Challenge: Earliest Memory

This is part of the weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. If you'd like to participate, you can find the prompts here. They also put up a post every Wednesday where you go and link your response -- and see everyone else's. Check out their homepage to find it.

The challenge for this week is "my earliest memory." 

Memory is a funny thing, not least because it's largely artificial and amazingly untrustworthy. My earliest memory isn't really a memory anymore: it's a memory of a memory. 

Specifically, it's the memory of me coming around the corner of the couch (a corner which was around the same height as my shoulder) at what I thought of at the time as "our old house." But it's not what I'd refer to as a "first-order memory" in that I no longer have the memory itself. It's a second-order memory: I remember it because when I was, I don't know, eight or nine years old, somebody asked me what my earliest memory was. That piece of motion -- coming around the corner of the couch in our old house, with no other context -- was what I remembered. At the time, it was a first-order memory; I actually remembered it. Now it's a second-order memory: I remember remembering it, but the image in my head is a reconstruction of the original.

Our old house had a section of stone floor; that's a first-order memory. A couple of times while we were living there my parents waxed the floor, and we couldn't go into that room until it... dried? Set? Got wiped back down? I'm not sure, but I remember having to walk across these wide wooden boards that were laid over the corner between between the hall that went back to our bedrooms and... I think a little atrium area that had a tree growing up through the middle of it, and out through a skylight. 

I definitely remember that atrium area. 

I remember that the house had eaves that I could somehow climb up to, maybe using the fence. I hung out on top of them a lot, not unlike a feral cat, though at this point I couldn't begin to tell you how often "a lot" was. I know that I was one of those children who climbed on everything but that's also been confirmed by my parents. 

And I know, because I do and don't remember it, that memory is a funny thing.

Challenge: My Earliest Memory

Some context for anyone coming in late: the topic is from the Weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. They have a new prompt each week (see the graphic at the first link) and on Wednesdays you can drop by their homepage to find the post where everybody puts links to their responses. You can even add your own if you like.

This week's challenge is My Earliest Memory.

Memories are strange things; they're more than shadows, less than realities. They're ghosts, and like ghosts they're unstable and prone to fading if ignored. Without something to anchor them, they deform and dissipate and sometimes disappear entirely.

There's a whole field of research related to how memory works, how memories are created (and recreated), and how they alter and are altered over time. Memories are untrustworthy, albeit with certain caveats; they may be more or less so for different people, and/or at different stages of life, and/or in regard to certain kinds of events and how they were processed afterwards, and/or because of certain kinds of trauma, mental illness, substance use/abuse, and processing issues. I'm fascinated by it, but I've barely scratched the surface of the available research on the topic.

My earliest memory isn't a memory. Not really; not anymore. It's a memory of a memory, or possibly further removed than that. There's nothing particularly special about it; it's just a memory of me walking past the corner of a couch in a particular place in a particular house. It's noteworthy only because when I was very young, maybe five or six years old, my father asked me this same question: what was the earliest thing I could remember? And that funny little scene -- was someone saying something to me at the time? I'm no longer certain -- was what came to me clearly as the farthest back my mind could reach. I remember being a five-or-six-year-old remembering a moment from when I was perhaps three.

You shouldn't trust any of this, by the way. I don't. Though the timing does match up with the period of time when we lived in that particular house, and the layout that I recall of the place. Also, some of the details that I remember about that house were later confirmed by my parents. Still... I clearly remember that as my earliest memory, and I remember recalling it clearly when I was younger. Nowadays, I couldn't tell you anything about the couch except that the armrest was about the level of my shoulder; I couldn't tell you much about the space it was in, except that it had a glass door to the back yard. And I may be conflating that with another piece of that house; memories are malleable, too.

So let me give you another memory of that house, from later on, because I'm more comfortable about -- and confident in -- this one. I remember the incident more clearly, partly because my father has told the story also (and in so doing, reinforced my own impressions; did I mention that ghosts need anchors?) and partly because, well, you'll see...

There was a tree in the back yard of that house. How tall, I'm not sure; tall by the nebulous standards of a small child, and in any case tall enough to have a branch that came out at a near-horizontal a good ways above the ground. My father hung a rope swing from the branch, and of course I swung in the swing. Then, one afternoon, I found myself looking at the ropes and decided to climb up them, so of course I did. At the top was the limb, so I climbed up onto that and stretched myself out along it.

My father came out into the yard some time later, saw me up there, and asked me if I knew how to get back down. He was very calm about it, but of course it was an alarmingly good question -- which I think is why this memory is still so clear to me. (When he tells the story, he explains about the nearly-superhuman effort he made to keep his voice calm and not frighten me, and the way he was moving forward to be under me in case I fell. I was aware of none of that.) Anyway, I thought about it for a moment and decided that in fact I did know how to get back down: it was the same way I'd come up, only backwards. So I eased myself off the limb, got my legs around the rope, and shimmied right back down.

...If you met me later in life, that story would probably not surprise you at all. And I think that's another part of why it's still a fairly clear memory: it had some drama to it, so naturally it got retold considerably more often than the one where I was a small child walking around the corner of the couch. In the process, it got reinforced, even rebuilt. My father remembers it too, and his memories of it are consistent with mine.

But you still shouldn't trust it.

Memories are funny like that.