Some of the most ordinary hours of my childhood turned out, once I actually sat down to write them, to be the ones I remembered with the most precision. That surprised me. I expected the big, dramatic days — the fall from the tree, the nights my father's temper filled the house — to be the ones that came back sharpest on the page. Instead, it was an evening well nobody outside my family has ever heard of.

We called it Kulwazi — “on the Rock.” It wasn't a real well, not in the sense of something dug and maintained. It was a temporary basin, rocky the whole way down, roughly a hundred feet from the surface to the water below, with no spring feeding it. During the wet season it filled to the brim. Without rain, it took five or six months to dry up completely. My little brothers Emanuel and Talemwa and I used to slide down toward it almost every evening once the day's heat had broken, and I spent longer than I expected, writing Chapter 7, trying to find language for what that place actually sounded like — the frogs, the toads, the crickets, a night bird occasionally dropping onto the water and sending a small crash echoing up the rock walls.

Around it sat three gardens, each one belonging to somebody in my memory almost as clearly as it belonged to its owner on paper: Mr. Bbaale Namuna's garden to the west, the Chairman's to the south, our own eucalyptus stretching east and west. I hadn't thought about those three gardens in years before I started writing this chapter. Once I did, I couldn't stop.

But the detail that ended up meaning the most to me, once the chapter was finished, wasn't the well at all. It was the walk home afterward — because there were always two ways back, and choosing between them was never as simple as it should have been.
One route ran past the Messiah-banana grove. The other cut through what we called the Chairman-Kayembe path. Either way, the sun was already dropping by the time we set off, and either way, the plantation air did something to you that I still don't have a perfect word for — a heavy, sweet, slightly dangerous mix of ripening fruit, damp soil, and coffee blossom that pulled you deeper into the dark even while some part of your brain was reminding you that dinner, and the evening's chores, and your mother's patience, were all waiting at the other end. No one ever hurried on those paths. And because no one ever hurried, a great many of us were punished, more evenings than I can count, for arriving home with the work still undone.

At the centre of the plantation stood one enormous bark tree, buttressed and deeply grooved, almost carved-looking, that my father loved more than any other tree we owned. I was told my mother gave birth to more than five of my siblings in its shade, and that its bark — stripped, cured, and sold as bark cloth — helped feed our family for years. Writing that sentence for the first time, I sat back from the laptop for a while. It is one thing to know, abstractly, that a tree in your family's yard had significance. It is another thing to realize, mid-sentence, that the same tree witnessed half your siblings being born and helped keep the rest of you fed.

That's the thing I keep learning, chapter by chapter, writing this book: the biggest moments of my life rarely announced themselves as big while they were happening. Most of them looked exactly like an ordinary evening — two tired boys choosing a path home, a well with a nickname, a tree nobody thought to write down until one of the children it sheltered finally sat down, decades later, and did.

Next post: the day I finally climbed too high — and what fifty metres of falling actually felt like.