Sometimes it comes up in conversation about early early childhood memories. And my friends tell me what they were like when they were tiny. When they were themselves only not yet, seeds of becoming. And for awhile I struggled with my own memories thinking I didn't have very many at all or if I did there was no way I might access them. What's your earliest memory, people ask and I furrow my brow trying to think back to the littlest me that ever existed only nothing pops to my mind. And I wonder how people can really know what their first memory was because especially at that young age memory is hardly chronological. The further we move away from a memory the less significant time becomes in relation to it. So it strikes me that I've been going about memory all wrong. I've been trying to access it like I would an infinitely long film roll but what I've found is that memories don't fall into a long line like that. It's like every frame has been cut up and scattered on the floor. Stills from my life unarranged.

So how does one organize a room flooded with photo stills?

The first house I lived in was a red brick row house. On the front porch was a wooden swing hanging by metal links. The roof sloped to an A. My room was right at the top of the stairs. There was a little tiny blue trashcan in there. It's what my mom would cut my nails into before I learned to do it for myself. My dad had made the bookshelf in my room himself. It was just some red plastic crates held all together with bright yellow plywood.

The yellow plywood is not so yellow more. It's been decaying in our garage for the last 15 years. It's moldy and brown and it would not take any sort of karate master to punch it in half. But in the memory of my room it stands out like a sparkling new toy. Bright red and yellow in a happy and shining compliment. Like my first bike at college. A bright yellow sunshine frame. But the handlebars were wrapped in white tape. All wrong all wrong. Something to be done about that. Electric tape has that nice shiny glow to it. Does it come in red? So there I am flying down the street 14 years since I stepped foot in that remembered first bedroom on a bike the very same colors as the shelves my dad made. Why did I tape the handlebars in firetruck red? Because of an unremembered memory, a happy connotation instilled from ancient childhood?

I still can't pinpoint my very first memory but once I realized that it's better to throw time out the window and arrange via a framing mechanism, the memories came flooding back. Before I was 6 I lived in that red brick house with the roof that sloped to an A. Or maybe it wasn't brick at all. Maybe it's built entirely from memories.

more to come on this train of pondering