Sensory Input and Memory

I know today's post is supposed to be another Back to Basics article, but as stated Friday, all of here at the England household are sick. I'm doing better than I was Friday. I can breathe most of the time now at least, but I'm in that stage of a sinus infection, with accompanying ear infection, where all the bones in one side of my face hurt. An it feels like I got smashed in the side of the head with a 2 x 6 kind of hurting that makes concentrating next to impossible. So instead of posting a grammar article that might be full of mistakes or where I forget half of what is needed, I decided to bump this week's article to next week, so you'll get January's Back to Basics articles back to back.

Since I can no longer take NSAIDs without hours of feeling ill, the only thing I've found that's really effective combating this pain is humidity and warmth. So I spent a good part of yesterday with this rather sad looking DIY rice hot or cold pack wrapped around my head with a smaller one laying over one cheek and eye. 

Although I've dealt with quite a few ear infections in my life, it's never before dawned on my to try using heat to soothe the ache. So I guess it's not that surprising then that this time, being so different, the sensory input of having a heating device soothing an ear ache triggered a memory forgotten for years and the earliest one I've had sparked.

My parents got married young, and I was a honeymoon baby born just ten months after they were married. They'd planned to work a bit to save up for college and get degrees before starting a family, but I kind of wrecked those plans. Suffice to say, things weren't super easy for our little family at the time with good paying jobs being hard to come by locally for those with just a high school degree.

So, when my dad landed a job two states away that would pay quite a bit more than the ones they were working down here, they picked up and moved when I was about six-months-old. Unfortunately, the job was contract, and it only lasted about a year. They moved back, but the house they were renting before was taken, which forced them to move in with my maternal grandparents for a year or so before they purchased a mobile home right around the time I turned three just to try and get back out on their own.

All this I know because of stories I've been told. I've never really remembered any of this before yesterday. Previously, the earliest memory I could pull up was getting my ears pierced when I was three.

So, in the memory sparked by using the rice bag yesterday, I was teeny, probably around two-years-old. My ear was throbbing as I laid with my head on a heating pad, watching something boring on television over at my paternal grandparent's house. I could hear the adults talking, and I'm guessing it was some daytime talkshow they were watching on the television.

I wasn't paying attention though. I was too busy hoping my ear would stop hurting and comparing how it felt then to how it'd felt when I'd first woken up squished between Mama and the wall in my maternal grandparent's front bedroom. It hurt worse. All I wanted to do was take my head off the heating pad, but my grandmother said it would help. So I lay there, trying to be still long enough for the heat to work as tears tickled the side of my nose.

It was a brief memory. I can't remember what happened after. Whether or not the heat worked, I can't remember.

Isn't it funny how sensory input can trigger memory? A particular scent can take you back years. Songs become associated with certain people or times, and you can't hear it without thinking about them. Nothing is ever quite as tasty as your mother or grandmother's home cooking, and they ways we were comforted as children flood our minds when we use the same tricks to self-soothe as adults.