First house

At two or three I remember running on the sidewalk in front of our suburban ranch house. Up the street they were building new houses. I had no concept of building houses yet. To me it was a mystery of plywood and wooden beams with dangerous gaping holes in the floor. I thought it was old.The wind blows past the sole tree by the street in the front yard. As I run past the tree the wind catches me, I start to rise and soon I'm flying. Not under full power, but gliding. It was only later, say at ten, that I could really control my flight. I remember these things. I imagine the images came in dreams, but I remember it as I remember anything.

One of my first memories is looking over the top of a tall wooden fence into the backyard next door. There was a swing set there. Not memory but detail: the fence was stained a redwood dark red, it had horizontally woven planks and was about six feet tall. In our backyard was a mound that grew cucumbers. I make a distinction between what I remember and what I know in a background sense. I imagine this later as coming from others' stories, pictures - some kind of memory backfill. For whatever reason these are things I don't "remember"; I just "know" them. Some happened to me, I don't "remember" them.

In a different house in a different city at between seven and eleven we had a deep front yard. Our neighbor's front yard had four tall, thick trees with their lowest branches many times higher than I was tall. There I flew pretty well; I could dive down below a branch and swoop up, stalling enough that to come to rest standing on the branch by the trunk. But I never went off flying over the rest of the city.