Remembering

You can almost taste it. The aroma from the blossoms on the cherry trees when the wind blew back in your face before you had to go into the stuffy church building on Sunday morning. Or how about the way the sea air would suddenly fill your nostrils and the entire world changed as you neared the ocean in the car with mom and dad and Uncle Bob and Aunt Jane? You couldn’t breathe deep enough or long enough. Just moments ago you didn’t even notice the air and now that’s all you could notice. Or the country could do that. Aunt Helen would stop the car by the side of the road and announce everybody out to pick huckleberries and the dust from the just stopped car and the closeness of the bushes as you climb out seemed to almost suffocate you, but you had to keep inhaling all that your lungs could hold. The air was so intense you couldn’t get enough. Think of it. These were the days when encountering the world came to you by sensations, by newness, by never-before-experienced-experience, through the magic of your fingers and nose and ears and the eyes they all widened in such astonishment. When the train thundered into the station and blew it’s hot steamy air all over you as it rumbled past, with it’s brake-squealing and bell-clanging assaulting your ears, your feet vibrating, your heart pounding, and your nose picking up on the staccato mixture of grease and coal and heat; it was your eyes that couldn’t resist opening wide to be filled with cinders because of the absolute immensity of this black iron machine that seemed to be an alive beast. That was aliveness--that was growing up. And each one of those lip-smacking memories was a right of passage. Remember?

Comments

[Jim Lynch]

lip-smacking indeed! nice one david.