Story Topic: My Earliest Memory

It isn't actually a topic for anything school-related, but my story would do well if it was. It's a cute one.

I'm two years old. Two years and a month, if you're looking for precision (although a post about distant memories is probably the wrong place to look). Christmas morning (OK, two years and a month less a day. There, you have my birthday now) at my grandparents', and I wake up and I go downstairs. All alone -- no one else is awake. I think. It's hard to remember everything.

Anyway, the first thing we used to do when we woke up on Christmas morning at my grandparents' was check the stockings lined up at the base of the stairs. That's not what I do, though...I guess tradition means little to a two-year-old. I head for the tree. It's illuminated in bubble lights and little coloured bulbs, with the softly lit pastel angel on top and all the family ornaments -- the silver one that sings, the snoopy bell, the ancient and brittle ones, Uncle Andrew's notorious orange Miss Wooster Christmas tree ornament.

Yet in my mind, the light is dim. It's strange how this, probably my oldest memory, seems to take on a strange, diluted tint in my mind's eye -- almost like sepia photographs. Yet the lights are on, the tree is clearly green, and under it...

...there is a bear.

A white polar bear, taller than I am, although he's sitting down, the hint of a smile playing about his lips. The entire world centres itself around him, focuses on the bear; he is the subject of the painting and the epitome of a moment that seems to last forever.

That's all. The bear was christened, rather appropriately, Big Bear. He would become one of the ruling elders of the growing society of Malcolm animals, and one of my dearest friends. Today he sits, a little dirty around the face and on the paws, beside the door leading into my sister's bedroom. Expect him to turn up again someday; Big Bear has a tendency to do so.

Slog on!