My earliest memory is (Mom told me my age) when I was 2 1/2 years old. I can picture looking down on a road, with really tiny houses. It looked like a miniature, make-believe place. Mom said she found it difficult to remember me sitting at all for that final time back to Canada.

At some point on the trip I guess I had been so bad that the stewardess up-graded us to First Class to get me away from the other passages. First Class only had a group of business men flying back up to Toronto for a conference. Mom says I hung over the seat pretty much the whole trip and entertained them with my witty “repartee”. At 2 1/2 what could I possibly have had to say. AHA…Mom says I was walking and talking by 1 yrs old and many a day found her in tears I guess on the front/back step of our trailer in the tobacco region of North Carolina.

Marrying my Dad had meant a few stark changes in Mom’s life. A move to North Carolina, of course. As well as beer joints, trailer park living and Carolina barbecue. The first two were some of the many reasons we were on that plane to begin with going home. Well, she was, I had been born in Greenville NC and to me we were LEAVING home and Dad. I guess that’s why its my first memory.

A couple of days after Mom died I was at home and going through the photos we had in this cabinet that sat in the Living Room and I came across a letter. It was written in pen on this very fine, tissue like paper. It was dated from that time, 1970, late in the year. It was a letter of a confused & scared 23-year-old girl to her stupid young husband. I hadn’t known this Mom. This unsure young girl with a young baby who didn’t know what to think, who was telling this boy she loved him and why was he acting so. Her words were awkward and her heart was broken.

Well, so Dad came around, and he came up after us — 6 months or so later mind you. Guess he needed to get his head straightened up. At 24 it was hard to all of sudden grow up and become a man. Dad says that Mom saved his life.

That memory is my very first. I can picture the miniature streets and houses, I remember the shape of the plane window. I think maybe I had finally settled down and had been sleeping. Mom said she didn’t recall me sleeping. Though I suppose for her the whole thing was a blur. She always said her memory was of how kind the stewardess were, and how taken they were with me — she would always add jokingly when she’d tell the story,  “here then, take her home with you”.

This post is part of the Daily Prompt