52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
Week 32
Prompt Youngest
Recently, my granddaughter spent some
of her summer holiday with us in Kelowna. She was away from home for
the first time. We had so many lovely moments. I found myself
wondering if she would remember this summer when she got older and
the important matters of her life take over her adult life. She is
will be 10 this October so I presume she might have some fragments of
memories of the visit.
Memory is a fickle thing. For the
first several years of life memories are not made or maybe it is not
remembered. Maybe we are too busy figuring out all those things we
need to survive in this world. As we age we find our memories become
fuzzy, exaggerated, embellished, epic, and at times forgotten.
When I was a teenager and talking to my
mom about this and that I told her about a memory I had of my younger
life. It went something like this:
The setting is a small dark and cold
house with a window over the small kitchen table. I am sitting on a
potty behind a fabric curtain that acted as a door just off of the
room I was playing in. I do not know who the women in the house was
and Mom was nowhere around. As I come out of the room there is
suddenly a women carrying an infant in her arms, all in white I
think. This women sits at the table and is drinking coffee . They
are looking at the baby now laying on the table in the sunlight of
the window over the table and talking excitedly. There is a
recollection of being carried to the baby to see its tiny fingers and
toes.
Mom blanched. She looked at me and was
gobsmacked to say the least. She told me the memory that I just
explained was the day she brought my younger sister home from the
hospital and she was picking me up at her friend's home who had been
babysitting me while she was away. She says the detail of the room
was correct.
My younger sister was born in January,
almost 22 months after me. My youngest memory was at the tender age
of 22 months old. Now it was my turn to be gobsmacked. How is this
even possible? Sometimes we think we remember things because we have
seen a photograph. However photographs in 1956 were rare in our
family and there was no photograph of this event.
This is my youngest memory in my life.
It seems unbelievable but according to mom, it really is true. As I
said before memory is a fickle thing.
Wendy
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