What's the point of difference? It's not an actual difference, only what I perceived between me and the people around me.

Why do I feel removed, separate, isolated?

When you asked me to look, only then did I try. I want to go back to the comfort of not caring, the getting lost in the present moment. The concentration on the small things that prevents me from noticing what really matters.

Yet I won't leave this now. I know I must finally take stock and find my way.

In my earliest memory I am not like the others. Perhaps it is because of the age difference. My brother is seven years older than me and my sisters, six and four years. They were all born before we moved back into my mother's childhood home, they had another life I did not share.

My Grandmother is holding me on her hip. She is warming the bottle for me in the silver kettle atop the wood stove. She is arguing with my mother, who is making excuses and saying that the animals needed tending and that Grandma was here for me, so she didn't worry. Grandma tells my mother that I am not her baby, and not her responsibility, that she should not be left to look after me. I know it's seems impossible that as a baby I could remember all of this, but I am certain that I do. This is my first memory.

Cassie is insanely jealous of me. She lies on the floor when Mum is changing my nappy and screams and kicks the door. Nobody goes to her until my mother has settled me into my cot, then I am jealous because I want my mother all to myself.

Air

The air is what I remember the most. It is always the air. The feel of it streaming through my hair, buffeting my open mouth or slapping my cheeks out of shape. We would stand behind the cab of the ute, my sister and I, while Dad took the straight stretches as fast as he could because on the bends he would slow, taking peeks in the rear vision mirror to be sure that his girls were safe.

It was eleven miles to the school each morning and that means it was eleven home again. I suppose there were times we were driven in the car, but it is the ute that I remember the best.

My father had the ute modified. Instead of a standard issue Toyota tray back, he had a timber tray with sides and tailgate that could be removed, and and tilt tray mechanism that would lift the tray at the front, so loads like firewood or gravel could simply slide off when the pulley was lifted. This meant we had a tall mast behind the ute cab, so we could stand full height, toes gripping the fixed front tray end, and our frozen fingers hanging on to the cold metal pulley frame for dear life.

If we wanted to speak to each other we would yell into the wind, but our words were ripped away and rarely heard. I imagined the letters that formed them trailing behind us like confetti, finally falling lost and forgotten on the loose dirt road.

We would come around those last few bends, past the rusty drum letterbox of one neighbour and the clean white painted one of another. Then Dad would slow carefully and pull up in front of the one room school building. We'd jump down before the dust settled, bare feet searching for a sandy landing on the dry dusty verge.

I'd watch wistfully then, as he pulled away and his dust trail shrunk down the road. It would be six long and boring hours until that air would blast my face again.