Earliest Memory

Someone very dear to me asked me the other day what my earliest memory was. So I decided to write my earliest memory down here, in case I forgot later on.

When I was about four or five years old (I think the age changes but I do remember that my little sister was just starting to walk, perhaps I could have been younger, she was about fifteen months old, give or take a month or two) and my older sister and I had begged my dad to make us a tree house in our back yard. There was this huge tree and so my dad hammered in some planks to make a platform and put up a rope ladder so that my sister and I could climb up it and sit on the platform. It was pretty high up and it was great to lie up there on hot afternoons and tan or watch the clouds.

One day we had quite a few guests over and my mom was indoors busy seeing to everyone and being hostess. My sister and I decided to escape all the hum drum and so we sped along to our tree house, climbed up the ladder and lay on the platform watching all the people below coming and going.

We noticed my younger sister making her way out the house on her little wobbly legs, exploring her new found freedom. We watched in amusement as she removed her diaper, flung it over the goat's horns (we had a pet goat at the time called Lottie) and then toddled over to the roap ladder. Now our eyes had become just a little bit bigger as we watched her start to make her way up the ladder. She climbed up pretty quickly but just as she was nearing the top, one of the gentlemen standing on the other side of the garden happened to turn around and noticed the goat standing there by the tree with an outraged expression on her face, and a diaper hanging limply over her eyes! He gave a start...looked up and yelled for my mother to come and see quickly and oh! someone help the poor child before she falls!!

My little sister was quite unperturbed and finished climbing to the top of the ladder, wriggled over the top and then turned and lay on her stomach and the three of us then watched with amusement the following proceedings.
All the guests had come running out of the house and were now standing in our back yard, looking up at the tree.
My mother came out through the door and saw the goat standing there, still looking very hard done by and she smiled! She looked up at the tree and saw three little faces peering down at her and then she began to laugh. I mean....it was actually dreadfully funny if you think about it!

We had to help my sister down from the tree because it was a lot harder going down than it was going up. It was great fun, though, and we were all quite psyched about it and couldn't wait to tell our dad. After that, however, we had to tie up the rope ladder so that my little sister couldn't access it by herself. It was quite dangerous and we didn't want anything to happen to her.

Later on in life my sister and I climbed lots of trees and had great adventures! But I will always remember her first trek into a tree!