Okay, so I am taking these in approximately first-come first-served order.

Veronica of Toddled Dredge asks about my earliest childhood memory.

I have a couple that seem to compete for prominence when I try to look back in time.  Most are just snatches of pictures, but I think my very earliest, if I try to estimate from context, would have to be from when I was under two and a half.   I am in a crib or playpen of some kind looking out, and my mom is mopping the floor.  I know I must have been under three at the time, because the floor is the black and white square linoleum of our house on Penrose St., that my parents lived in when they were still married, and I don’t remember my brother being there.  The TV is playing “Romper Room” in black and white behind her.  It is the only recollection I have of the time when my parents were still married, but I never see my Dad in the picture at all.  They divorced before I was three. 

I have two other vivid memories from when I was very young.  Both involved my brother during probably the last time we were ever considered “close”.   My mother left my father just before my brother was born, and after his birth, we lived with my grandmother, while my mom worked nights at Xerox corporation to support us.  My little brother slept in a crib in my room, and if he cried in the early morning hours my mom was too sleepy to hear him from her room (she slept in the unheated “Florida” room off the back of the house).  So, at three years old, I would climb up into his crib and lie down and hold him to help him stop crying.  I remember the green paint on the walls of the room, and the old bureau of drawers in that 1950’s shade of honey pine, and the little cross on the wall above my brother’s crib, and the ever-present smells of Lysol and bleach and Murphy’s Oil Soap.  It was the same room my father tried to steal me out of during the ugliness of their divorce. The same little bed with the white chenille bedspread that I burrowed into and hid under the covers as he fought with my grandfather in the door, and there was yelling and the baby was crying and the police came and took my Dad away.  But I put my hands over my ears and pulled the covers down tight until the noise stopped and everyone went away.

This isn’t the only memory of that early time that involved emergency calls.  Once, when I was crawling up into my brother’s crib, I fell flat onto my back on the floor and could not move a muscle.  I remember crying, and my mom and grandmother running in the room and telling me to get up off the floor and I couldn’t.  I couldn’t even turn my head.  Then the ambulance men came and they put me on a backboard and carried me out to the ambulance.  I remember seeing my feet in my blanket sleepers – white with red stripes.  That’s all I remember.  My mom tells me that by the time we got to the hospital, I was able to move again just fine, and they never did figure out what happened to me, and why I couldn’t move. 

I look back and wonder why, of my earliest memories, I don’t remember more of the good times.  But I don’t.  I like to think it’s because they were mostly good, and all the light, quiet days run together in memory.  It’s only the anomalies that stand out.