During the month of January, I will be posting (tentatively) one post every day as part of the #bloganuary challenge
Today’s Prompt: What is the earliest memory you have?

It’s tricky to talk about memories from when you were a kid. The brain is a complex thing and memories work in a very intricate way. It’s hard to know what is a real memory or what is a memory you think you have but you have it because someone told you about it.

This can happen to adults too. I know people who swear they have vivid memories of things the they never lived. Someone told them about something and years later it becomes a memory like the person was actually there. Freud might be able to explain the process.

I’m saying all that to explain that I’m not 100% sure this is an actual memory of when I was a kid or if my parents told me about this, but in my head, it’s my own memory.

We used to live in Natal, a city in the northeast coast of Brazil when I was little. I was not born there, but my father got transferred when I was 8mo and there we went. We lived there for four years and I have a few memories of our house there. I remember laying on the hammock with my mom in the afternoon waiting for my dad to come back from work. I remember planting vine tomatoes in our backyard. The smell of vine tomatoes still takes me back to Natal and I love it.

I remember my grandparents visiting and going with my mom to the neighbour’s house across the street. They had a daughter a few years older than me.

But the weirdest memory I have is this one:

From my bedroom window I could see our next door neighbour’s roof. The street was very steep and our house was a bit above theirs and I could clearly see the big water tank on their roof. It had a stone-like coating and looked very fancy, but I used to think there was a crocodile living there. I think maybe it had to do with the fact that my favourite TV character was the Cuca which was a crocodile humanoid witch I used to love (I was a weird kid). I don’t know, All I know is that this is one of my most vivid and also one of the first memories from when I was a kid.