From Rudy Wiebe’s memoir Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest (Knopf Canada, 2006; Vintage Canada, 2007):
“My first memory: water arcing and the length of Liz’s small leg scalded; which is not as dreadful as Abe’s throat, but why are the rafters there? Why would we bathe upstairs in the sleeping loft? Where is Mary? The extremely hot, very heavy kettle would have had to be hoisted up the ladder stairs you needed two hands to clutch and climb — hoisted somehow by Helen who was always sickly, never strong? This should have happened in our lean-to kitchen, as usual, beside the woodstove where Mary would simply swing the kettle around by its handle, off the firebox and tilt it over the washtub.
But in this, the first undeniable memory of my life, nothing is more fixed than that low, open jaw of roof rafters and three of us screaming. Childhood can only remain what you have not forgotten.”
Your Pages . . .
1. Write about your “first undeniable memory.”
2. Describe an accident or injury that happened to someone else — a sibling, a friend — as you recall it.
3. Write about an early memory that has never quite made sense to you, one with missing pieces or fuzzy edges. (A former student of mine called these “memory shadows.”) Leave the draft for a few days, then come back to it and see if you can layer in more details that render the memory clearer.