Earliest Memories

I was looking for writing exercises to practice with while I'm between projects (I could do a rewrite of my latest, "Father Fox", but I need to think some more about what I really want the story to be about) and I came across a website called Earliest Memory where people have posted their earliest memory in a couple of sentences. For some reason my breath catches when I read these. They are succinct, raw, and very real. It also takes me back to when I wrote about my earliest memory a couple of years ago:

"A pink room (gray magenta). Panic. My little brother has fallen again. He’s small, small enough so he can’t walk, small enough so that his hair is still wispy golden white. He’s been cut on the head and they need to give him stitches. We were visiting a museum. Or a planetarium. Or an aquarium."

I wrote that slightly over two years ago. I would have been two months into my first year of college. It just shows that even though I didn't really feel it as much then, I knew that I wanted to write and I did it on my own. I tried to get into a creative writing class the next semester, but they filled up too fast. I think it was good that I didn't. There was a gradual build up over the next year and a half of me realizing exactly how much writing meant to me and that I wanted to make it part of my career. This desire is what gave me the confidence to pull through the rough patches of my first semester in narrative writing. I know what I want and I know what I have to do to get there. Constant reading, constant writing, and constant thought.

Now if only I knew exactly what I wanted out of "Father Fox".