My earliest memory is of an Easter egg hunt, held at my aunt and uncle’s house in Hamden, Connecticut. So, April 14, 1974. It’s odd to know exactly the point in time where one’s memory begins; it’s convenient for me that it was a holiday.

It’s the slightest, most evanescent of memories, and it’s a compromised one, as three photographs survive from that morning, and I fear that much of my memory is actually a cheat; that it’s rather only a memory of seeing these photographs when I was young, their significance growing once I got a grasp of the concept of “the past.” And the haziness of the memory—is it just due to the blurriness of the photographs (they seem to have been shot from a moving car)? But no, there is something else there, something actual, something lived—weak, just-wakened sunlight; a smell of rain-freshened soil; being part of a pack of children scrabbling up a hill; adults in stations along the hill, standing like referees or wardens. A sense of childhood as an anarchic collective, a separate order, briefly united here in greedy exuberance.

The photographs are of eight children, arranged in two rows on a stone staircase. I believe it’s before the hunt, as everyone looks distracted (well, except one glum boy in the top row); some kids are clutching their baskets. I don’t recognize anyone here. Who were these children? Neighborhood kids, I suppose, all of us dressed in the color-happy fashion of the time: I’m in a pair of crimson pants, an Indian girl to my right is wearing grape and sea-green.

This was a false start—the memory, the photographs, seem like a scrapped pilot. My parents would move from Connecticut to Virginia a few months after this morning, and so radically revising my childhood, which wasn’t to be an urban one, with pick-up neighborhood Easter egg hunts, or one crowded with relatives. It would be a far quieter life on a much larger stage.