She can hold up four fingers: she understands that next month she’ll be 4. Already she remembers scenes, so many— her mother walking in through the front door with her wrapped-up baby brother; that time the big dog gobbled up her toast before she could take a single bite; that day a bad man pushed her so hard on the swing she spun out, landing face down in the dust. Also, sometimes, some first happy thing she barely senses anymore— a soapy bath toy, warm in her baby hands?
All of that has made her who she is right now, a girl with pictures in her head from a place he called the South, her grandfather whose house she plays outside where there’s a falling whiteness that her mouth takes in as ice cream: of all her memories, this is the first one she will claim even into old age. How could she know that everything that’s happened until now would melt away in time, except the snow?
This poem appears in the February 2026 print edition.
The post First Memory appeared first on The Atlantic.
