One of my earliest memories is of sitting on the bed at my grandparents’ house with my brother, and our father coming home and dumping a bucketful of tiny plastic animals all over the bed to our surprise and delight. I was almost two, my brother close to five.

We had just moved to Trinidad from Switzerland. I was a shy and quiet child who stuck to my brother’s side. My grandmother would communicate with him and he’d speak to me in French and then translate back to her. Unlike most of the memories before which have a hazy, dreamlike quality to them, my memories of moving to Trinidad are sharp. I remember feeling sad at times because our parents, who were looking for a house, were gone a lot of the time. Trinidad was so hot and the sun so bright. My grandfather was a stern man who smiled very little and scared me. My grandmother was kind and gentle but I kept my distance. Everything felt new and overwhelming.

We kept those little plastic animals for a very long time. I recall a dinosaur among them, I liked to chew on his tail. I think we got rid of them in the yard sale we had when we were moving to Venezuela. But every time I played with them I remembered the day we got them.