I hear stories of my early childhood as if they happened to someone else. How, when Jennifer didn’t want to go to daycare, she lay on the asphalt by her father's truck, screaming her three-year-old lungs out. How her father learned to sit patiently behind the wheel, passenger door open, and wait till she grew calm and climbed in. How Jennifer marched into daycare each morning and shrugged her coat to the floor. How another child always hung it up. How Jennifer told the other children when it was time to play with this toy or that. How, on what would be the last day of daycare, Jennifer discovered she could climb out of the window on the second floor and slide down the drainpipe on the side of the building. How parents arrived to find their children in an orderly line, climbing and sliding, Jennifer running a tight ship while the teacher slept it off in the coat closet.

What I do remember is a dream. A tarantula crawled up my arm to my shoulder, the teacher beside me, her big blond head. She pulled the spider’s body away, but some of the legs stuck to my shoulder. Ah, ah, I said, the legs quivered and clung, and I could not scream.