That I know is a memory and not just something I’ve been told, is picking my grandfather up at the hospital and bringing him home for a visit.
I know it was the summer I turned four in 1987, as I had one sister, we had a blue Volvo station wagon and not the Renault, and he died in January 1988.
My grandfather was in a wheelchair, and I can, sort of, remember how it was standing next to him whilst he was sitting in it.
I remember driving to the back of my grandparents’ house with my Dad and my grandfather. Because of the wheelchair, we couldn’t go through the front, because the house was not wheelchair accessible by any means. So, we stopped in the back, on the parking lot there, went to the back of the Volvo, and got the wheelchair out.
I know from pictures that we sat under an umbrella in the backyard, my sister on grandfather’s lap, and I think I remember that he also went into the house. (I’m not sure if the latter is actually from an earlier memory and if I have mashed them together, or if it is the same time.)
In reality, most of the earliest things I remember is from that summer I turned four, so I guess that is also when I started to become a bit more self-aware and remembered events – or simply the events I remember, this, breaking my arm… are so major I would have remembered them anyway.
What’s your earliest memory?
