Today has been odd. I wish I could articulate it better. I've remembered two things that I wish I hadn't, which is a thing for me sometimes. Out of the blue, memories bubble up almost as clearly as the day I lived them, but they feel so strange and significant and thoroughly odd out of context. One of them is from two years ago and involves somebody else, so I won't talk about it, but the other is one of my earliest memories.
I remember it was in the very middle of the hottest part of summer and I was by myself in a parking lot. I was out just with my dad and my brother was too little for me to remember, at home with my mom We were checking a minnow trap in a creek by the railroad construction site. My Dad went down to the creek, but I had to stay up by the car for some reason. It was getting to be evening but not yet cool or dusky. The place was entirely deserted. I remember sitting on the curb in my little girl shorts, dry, dead grass around me, the heat wiggling the air over the asphalt. I was playing in the dust and I found a lighter. I knew what it was, but I was acutely, almost dutifully afraid of it. Even as young and barely formed as I was, I had been taught not to play with fire.
I don't know, it's not really about the ever-present potential for fire or the being afraid that stuck with me in that particular reminiscence. It was something about the feeling of my parents being very young.
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