I paused in my brother’s childhood (and, well, adulthood) bedroom at my parents’ home. We had finished Thanksgiving dinner and I was lolling about upstairs in a turkey-trypto haze when I noticed the sunlight pouring into his room. At first, I couldn’t remember the afternoon light streaming in like it did. I have vivid recollections of the morning sun peeping in my bedroom at the northern side of the house, and of the moonlight coming through my window as well, but I couldn’t place this bright warm scene in my memory bank. Puzzled, I sat down on the bed and almost spoke aloud the words ‘I don’t remember this…’
I remembered dancing to ‘Dress You Up’ in this room, jumping up and down on the bed to Madonna’s early music. I remembered sneaking through the rust-colored shag carpet that used to be here in order to get to the guest room when our Gram was staying over for the holidays. I remember the whispered stories that my brother and his friend would tell when we would have sleepovers. But I couldn’t remember this sunlight.
As much a test for my failing memory and middle-aged forgetfulness, I forced myself to think back to my youth, but nothing was coming. I simply did not recall a time when the sun was this strong. It flowed through the window, in spite of the frosty panes. It roamed over the warm carpet, climbed atop the bedspread, and rose all the way up the wall. In spite of the cold, the sun heated the room. It was always warmer in my brother’s room. I wondered if that informed his disposition, whether that explained why he was sometimes sunnier than me. Cool and reserved, like my bedroom, which only saw the morning sun or the moonlight, I held my emotional cards closer to the vest. It was safer that way.
Then, as I watched the dust particles floating through shafts of sunlight, I began to remember. An old television, with the knob you had to manually turn to switch channels, once sat in front of the window. It didn’t broadcast anything but static, yet we still fiddled with it, hoping for a station to come in eventually. One never did. A box of stale dog biscuits, which we dared each other to bite. These were distant and dim memories, but still largely intact. Images and scenes without plot or point, they were there buried deep in my memory castle, and instantly I warmed at their presence.
Only then could I leave the room.
