First Memories

The house on Maple Street had a peculiar smell—a mixture of old wood, my grandmother’s lavender perfume, and something indefinable that I’ve never encountered since. It’s funny how scents can transport you back to a specific moment in time, more vividly than any photograph.

I must have been four, maybe five years old. The memory comes in fragments, like pieces of a broken mirror reflecting different angles of the same scene. There’s the feeling of the rough carpet beneath my bare feet, the way the afternoon light slanted through the lace curtains, creating patterns on the wall that looked like secret messages.

My grandmother sat in her rocking chair, the one with the squeaky left runner that announced her presence long before you saw her. She was knitting something—a scarf, perhaps, or one of those endless afghans that seemed to multiply in every corner of the house. The click-click-click of her needles provided a steady rhythm, a metronome marking the passage of an afternoon that felt both eternal and fleeting.

“Come here, little one,” she said, though I can’t remember if she spoke in English or in the old language that she sometimes slipped into when she thought no one was listening. Memory has a way of translating everything into the language of the present.

What I remember most clearly is the weight of her hand on my head, the way her fingers moved through my hair as she told me stories about the old country, about a world that existed before I was born, before my parents were born, a world that lived only in her words and would die with her silence.