Blurred Lines

I have a memory. It's a nice one, but its edges are blurred. It feels like I'm looking at something without my glasses. I can see what it is, but not the details. When I look out my window first thing in the morning, I see a bush across the street surrounded by something white, and I imagine flowers. When I put on my glasses, I see white paint on the porch behind the bush. That's how this memory appears...

I am about nine or ten years old. There is snow on the ground--a lot of snow--and the sun makes it glitter like the front of a Christmas card. I am in a chair by the window, reading a book. The house is quiet, and I am content.

When I look at the picture in my mind, I can't tell if I'm actually sitting by a window reading on a snowy day, or if I'm reading a book in which the description of a snowy day is so vivid that I feel like I'm actually in it.

I've been thinking about memories--and memory--a lot lately. Pondering that picture of me reading by the window makes my brain hurt.

I recently shared a story about finding my dad putting together toys in the kitchen on Christmas Eve. In my telling, I said that I didn't know where my mom was; that Dad explained that Santa had dropped our stuff off and asked him to put it together. I wrote that it was Dad who preserved my Christmas fantasies of for several more years with that story. But I recently read back over older posts from Christmases past. In an earlier story, I had described that same Christmas Eve, but in that version, it was my mother who met me at the kitchen door and saved Christmas with the story of Santa asking for help. Both memories are real for me, although I realize the second one--the one where my mom is the hero--is more likely. Dad would have been too distraught at being called to elf duty to be able to come up with something that quickly.

So now I'm forced to wonder about all of my other vivid memories. How much of what I "remember" really happened, and how much have I written myself, and came to believe in my heart?

And how much does it really matter? If I were to list all of the memories of my childhood in two columns--one for happy ones and one for sad--the Happy column would take up many more pages than the Sad. I like it that way.

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, truth sometimes is fiction. And you probably shouldn't believe everything I tell you.