Emily Roche- Earliest Memory of Washington D.C.

Living in northern Virginia for the majority of my life has proven to have its perks.  One would be the close proximity to Washington, D.C.  Due to the closeness to our nation's capital, it should be expected that my parents would take every single opportunity to go into the city to visit monuments, museums, etc.  While I cannot recall every single time my parents dragged me out of the house to venture into the congestion of the capital, I do remember one of my first trips to the city's monuments.

I was about ten years old, and it was rather rainy that summer day.  The humidity was dragging my family and me down as we walked through the city.  However, the trip was not horrible just because the weather was.  As my family and I wandered throughout D.C., we made stops to a handful of beautiful monuments, such as the Washington Monument (which I referred to as the Giant Pencil until recently), the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the World War II Memorial.  We even made a pit stop to see a very strange Albert Einstein monument situated near the Lincoln Memorial.  The memory of Einstein specifically stands out in my mind because the memorial contained a very large human statue of Einstein made of bronze and perched a top marble steps.  The whole memorial was very odd; interesting, but odd.  Even at an early age, I could infer that the memorial commemorated Einstein's achievements as a mathematician because of the numbers and equations that surrounded his body.  Einstein was the last stop of our trip; however, he remained in my mind for many years to come because of the oddity of his memorial.  I commend the architects of the memorial because they were very successful in making the memorial a memorable one,  The memorial may also be very memorable for me because of the intense hunger I was feeling by the time we reached the site, but I'd like to think it was the memorial itself that left its mark on that trip.