I have a few very early ones, and I’m not sure which is chronologically earliest.
One is me sitting on the couch – I was about three and a half, and my brother was having his diaper changed. He stood up, Mom handed him the diaper. He went to throw it away, and got his foot stuck under the refrigerator.
He had to go to the hospital and have stitches. Then there were a few more trips to the hospital for Billy – he always shoved things up his nose. Lima beans, cereal, small toys… then it’d take half the nurses in the hospital to hold him down while a doctor fished out whatever it was. Then I’d get a lollipop because I wasn’t a baby. ^_^
Another is actually a dream, from living in that same apartment. In the dream I was in the kitchen helping my father set a mouse trap. We didn’t have any real cheese so I drew a picture of cheese and put it on the mousetrap. I came back later and there was a paper mouse stuck in the trap.
And the third is my dad reading to me. A lot of my memories are of my dad and I reading together – reciting “Gunga Din” by Rudyard Kipling, or very seriously paging through “The Hobbit”. There was the odd Dr. Seuss book, too. I remember when Dr. Seuss died. I was in the first grade, I heard the ladies in the school library talking about it, and I was inconsolable the rest of the day. I’d never heard of anyone dying before, but somehow I knew it meant he was gone forever.