I was just thinking about how, though it's been almost four years since we brought the guy home from the hospital, that memory doesn't seem that much more distant than when he went into the pool without us at swimming lessons for the first time, less than a year ago.
When I was a kid, things that had happened two years ago seemed distinctly further away than things that happened a year ago. I felt like I had a solid sense of time-distance.
This is probably an insight that everyone else has had, but it just occurred to me that kids have a more proportionate sense of distance for events in the past because they have changes in themselves to measure against. Any 9-year-old was really different a year ago. So, events that happened to them happened against an obvious marker that has since changed. Whereas a 41-year-old probably wasn't much different last year.