What is your earliest memory?
It is a question that gently returns from time to time. I have asked myself this often, sometimes in moments of silence, during long drives, or late at night when thoughts tend to wander backwards. I try to reach as far back as I could, searching for that first flicker of consciousness.
Over the years, I’ve remembered many things. Faded scenes, disjointed flashes of childhood. Some warm, some odd, others felt like shadows I could never quite name. But there is one distant, grainy, yet distinct image that has stayed with me.
I am a toddler, seated on someone’s lap, riding on the side seat of a tractor. A teenager is driving it. There are others on board too; perhaps cousins or two, an uncle. I cannot recall most faces, but the feeling of that moment has stayed. There was sun going down, its golden rays filtering through distant eucalyptus trees, air moist from the freshly watered fields, a dirt road, the low growl of the engine, and the colour of the tractor. It looked like a dull red, pinker, faded like a shirt left too long in the sun.
For a long time, I was not sure if this memory was real.
I always thought that perhaps it was a made-up one, quietly born from the childhood stories my mother told me, or bits and pieces from cousins sharing their own adventures. It felt so distant and dreamlike that I never thought to ask anyone if it had really happened.
Then, in May of 2025, my mother passed away.
The family gathered at my father’s home. It was a house that had once been full of voices, clatter, and shared meals full of history and stories, now quieter than before.
Grief, strangely, creates its own kind of intimacy. We talked late into the nights, sharing stories about her, remembering her life, the joint family days, the sacrifices we had not seen then but understand now. And maybe it was the comfort of shared loss, or maybe the sudden silence left behind by her absence, but that old memory resurfaced.
Just like an afterthought, I asked my father, “Did we ever have a tractor?”
He looked a little surprised. “Yes,” he said. “But that was long ago. Probably before you were born.”
“I remember it,” I said quietly. “It was kind of light red. Almost pink.”
My uncle, my father’s younger brother, who had been listening, turned toward me and asked me to describe it. I told him what I remembered. The size. The way it looked. That faded red paint.
He nodded slowly. “That was the one. We sold it when your grandfather separated from his brother. We divided the property, land, the house. You must have been just about three.”
Just about three. And yet somehow, that moment had stayed with me all this time. A memory I had always doubted turned out to be true.
And then another memory that came back to me. An image of a camel, tied to a wooden stake in our cattle yard, ruminating nonchalantly. I had always thought this too was imagined. It felt like something out of an old village tale.
“Did we ever have a camel?” I asked my father, half-laughing.
“Yes,” my father said, amused at my surprise. “We used it to till the land.”
I sat there quietly, letting that sink in. That memory was perhaps even older than the tractor. I must have been barely walking then.
It amazed me that these memories, stored so deep and unspoken for so long, had survived. They lingered in the body, in the senses, in the soft folds of childhood where everything is absorbed, the sounds, smells, feelings, even before we know what they mean. They were small pieces of our family history. A past I had lived through without understanding at the time.
And in that moment, alongside the joy of remembering, came a quiet ache.
I realised that so many other memories might never be confirmed now. The one person who would have remembered them the way I did, who could have smiled knowingly, filled in the gaps and added the warmth of detail, was no longer here.
My mother.
How many more such stories will remain unconfirmed now that she is gone? How many memories will remain floating in that limbo between imagined and true, simply because I did not ask her when I had the chance?
That is a kind of grief no one prepares you for.
Not just the absence of the person, but the absence of answers. The unasked questions that now hang in the air like tethered balloons still full, but with nowhere to land.
The tiny stories that might forever remain untold.
The first time I spoke.
The day I first ran across the yard.
The lullabies she sang to me that I no longer remember but know I once loved.
We go through life assuming we will ask someday. That we will sit down one afternoon and gather it all, like picking cotton from plants before winter. That there will be time.
But that moment never comes quite the way we think it will.
Grief teaches you that time is a trickster. And memory, no matter how vivid, is delicate.
Those memories of the faded tractor and the indifferent camel, feel like relics. Not just of my childhood, but of my mother’s life too. They are about belonging. About being rooted in a place, in a family, in a time. Of a world I knew, but only as a child looking up.
Maybe that is what memories really are. Not just stories from the past, but threads. Threads that keep us connected to the people we love.
Even when they are no longer here.
They live on, in what we remember.
And in everything we still wish we had asked.
Thoughts on this story?
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