Blemished

My first memory is of a tapered lake shore. My foster sister had brought me to the marina of Lake Superior, the largest fresh water lake in the world, to pass an afternoon in play.

I must have been three years old.

It was April and fragmented ice still turned in the water defying the weak rays of a dandelion sun. Too cold to swim, too tantalizing not to take off those white and pink velcro shoes, remove cotton socks and stretch little toes in murky water. So I did. A biting and unforgiving cold. Then amidst the soft ground something sharp and piercing. I lifted up my foot and a shard of glass, deep beer bottle brown, clung to that baby smooth, unblemished sole. Blemished. I cried and my foster sister swept me up in her arms and laid me on the bank. She cooed and made promises of ice cream if I let her pull it out. So I did. It felt like a pinch, then release, and sticky red oozing from a cut that wasn't deep enough for stitches but earned me a piggy back.

If I twist my body now, twenty odd years later, and look at my sole, the scar of my first memory remains. #memory #nonfiction #childhood