Do you remember...

My earliest memory was around 17 months of age.
The only reason I know this (Yes, I was cute and smart, but could not read a calendar at that time) is that my mom tells me we moved out of the house I remember when I was 18 months old.

We lived in a tiny house behind City Market in Montrose, Colorado.

For some reason, I was afraid of the small man who drove the garbage truck. I don't know why, and don't recall seeing him before he showed up in my dream, but I remember that is who he was.

He was a short guy who wore white jeans and a white, short-sleeved button down shirt. A stub of unlit cigar always protruded from his mouth, and he had a scary deep laugh... it sounded like he was gargling gravel.

Don't ask me how I remember these things, but my mom corroborates every bit of this.

I was born in December of 1960, a year and four months after my parents were married. Like most newlyweds/young parents, my mom and dad didn't have a lot of money, and made do with second hand furniture or went without a lot of things when necessary.

We had a sofa that was missing a leg. This was a rose-colored piece of furniture with no arms. It sat on long, tapered wooden legs, about ten inches off the floor.

The left front leg wasn't wood. It was a Coca Cola bottle.

One early summer morning (I know it must have been summer because I slept in my crib just outside my parents' bedroom door in the front room, and the front door was open, but the screen closed. I remember the early morning light coming through it.) I had a nightmare.

I dreamed that the garbage man was sitting on our couch, laughing. He was holding a burlap sack, chomping on his cigar, and trying to pull the bottle out from under the couch to put it in his sack and take it away!

I don't remember if I cried, but I was afraid and I climbed out of my crib to go to my mom.

I can recall looking down at my bare legs (past the little kimono-wrap t shirt I was wearing... I can even see the snaps on it) and hearing the crackle of my rubber pants. I can remember the feel of my wet diaper (it was so cold!) and I can see the outline of the diaper pins through the plastic. (The diaper pins had little yellow ducks on them.)

I remember grasping the top rail of the crib and climbing over it. I can remember standing on the outside of the crib, toes on the edge of the mattress and slowly lowering my legs to almost the floor... then letting go when I was just an inch or two above the boards. (Hardwood floors... another accurate detail.)

I remember going into my parents' room and my mom asking me, "Did you have a bad dream, Honey?" and her picking me up and putting me in the bed between them.

That's where the memory ends.

The next memory I have was at about age three. I had received a children's baking set for Christmas, complete with a fortune cookie recipe and little fortunes to bake into the cookies.

I remember sitting on the kitchen counter, legs dangling over the edge while my parents and I went through the items in the set, and how they laughed as they read the fortune, "Help! I am being held prisoner in a cookie factory!"

I didn't understand why it was funny at three, but I wrote a slightly changed variation of it inside MANY candy boxes when I worked for Russell Stover Candy in Montrose about 17 years later. Because of course by then, I'd figured out the joke.

:)

So what's your earliest memory?