The Stories We Carry From Childhood

There are things from childhood that you don't realize you're going to remember.

Not the big things. Those announce themselves. Birthdays, holidays, moves, losses—the moments that divide life into before and after tend to stay with us whether we ask them to or not.

I'm talking about the smaller things.

The smell of salt in the air. The sound of somebody's voice from another room. The truck parked in the yard. What you called a pair of white rubber boots that everyone else apparently had a completely different name for.

Growing up, they weren't "rain boots" to us. They were Snead's Ferry Sneakers.

They went fishing. They went offshore. They went knocking oysters. They went wherever we were going because they weren't a fashion statement—they were simply part of life.

It's funny what stays with you.

The Places That Become Part of Us

I've always loved being near the water.

Any body of water will do, really, but there's something different about saltwater. The smell of the air, the breeze, that particular feeling you get when you're close enough to know the ocean is there even before you can see it.

I don't remember deciding to love it. I just did.

Maybe that's because so much of childhood isn't something we consciously choose. We absorb it. The landscapes around us become normal. Family sayings become part of our vocabulary.

Traditions become things we don't even recognize as traditions until we're older and realize other families didn't do them.

For a long time, those things were simply life.

Now they're memories.

And the older I get, the more I realize how much those ordinary pieces of childhood shaped me.

The Photographs That Hold More Than a Moment

Lately, I've been looking through old photographs and sharing some of them on my author page.

There's one of me during my last year playing softball before we moved to Fayetteville that summer.

At first glance, they're just childhood photographs.

But I know everything outside the frame.

I know what was happening in our family. I know what had already happened and what hadn't happened yet. I know which people would eventually be gone. I know which places would change.

I know things the little girl standing in those photographs couldn't possibly have known.

That's one of the strange things about looking at childhood pictures as an adult.

You aren't only looking backward.

You're standing on both sides of the photograph at once.

You can see the child who thought that particular afternoon was simply another afternoon, while carrying everything that came afterward.

Memory Doesn't Always Keep the Important Things

Memory is strange.

Sometimes enormous stretches of time blur together, while one completely insignificant detail remains crystal clear.

I might not remember exactly what someone said on a particular day, but I can remember how a place smelled. I can remember textures. Weather. A dog. A vehicle. The feeling of walking into someone's house.

And sometimes I wonder whether those are actually the insignificant details.

Maybe they're the things that made a place feel like home.

The things that made a person feel familiar.

The things that quietly taught us who we were.

And Then They Find Their Way Into the Stories

I don't sit down to write fiction and deliberately recreate my childhood.

The Vale isn't Snead's Ferry. My fantasy characters aren't disguised versions of people I grew up with. The stories themselves belong to their own worlds.

But I would be lying if I said the places I've known don't influence the places I create.

I understand landscapes as something more than scenery because I've always felt connected to them.

I understand why water can feel comforting and powerful at the same time.

I understand how a place can hold memory.

I understand how land, weather, trees, marshes, seasons, and water can become part of someone's identity.

And when I write memoir, the connection is even clearer. Shining Through required me to revisit parts of my life that were much larger than those little childhood details. But even there, the small memories mattered. They helped put flesh back onto years that could otherwise be reduced to a timeline of things that happened.

Because our lives aren't really timelines.

They're collections of moments.

We Carry More Than We Realize

I think we all carry pieces of where we came from.

Some are beautiful.

Some are complicated.

Some make sense only after we've lived long enough to understand them.

And some are wonderfully ordinary.

A pair of white boots.

A beat-up truck.

A softball field.

A dog who happened to be standing beside you when somebody took a picture.

The smell of saltwater.

A grandmother's house.

A road you could probably still travel with your eyes closed.

Maybe that's why I've become increasingly interested in preserving these stories—not only the dramatic ones, but the ordinary ones too.

Because eventually someone looks at an old photograph and asks, Who is that? Where were you? What's the story behind this?

And there is almost always a story.

Sometimes we just don't realize we're living it yet.

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What is one completely ordinary thing from your childhood that you can still remember perfectly?

A smell, a food, a family saying, a place, a sound, an old vehicle—anything.

I'd love to hear yours.