Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Connection is what matters to me. Heart-to-hearts, learning more about your life, and finding the trust to share mine breathes life into my soul. While there is the permanent “Story of a Lifetime” series, it’s important to me to continually push myself outside my comfort zone and to seek out meaningful conversations. So, I’ll post a question-and-answer each Thursday. Doing so makes me vulnerable… and, I hope, inspires you to share. Sharing challenges despair by offering the reminder that, no matter what we’re experiencing, someone else intimately understands. Believing that brings connections. Each week, I’ll share an answer to random questions, and look forward to the conversations it may ignite.

What are some of your earliest memories?

Childhood memories are like spiders’ webs: wispy, thin, and sticky. The earliest memories are tinged with an airy of mystery because, while I am sure of the big picture, many of the details are lost to time. Yet, even without the details, they hang on, refusing to vacate completely my mind and heart. The very earliest memory I have is sleeping in the brown recliner that sat in my grandparents’ room. The recliner sat next to their bed, and in front of a small TV tray style table. There was a radio because Papa was blind, and audiobooks often played. We ran in and out of this bedroom throughout our lives: there was a sunroom off of their room that had a couch and a television. Sometimes, we slept outside in that sunroom. Sleeping in the recliner is likely a clear memory, in part, because I craved small spaces when I was little. Small spaces made me feel safe.

My great-grandmother, Mama O, was my friend. She woke me letters; she let me sit with her while she worked in her garden, I played Swat-the-Lightbulb-String with her cane, and I vividly remember her waving at me from the rickety old front porch. The tangy, bittersweet smell of her house is a distinct early memory that’s so vivid that, many years after her death, I’d walk into a random house and be struck with emotion as the smell was the same. It was December 1986 when Mama O died, and it rocked my world. My sister and I stayed with Papa and Grandmama, and I clearly remember relying on my refuge of small spaces for comfort. In the same house as the recliner, there was a window in the downstairs bedroom. I clearly remember squeezing myself into the space between the bed and the window, and watching the rain, wishing I could go to the funeral. Being unable to go affected me deeply: I still avoid funerals when I can. I wrote letters to Mama O on her birthday for years, well into middle school, and slept with a picture of her under my pillow when I feared I was forgetting details of her face. I was only six years old when she died, but Mama O reminds me to this day of how powerful our impact can be on another person…. even years after we’re gone.

Since it’s around the same time period – 1985, 1986, when I was five or six years old — I also distinctly remember playing outside in the ditch behind that same house. My sister and I would find sticks and leaves; we’d wonder into the sewage tunnel and make up elaborate make-believe games. The chain fence that separated our grandparents’ yard from the neighbor’s was not a worthy opponent; we always managed to venture into the “other world.” The lady who lived at the end of the street scared us: she had a moustache and never spoke. No matter what the story, no matter who the villain, at the end of the day, the forces of good (whose side we always served) emerged victorious.

It’s the ordinary moments that mostly stand out in my early memories, and so it’s the ordinary Magical Moments I strive to soak in now. They will become my lifeline to the past.