This was our first writing prompt in my Creative Nonfiction Workshop. We have been reading about memory in Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, our text. I like what's coming to mind lately regarding memory and how I can take a subject and trace it through the years. This is unfinished, but I wanted to share and get any thoughts, if there are any.
Again, I appreciate each of you, sweet readers. And I always welcome an argument or compliment if you have either ;) And even more wonderful, a conversation (which is what "argument" nearly means to me anyway). What is your earliest memory?
What does it take for a memory to qualify as one’s first memory? I hardly feel like some of the dazzling fragments I remember would pass. This feels incomplete, as most memory actually is, but I want to tell it anyway because I believe I can place myself inside a home from my early childhood. There are bits and pieces in my mind of my Granny’s old home on Thompson Street in Oak Hill where my mother and I lived with her for awhile when I was a toddler.
I had a playroom off the kitchen at the rear of the house that served as my personal heaven, where I played with my See-N-Say and red and blue shape-sorter before I placed them in my Strawberry Shortcake toy box constructed of what felt like particle board. In fact, the whole house seems heavenly in my memory. Why wouldn’t it when I was the first grandchild of the family living with her Granny? She took a ton of pictures, but I don’t recognize this particular home in many of them, so I can assume these memories are genuine as they can be when resurrected from the deep recesses of my mind.
I felt loved and safe in the home on Thompson Street. I was always surrounded by people who adored me, which is something I still long for today. My mother, Granny, and my aunts never minded when I slid my body down to their laps and silently begged for a good back-tickling. Granny was always ready with a grilled cheese sandwich and pickles.
The house was large compared with the apartments and trailers I had been used to and those I lived in afterwards. There was a piano in the living room and saloon-style doors leading to the hall. Someone used to play bass notes on the piano while another person sauntered comically down the stairs or through the saloon doors. This reminds me of a wolf for some reason. Maybe they were acting out a scene from a cartoon.
In one of the bedrooms I busted my head on a wooden potty chair and went to the hospital for my first of three sets of stitches in my face. The second set occurred years later on a curb outside that very house when I fell from my older friend’s too-large bicycle. I don’t remember the first set of stitches or that particular bedroom. I do remember a small bedroom upstairs where I slept on my bed under a bottomless Smurf tent made of plastic and vinyl. The only other bedroom I recall was my uncle’s because it was the strange space belonging to of a young man. It was dark and intriguing. It had a sloped ceiling and a dart board and other things I wasn’t allowed to touch.
The front sitting room had a picture window where I could see the tree in the front yard which boasted a rickety tree house I was also not allowed to explore. I associated most of the things I wasn’t allowed to touch with my uncle, so this was his tree house also. The backyard had a clothes line that looked like antennae and pebbles that I was delighted to explore while the adults did laundry.
I deduced that these were some of my earliest memories that seemed my own after trying for days to think of one particular time or event that happened earliest of those I recall. Even today when I go to Oak Hill I try to drive past the house when it’s convenient. Although I’m not even sure how long I lived there (and I’m sure it wasn’t long), I have just realized that was definitely the very first place I can call home.