/ childhood / 

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I rarely remember my childhood as a sequence of events.

It comes back to me in separate sensations.

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I remember my grandfather, always silent. I remember his presence, that particular kind of silence beside someone who did not need to keep talking in order to be there.

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I remember the smell of carnations in my grandmother’s garden. Sometimes I think smells remember our lives better than we do.

I remember the cold window glass I would press a drawing against so I could trace it.

 

I remember the endless lengths of embroidery thread and the quiet evenings when my mother and I embroidered together, sometimes without saying a single word.

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I remember the cold metal box of filmstrips. We would take it out, choose one of the little rolls of film and settle down with my friends in the dark corridor. Images would appear on the wall, one after another and for a while an ordinary corridor stopped being a corridor.

I remember the swing I could sit on for hours, alone. Almost nothing was happening around me, and perhaps that was precisely why so much was happening: the movement forward, the movement back, the air, the silence, and that strange state of childhood when time does not yet exist.

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I remember the enormous piece of land my parents bought. It was overgrown with grass and seemed endless to me.

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Everything was bigger in childhood: rooms, trees, distances, summer. Perhaps because we ourselves were small. Or perhaps because we had not yet learned to measure the world.

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And I remember my first red patent-leather bag. I don’t know why it mattered so much to me. But something entirely new happened when I had it: for the first time, I felt like a girl. Not because someone told me I was. I saw myself that way.

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Memory does not preserve our lives whole.

It chooses a few things and leaves them inside us.

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And then many years pass and suddenly we understand: what seemed to have disappeared had been with us all along.