My earliest memory is not one I actually remembered.

For most of my life, I couldn't understand why I was afraid of water or why I never learned to swim comfortably. The answer didn't come until I was in my late thirties, when my sister finally told me what had happened.

I was five years old.

We were living near Brookings, Oregon. My older brother had made a little wooden boat for us to play with. It floated on what looked like a small pond beside our house. None of us realized it was actually an old well, level with the ground.

I went out to retrieve the little boat.

Instead, I fell into the well.

It took my oldest sister, another sister, and my brother to pull me back out.

No one spoke about it afterward.

The memory disappeared, but its effects did not.

For decades I carried an unexplained fear of water. I believed something was wrong with me because I couldn't swim and never felt safe around deep water.

Only many years later did I learn that my body had remembered what my mind had forgotten.

That hidden memory became the first unseen current that quietly shaped the course of my life.

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