The first fourteen or so years of my life were spent in the Magic Valley, living in south-central Idaho. My memories of the earliest years of my life are necessarily blurred. But the stories I’ve been able to piece together through a combination of research, memory, and conversation are jarring… so I push myself constantly to remember more, earlier, younger memories. There is a sense that if only I could recall something, my world would be changed for the better, that I would better understand who I was supposed to have become–that my failure to remember is a kind of moral failing or mental defect. Yet, like most of us, my mind will not provide a coherent memory of my earliest days. I have flashes, discontinuous frames of punishments. What does come through, in waves, are instances anchored in the memory of a place, and what I experienced there, in Twin Falls.
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