She considered this question for a while, wondering how memories are worn and reshaped by the eternal tides and their sands of time. Finally, after trawling through unpleasant childhood memories of living on the farm, she realised that life had not started out there and she was able to put some order to events.
She remembered laundry.
She remembered sitting in the garden of the pretty white bungalow watching her mother hang out laundry on the line. A friendly young neighbour called Elaine talking and giggling over the garden wall with her mother, who was surprisingly kind and fun in this memory. White bedsheets billowing in the breeze attached by wooden pegs to a length of blue plastic wire. Was she sitting in the washing basket? She thought so. Playing with the spare pegs. Greyish green lawn grass poking through the holes and a backdrop of greyish white skies.
She remembered having fun with her brother climbing into the washing baskets. She clearly remembered him getting into the tall blue one that was too big for her and him pulling the woven blue plastic lid down and pretending nobody could see him, which she had found hilarious. She sat in the little white tubby one with the squarer holes. He stood up and popped his head up with the lid on it and stared at her over the rim every so often. They giggled.
Bizarre to think back on this because it is a happy memory with feelings of lightness and cleanliness and fun. This made her begin to wonder if this might have been before her father’s accident. Maybe they had been a happy family at first.
Nobody had ever spoken to her about the accident so even in adult life she was unsure whether it had happened before or after she was born. She guessed it would be a neat explanation for all the awful memories she had of times after this laundry memory. If the accident had happened after this, maybe when she was two or three years old, her parents must have been traumatised for the rest of their lives by it all she guessed. Maybe that was why they acted the way they did.
She remembered seeing a photograph of her youthful father with both thumbs in his ears waving his fingers out and making a funny face at the camera with two young children giggling. She had never known whether those children were her and her brother because nobody ever talked about anything in her family. It’s difficult to recognise yourself as a toddler. Again, she thought maybe it was her as a baby and that might indicate it was before her father had lost his left arm and indeed lost the ability to make a daft waving face at a camera and perhaps even the ability to smile and enjoy being with his children.
She was quite shocked by this memory but it was a time when she remembered being happy as a child. Whether it was distorted by 48 years or so of storms or not, it evoked feelings of calm and peace which she never thought would happen when she was asked to recall her childhood.
That gave her a sense of hope.
Warrior Soul 