Memory is a crazy thing.

Since moving, I've been making a point to actively try and use every piece of clothing and every towel that I brought, so I can weed out the stuff that's either bad, ugly or doesn't fit anymore.

Today, I came across this old towel that's styled like a beach towel, but is sort of way too small for one.

So I use it to dry my face and something in the smell of the towel activates a memory of four-to-five year old me on a pebbly beach on the island of Krk in Croatia on vacation with my parents (the name of the island also is contained in this memory, if you had asked me to name a Croatian island, any Croatian island at all, in a quiz show, before today, I couldn't have named one) - and lying on this towel, which was comfortably big enough for smol-bean 4.5 yo me.

Knowing what I (rationally) know about memory and from my life-long experience with the quality and accuracy of my visual memory in particular (- it's abysmal), I'm pretty sure the beach that see in my head now actually is an amalgam of the thousands of beach images I've seen since and only bears the faintest resemblance to the actual place that this memory was made at.

But still - my conscious memories that I can summon at will basically only start at the age of 6, right when I started primary school.

Before that, there's basically nothing. But now there's this beach. And it was all unlocked by how this particular piece of terry cloth smells.

It is a pretty old towel however, I'm not sure about keeping it.