It was well before I turned one; I was still in a crib. It was dark, nighttime, and incredibly hot. Some sort of animal with glowing eyes stared at me from the floor.
I thought it was a dream, but decades later my parents confirmed that when I was a baby the thermostat had broken and we had a night where the temperature was 100°. As for the animal with glowing eyes, that was our cat.
Weird person giving me something incredibly sweet. (Later found out that was a polio vaccination via sugar cube). The memory was very partially formed, but it should have been around 18 months old.
Other fully formed memory starts around 2 and half.
Climbing onto the counter (at 2 or 3 years old) to get a Flintstone’s vitamin, because I liked the way they taste. Plot twist: what I actually ate was one of our dog’s epilepsy pills.
Nice try to trawl for answers to security questions! I’ll never reveal that my earliest memory is playing with my first dog Chestnut in my childhood home on Oak St with my mother whose last name prior to marriage was Jessop!
Playing in the yard outside our apartment: little 3 y.o. me was throwing rocks at a giant wasp hive. Coincidentally, my first memory is also the first time I almost got myself killed. Getting stung is how we found out I’m seriously allergic and now I carry an epipen.