Holly asks about My Earliest Memory

We lived in an apartment that used to be the woodshed on the back of the farmhouse. Wooden steps, painted a minty green, descended from the sunporch on the second floor down the outside of the house to the patio below.

The patio was paved with large rectangles of flat concrete stones. Between each stone little weeds fought to push their way up and under the steps my mom’s mint patch flourished.

It was the sun. I remember the feeling of the sun soaking into my skin, and being aware that I was there under that bright sun and it was warm and I loved it. I looked down at my striped T shirt. It was sleeveless. It was the first time that I was aware very strongly that I had a place in the world. I must have been about three.

Across the strip of gravel, my dad was working in his shop. I have more memories of playing with bondo shavings on the gravel outside the shop, making bondo shaving pizzas with an old grinding wheel for a crust. I remember using an old truck frame as a monkey bars and scraping my knee very badly. I remember my mom vacuuming the wood floor in our apartment and the blue and yellow tiled floor in Grandma’s big house farmhouse kitchen on the other side of the entrance way. I remember my baby sister’s huge dark brown eyes and the little yellow stuffed puppy that we played with.

I remember Star’s red body and her black legs, and that one white fetlock. I remember my Daddy boosting me onto Star’s back where I hung onto her black mane for dear life and loved every second of it.

But before all of that, I remember that hot day in the summer, in my striped T shirt, with the sun beating down on me and juicy tough weeds poking out between the slabs of concrete. I was being watched. My father was in the shop, my mother most likely hanging laundry on the washline up in the sun porch. They knew exactly where I was and what I was doing, but I didn’t know that at the time. I thought I was totally free. I was busy soaking up the sun.