My Little Brother and A&D Ointment

Prompt: Write about your earliest memory

I remember my brother coming home for the first time. I was two years and ten months old. My older brother was seven going on eight in a few days. We were living in the bottom flat of a two-family house on the west side of Detroit, my first home. My grandmother and her husband were over. (He wasn’t our grandfather, but he was.) They had stayed with Terry and me when Daddy went to the hospital to bring Mama and the baby home. At that time Providence was a huge, gothic structure on the Boulevard. Daddy drove us there while Mama was gone to show us the outside once she left to give birth. That building has since been demolished and the facility moved to the suburbs.

After letting me see and touch the baby, Mama took "my new brother" into her room and placed him into the small white wicker bed with the hood that she called a “bassinette” I remember not wanting to hold him when I was asked. He looked like a doll, but he moved; I recall being unnerved by that. The baby was tiny, noisy, and yellow, and he smelled funny.

It was warm in the bedroom. Mama put him down and went to change his diaper. When she opened it, he was in the middle of a bowel movement. As she held the diaper close to keep the emissions from running out onto the sheet, I thought it was mustard coming out of that little behind because that is what it looked like to me. I said as much to my mother, and I remember her laughing and telling me what it really was. Wrong color, as far as I was concerned then. I watched as she cleaned him up. Then she pulled out a tube of something, squeezed it, and spread it on the baby’s skin, explaining that she did that to keep him from getting a rash.

Many decades-and my own kids later- when I smell A&D ointment, every single time, it stimulates the memory of my little brother coming home for the first time.

FYI: He's still full of it, but I love him dearly.