memories

Those pictures brought back a lot of memories, which made me try to think back to my first memory, which is from when I was about one and a half, and I know it's accurate and not pieced together from things my parents said, because both of my parents had totally forgotten about the event until I mentioned it. My parents and I were going to the pool, and I was really excited because Dad almost never went. We were getting ready, and 'Lady D'Arbanville' (by Cat Stevens) was playing, when I turn the corner and run into Woodson coming down the stairs with my red sand-bucket on his head. And I remember thinking it was the funniest thing ever, and for the next week, when my parents wanted to get me to laugh, they'd put a bucket on their heads, but it wouldn't work if I was mad, because if I was determined to get something, no amount of bucket-on-head was going to distract me from it. 

I also have a memory from my second birthday of my mom taking a picture of me by a bush in Uncle Dale's front yard, because we had one from my first birthday, and she wanted to have one in the same spot to see how much I'd grown etc. And I remember being grumpy because she wouldn't let me wear the dress I wanted to wear because I wanted to wear a winter dress and it wasn't cold enough outside. We still have that picture, I think it's somewhere in my Aunt Amy's attic, with all the other pictures we have of Little Layli. 

And somewhere between those two memories, I have a vague memory of shopping for my grandmother's coffin with my mother. 

Anyhow, this sort of ties in with Brynne's post about memories. I thought it was natural that I can remember things from before I was three, but apparently not. That's me, an unnatural beastie with weird, morbid memories. The strangest thing about the coffin-memory (as I call it in my head) is that on some level, I knew exactly what was going on and why everything felt heavy and depressing.