From the time I was 14 months old until I was 17 years and six months on my way to 18, I lived with my parents in a five-room house facing the grade school that they had attended at various times in their lives and that I attended from the first through the sixth grade.

The rooms in the house were large but it was lacking not only in luxury, but until I was almost 12, in most of the conveniences of that era.

I was 8 or 9 years old before we had central heating and 12 before we acquired an indoor bathroom.

We always had books, magazines and classical music.

She died when I was 6, but until then my maternal grandmother occupied one of the bedrooms, my parents the other and, until I outgrew it, I had an extremely ornate Russian sleigh that stood behind the baseburner that provided heat until we got the hot water furnace.

If we had company, and we usually did, the big leather-covered davenport could be opened to become a bed.

I suppose there must have been days when only the family was at home, but in truth I remember none.

My little warm spot behind the baseburner provided me with a small room of my own. Not only did I have in the sleigh a bed for night, but a comfortable little sofa by day.

I also had in the private space a nicely covered box, which had held my clothes and blankets made for me before my birth, but held for me my toys when I was old enough to have acquired toys.

I didn’t walk until I was 14 months old and this so upset my mother that she always insisted that I learned to talk much sooner than most children.

Goodness knows I tried hard enough to speak. I listened to the conversation of adults cluttering up the room, but it wasn’t much help.

Years later, when I was in my teens, I was reading a Liberty Magazine about a Russian countess who escaped and came to this country at the time of the Russian Revolution around the close of World War I. She wrote about a psychologist, a guest at a party she attended.

He claimed, she wrote, that he could pretty well tell what sort of a person anyone was if they would tell him their earliest memory.

The countess recalled her earliest memory was going off by herself to eat a large tasty red apple. He at once told her she was selfish and greedy.

I’m not sure my earliest memories are memories. I think they come more under the heading of recall.

A phrase of music, the scent of a flower, taste of food, or something of the sort will bring incidents back that had lain in my memory for years.

In my pre-school days, I spent much thought on pondering the meaning of certain words. One of them was “people.” I didn’t get it right.

Hanging above the sleigh I slept in was a rather depressing painting of a black castle. It had a red roof. It belonged, I think to my grandmother, who told me it was a German castle.

We no longer have it, so it probably went to one of her other children after her death. Until I was old enough to understand the word “people” the black castle was the concept I held of “people.”

Even now, when I have reason to use the word &uot;people&uot; the mental image of the castle that once hung over my bed floats into my mind right along with the word.

(Love Cruikshank is an Albert Lea resident. Her column runs Thursday.)