My memories are pretty detailed going back to about 4 y.o., but it's definitely aided by moving so much in the Air Force so I can date stamp them by the places we lived.

My earliest memory is about age 2, of getting on my belly to slide out of our white station wagon. Which we only had until I was that age.

But we lived in Oregon, Canada and Florida, then four different houses in Florida so all those memories are discretely boxed off by location, and school.

I really need to get Hubby's memories written down. He'll drop references to things into conversation, then I have to dig the story out of him. Like the (minor) tidal wave that nearly washed him out to sea in Hawaii and working on tall ships and such.

it's definitely aided by moving so much in the Air Force so I can date stamp them by the places we lived.

Yeah, DH has much more accurate memories of his childhood than I do mine, because he can date them by what country they were in at the time.

I totally missed the house, of course, and ended up quite far away.

When my uncle was two, he decided to follow his daddy to work one morning, and traipsed out of the house in his pjs at 6:00 am. Grandma had no clue he was gone until she went to wake him a few hours later, and obviously went into panic mode when she realized he was gone. After running around the farm looking for him for nearly an hour, she called the police, to find out that Gordon was there. A policeman had picked him up nearly a mile away from their house. Someone took a picture of him in his pjs wearing a policeman's hat, sitting on someone's desk, and it got published in the local paper later that week. When I asked him what he remembers about that day, he's not sure if his memories are real or stem from the article and Grandma's stories.

I don't think I'd be able to file memories if I didn't have different houses and countries as backdrops.

Hmm. I have an agenda in my inbox for a meeting that's not on my calendar. I better track that down before I embarrass myself.

Yeah, growing up in the house your father lived in as a kid doesn't give you a lot of variant to track events by.

I have sense-memories rather than event-memories. I have a clear memory of seeing my left shoulder and arm, wearing a particular dress, the exact color of my hair falling over my shoulder. It's warm and I'm in sunlight, and I'm in our back yard. No event, no sound.

I know it's a real memory because I have a b/w photograph of me wearing that dress. On my tricycle, in our front yard.

I was dreadfully (and undiagnosed) nearsighted as a child, so a lot of my memories fade out a yard or two beyond my physical self.

Yeah, growing up in the house your father lived in as a kid doesn't give you a lot of variant to track events by.

Yeah, me too. 'Cept we tore down our 110 year old farm house and built a new one in its place in 1980.

My dad (who's in his late 70s) moved for the first time in his life when my parents moved to an apartment after selling the farm. I can't imagine what that would be like.

Updated XKCD map of the internet. There's a remarkable amount of it that I'm not familiar with, thank god.

Oh, look! I found LJ. And ff.net.

Where is LJ? I was looking for it before.