31-Day Writing Challenge - Day 10

 Prompt: Describe your earliest childhood memory in detail.

My earliest childhood memory is at our yellow house in Illinois. In our shared bedroom there was a large closet, and in that closet was the washer and dryer. 

One day when I went into my bedroom, there was a large metal object sitting on my small desk.  My desk had a smooth metal surface and inside was coloring pages and markers and crayons. My desk sat near the laundry closet. 

The object on top of my desk was shiny and I was curious about it. I picked up the object, but it was very heavy and very hot, so I dropped it quickly. 

The heavy shiny object fell to the floor, hot side down, and started to make the carpet smell funny. I am not sure who picked it up again, whether it was me or if my mother did it. But when the object was picked up, there underneath where it sat was an exact replica of the oblong shape of it in the carpet. Think  rectangle-connected-to-a-triangle kind of shape... Yes, the object was a clothes iron. 

My mom must have left it there either in the middle of ironing when she had to step away for something, or it was sitting there to cool when she was done ironing. Either way, I ruined a portion of the carpet that day and my parents had to get that piece of carpet replaced before we moved. 

As I'm writing this memory out today, another memory came to mind. I think I was younger in this memory than I was in the iron incident... but still in the yellow house. 

My two older sisters climbed on the counter to get a treat from the top shelf of the cupboard. I was small and couldn't get up the way they did. After they had retrieved the object of their desire - they jumped down and ran away.

I was small, but I didn't let that stop me. I didn't want to be left out. I wanted a treat too. So I pulled out the drawers of the lower cupboards to climb onto in order to get up onto the countertop, and somehow reach the treats on the top shelf. The problem was that the countertop was full of stuff. There wasn't much room for me to put my feet. I inched along the edge, trying to reach up to the right shelf. I believe that I was also wearing footie pajamas at the time. 

One small misstep and I slipped! Down I went, smacking my chin on the edge of one of the open drawers on my way down. I must have screamed something fierce, because my mom came running down the stairs in her underclothes! 

She scooped me up and soothed me as I cried. We had to go to the emergency room. I got stitches on my chiny-chin-chin. There's still a tiny scar under the edge of my chin too.