highly inflammable, did we have to live ashore in ponyville on Sweet Apple Acres.
The Sweet Apple Express had bedrooms, a bathroom, and a pink marble fireplace and a dining room with a big round table. There was a kitchen called the galley, and a storage room full of everything we needed.
Unlike most homes, ours didn't stay put. At night, the ship kept moving, so every morning, we woke up far away from where we'd gone to sleep.
It often seemed as if we lived on a farm, not a ship. Roosters crowed, hens clucked, and ducks quacked. Mother raised them all in neat pens below deck, so we'd have fresh meat and eggs to add to the ship's food supply. Big Mac and I collected the eggs.
We all took turns caring for our pets as we traveled around the world. There was, Daisy the dog, and a cat named Precious. We had a pheonix, a gator, all kinds of pets.
The day the gator accidentally jumped overboard we screamed for help. The crew quickly lowered a life boat and rescued it.
Our cat wasn't so lucky. She fell into a pot of hot tar the men were using to repair the ship's deck. Kitty died. We had a real live funeral for her, and a dignified burial at sea.
Instead of a backyard, or a playground, we had a great wooden deck where we played tag, hide-and-seek, and catch, always with beanbags though. We swung on rope swings, and after our baby brother, Carmel was born, we took turns wheeling him in a baby buggy.
