The earliest memory of mine that I can recall is from when I was very young. So, I will start there. I do not know precisely how old I was, but I was 3 at most. I was playing with shaped wooden cut-outs that I was supposed to fit into a wooden frame. (See Figure 1.1 for reference). I vaguely recall sitting in front of my room door (which was really more of a playroom, since I mostly slept with my mother at that stage), between an open shelf on my right and a chest of drawers on my left. And I was stubbornly trying to fit the wrong shape into the wrong frame.
Part of me knew it would not work. I knew that I was trying in vain to fit a truck-shaped block into a bike-shaped hole. But I had already put the truck in its right place many times. It was boring, so I was trying something else.
These same vague memories crop up throughout my time in Zastron, a small town in the Southern Free State, a province of the Republic of South Africa. Memories of getting pushed out of a treehouse and breaking my collar bone, memories of the drive to the nearby town of Aliwal-North (now Maletswai), the “Gatvees”, a local fair, the mountain, and the occasional touches of snow during the cold winter months. But I only lived here until I was nine, so the memories are vague.
