65.

During my senior year of college, my final class for my literature degree was called Sources of the Self. We read some theory, and a great many memoirs, and we spent a lot of time discussing and writing about the nature of memory. One of our assignments was to write our earliest memory. I had two, one a very early and very partial memory. The other was a little more formed, so I chose that one. To my dismay, after I'd written it, I couldn't remember it properly anymore. I could tell the story, but I'd lost the sense of it in my body, the flavor of it. I resented that loss for years, and I was astonished at how fragile that thread could be.

Today I finished reading a graphic novel. In the final few pages, there's a frame in which the narrator is sitting on her father's lap and he's letting her steer the car while he drives. In the instant it took to absorb that image and the text that appeared with it, my memory came back to me in its visual, sensory, non-narrative fullness, for the first time in 17 years. I read the end of my book with tears in my eyes, so grateful to have this tiny, powerful event returned to me, after I'd long since forgotten any hope of knowing it again.

Memory is a strange beast, and I'm not going to unsettle it by retelling that first memory. But I'm so delighted and surprised to have it back.

53.

When you choose a Christmas tree, there are lots of things to think about. How tall is it? How fresh? What kind? Do the needles poke? Is it pitchy? Is it crooked? Is it a little mushed on one side so it will fit just right in the corner? Does it have a proper top bit? These are all very important questions. They don't matter one bit. The only way to choose your tree is by smell. When you get right in amongst it, are you suddenly transported to the pitch black middle of the night on Christmas Eve, as you and your brother sneak upstairs to look at the lumpy stockings hanging in a row? You are?

That's your tree.

40.

It's been brightly sunny and bitterly cold the last few days. I stood at my window this morning, watching the frost crystals dissolve as the heat from the radiator reached them, and I suddenly had the most vivid memory. When I was growing up, winter mornings in Vermont were very dark and very cold. My brother and I would jockey for position over the furnace vent, by far the most comfortable place to be while breakfast was cooking. It was on his side of the table, but I was older. When I stood in front of it, my long flannel nightgown would billow out, full of warm air. The thing I remembered just today is that while I stood there, warming my toes, I'd press my fingertips in a circle against the frost crystals in the windowpane to make a flower pattern. I liked the way the tiny resulting trickle of water refrosted in miniscule formations at the edge of the fingerprints. Microscopic worlds of crystals, frosted hands and warm feet and NPR on the radio and the smell of breakfast.

earliest memory.

While I'm packing, I've been going through boxes of photo albums and letters. I came across this picture, and it made me think about a very early memory. I have a memory earlier than this one, but it's so nebulous that it's barely even an image. This one has some structure to it, at least. In the way of memories, it may not have happened exactly like this, but this is how it lives in my head.

I'm about two years old (a little younger than in this picture, I think). I'm on the riding mower with one of my parents, cutting the grass in the enormous yard of the house where we lived until I was four. It's very bright and sunny, but we're going along the edge of the yard where there are trees and there's that kind of dappling light effect. The mower is loud, and I can smell cut grass and gasoline and that sharp smell of hot stone from pebbles that kick up and hit the blades. Whichever parent is driving the mower has one hand on the wheel and one arm around my middle with a hand on my belly. The yard is uneven, and it's bouncy. We come up towards a tree with a low-hanging branch and it's coming right toward my face. The hand around my waist comes up and underneath the branch and sweeps it up so that it passes over our heads, and then the arm goes back around my waist.