My earliest memories are a jumble of three images. One was me, crying in my crib, angry at an imposed curfew but otherwise, just darkness, and a semi-out of body experience where I imagine seeing myself, howling into the night, raging against sleep, and eventually…succumbing.
The second earliest memory is of a car crash. Truck crash, specifically. I remember in great detail and environmental awareness of the moments beginning with me looking out a window in the Ford pickup being driven by my mother down the highway, and then crawling around on the upside-down-overturned truck cabin roof, avoiding the pebble-like broken safety glass that was everywhere, and crawling out onto the highway to the waiting arms of my mother who had, until that moment, assumed I had been crushed under the truck or thrown free of the wreck into a fence somewhere.
The third is much more green. Running back and forth around the back yard of my grandparent’s lawn in Fort St. John at the age of…well, I was at the oldest four years olf. I remember the feeling of the sloped lawn under my feet as I ran from the house to the small drainage ditch that broke the lawn up into a hill and an island when it rained. I remember the smell of peas and ruhbarb and the taste of fresh carrots straight from the earth and the plesant cold sting of icey cold water right from the garden hose. I remember countless times over countless years of that same backyard, and the layout of the home attached to it. My Grandparents home. With a simple one-story design, with a caveronous, adventure-sparking cellar underneith known only as the “Mole Hole” in which treasures like pickled carrots and mushroom soup lay dormant and pensive upon a noble and brave soul’s journey down the home-made rickety steps.
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