I’m the only one who tells it: the sun is practically sideways, and a couple, having eaten supper, walks by our house. The man looks up at our second-story window and says, “What a cute little girl.”

Ford, a toddler three and a half years younger than I, has toddled to the window. The sun shines on all of his yellow curls.

I’m in the front yard. “That’s not a girl,” I tell the couple. “That’s Ford the boy.”

Not from a photograph, not a tale told by a parent: I remember it myself.

I like those unassisted memories best. I don’t have many of them. Most of my childhood, like most of most everyone else’s childhood, is mist. Puberty’s mental and physiological changes make it “impossible to ‘remember’ the consciousness of childhood,” Benedict Anderson points out in his book Imagined Communities, which I just finished.

How can a high school senior write about herself with authority? Eighteen years of life is a long time, but the first twelve years of it are largely locked behind childhood’s door. What does it mean, and what is it like, to write a college essay?

Sometimes I think I remember, in one of my mom’s albums, a shot of Ford as a little kid at a window. I’m not looking for it.

[Photo by Peter Miller. Used by permission under a Creative Commons license.]