Tuesday, July 12, 2011

What's your oldest memory?

I love photographs. I often look at pictures I've seen again and again. Sometimes I look at pictures of myself as a kid and don't recognize the little me. I don't have too many pictures from my childhood and no video at all. But I like it that way. I sit back and think about what I was like, what the people around me were like, what we used to do.... a vague memory here, a tiny mental image there and my Mom's and Dad's aging recollections to fill some missing pieces.....

I thought long and hard about what my oldest memory might be and I think it's this. I might have been about three years old. I have a very vague image - my brother and I playing in what might be a living room with long white curtains. He's on the floor like a horse and I'm on top of him and we're singing something and riding around the room. I also remember looking out at the gates to our house from the windows as we were playing - there were 3 white arches for gates in that house of ours (which matches up to the pictures we have of that house). That's it. I'm not sure whether this has been ingrained in my mind as my oldest memory perhaps because my brother told me about the games we used to play as kids some years later or whether some part of my brain still stores images from my childhood and I'm able to access it once in a while. But it's interesting to dig.