It is funny how sometimes loneliness creeps in even as the world wondrously and beautifully wakes up once more in spring. As I watch winter slowly and hesitantly roll out, and think,’ It was just Christmas!’, I realize, yet again, how quickly, life happens. We watch as we casually misplace each minute, and then, we suddenly slow down and realize we have lost the years.
Sometimes, on this kind of melancholy morning, my thoughts land in the middle of my childhood with my mom baking a blackberry cobbler in our little kitchen in the woods, my dad in a white t-shirt, outside taming the yard, my younger sister shooing daddy longlegs in her backyard playhouse, my little brother wandering in the woods with his dog, Pogo, and me, walking on the beaten path to visit Miss Sue…sometimes I am there, nearly sixty years before and it feels real, but it is all gone, the places and the people…only I am left.
I dip back into the present moment with that perspective in mind, that knowledge of how fleeting it all is and, suddenly, I feel free…free to be less concerned, for life is always moving, and whatever cares I have now, will all be absorbed by the inescapable passage of time.
The big question is, what will remain? Very small amounts of the details I am sad to say, but what does remain is very big. I described my childhood family with only a few words, a random and immediate response that I did not contemplate but abruptly appeared in my thoughts, an example of the ‘big’ memories that I kept…my mom in our kitchen with blackberries I had most likely just picked in the woods, stopping all she was doing to make a cobbler one summer afternoon, my dad in the yard, working to make our little house a home, my sister always playing ‘house’ in her small backyard playhouse my dad had struggled to build, my brother in the woods exploring the natural world with his beloved pup, and me, going to Miss Sue’s, one of my hundreds of visits to this magical place in the woods. That’s what I most remembered of those years and of those people.
I write this to remind myself how fleeting it all is, how wonderful it is to build a life with small occurrences, that for the most part, cannot be perfectly recalled, but all together, end up being the whole of our memories…it really is all about the little things.
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