“I can’t recall much from when I was little.” -Briana Loewinsohn, Ephemera

                I’m not sure how much I can recall from when I was little. I remember being surprised when the tadpoles changed, and never being able to catch the moment when tadpoles grew legs and became frogs. They were boring until that moment when they’d already been marvelous. I remember walking along a steep creek with my parents and older brother. I usually didn’t like hiking the way my parents did, but the creek’s little waterfalls and pools conjured worlds of tiny towns with pebble sized houses next to the water. Fairy houses, my mom might’ve called them. They made me into something of a giant, or maybe a cloud, drifting by and curious and half real to them as they were half real to me, and usually I was little (am I six, in this memory? Seven?). And as a child I knew there was a poetry to size and scale, to how we imagine ourselves as bigger or smaller, casting shadows over tadpoles as we stand in a tree’s dappled shade.
                Loewinsohn’s memoir plays back and forth through time. After pieces of her sometimes fraught relationship with her mother, we get a page of her as a child lying next to her mom. On the next two-page spread, we see Loewinsohn-as-an-adult lying on Loewinsohn-as-a-child’s other side. The three share the space: a woman, a child, a woman who is also the child. Reading, I’m struck by how so many of my words for the past pretend I’m attempting to re-create something. To recall my childhood. To remember. I’m struck by how time plays both ways, the kid I was sitting here looking over my shoulder, curious about the words I’m typing (and wanting to go find some tadpoles, wanting to see the magic, though a little in love with missing it and so knowing it’s somehow washing beneath the surface). And the adult I was (before I sat here as a kid again) looks at the kid, a little wistful, a little confused and a little kind about the kid’s big thoughts and confusions. We take care of our many selves through time, don’t we? The child points out squirrels looking at me. The adult shares it’s okay that you’re scared. And not just our selves, but our communities. We lie down in the grass together. It’s more a washing together than a recreating: I might not recall much, but I’m calling so much from when I was little, and so much from when I was little is calling me.