6-4-18
Summer is in sight. The green foliage is busting out everywhere – everything is lush lush lush. It is almost too much for me, the lushness and absolute decadence of this time of year, when the rain is still coming but the days are longer and and a bit warmer and everything busts out.
I close my eyes for a minute and remember those summers long ago when days and time stretched far into the future, when summer truly felt like it was forever when that last school bell rang, when all I seemed to do was read and go to the pool. All I seemed to do was not much at all, as I read ten zillion books and swam and time stood at a standstill.
I open my eyes and the thought comes to me that summer, despite not quite being here, will be quickly over. I don’t know why time is going so quickly these years. The last twenty five years, time spent raising my daughters and launching them into adulthood along with launching myself into different careers, did not seem to last a quarter of a century. My grown girls are proof that it has been that long but I deny that fact. That time seemed to simply speed by and is now simply a jumble of memory.
It is a jumble of memory and I sink into one memory in particular, of my first daughter at around a year and a half old eating a popsicle with her young toddler friend in front of the blooming rose vine in my backyard. The stickiness is running down her arm and she is immersed in that moment of experience. She and her friend eye each other and suck on their popsicles in the hot sun. They suck on their popsicles and the moment stretches out forever.
Another memory comes. My first dog as a puppy, racing around my garden, snatching strawberries as she goes. Her lips are stained red. This leads to another memory – dropping warm black blackberries straight from the brambly stem directly into my daughter’s mouth. Another rises and another and another, until I am immersed in moments of summers past.
I rest there for a time, perhaps it is five minutes, perhaps longer, but time has stopped for now as I rest there and remember. I remember. Those selves of mine that lived during those endless summer moments are still part of me, waiting to be called on. They are waiting to be called on, to bear witness to those moments, to come out of sometimes decades long hibernation and to remind me that those moments still exist.
I open my eyes. They fall upon the absolute greenness of the foliage around me – there is no avoiding that these days. They fall upon the absolute greenness of the foliage around me and I grab a popsicle that has seen better days from the freezer. I grab a popsicle and head outside to sit in the warming sun which is growing stronger by the minute. I grab a popsicle and go outside and I sit in the sun with my head tilted at just that angle of maximum radiance received. I close my eyes with the cold popsicle at my lips and, through my eyelids, I sense the verdant leaves calling me to summer. They call me to summer, they call me to rest there, they call me to rest in each long forever moment. I open my eyes as a blue heron flies overhead, each wing stroke lasting an eternity.
