We have these moments in our life, small but potent, when we're so immersed in the present that it etches a photographic snapshot onto the walls of our memory.*
Before leaving my home, a photographer friend asks me to stand in my red shirt against a rainbow-stitched weaving from Guatemala so she can take a picture of me to put in her phone. At the last instant, I become a self-conscious teenager again and make the same gaping, open-mouthed expression of delighted surprise. It’s a hideous photograph. My friend says it makes her smile.
* * *
The wind suddenly comes, unannounced and with no warning. The thin lower branches on the tree are shaking, shivering, almost bowing. It reminds me of the Japanese tradition of greeting to which I was expected to adhere while living there: to bow lower, in alternating rhythm again and again, always trying to pay deeper homage, more respect to the other, my elder.
* * *
I gently place my hand atop my new hospice patient’s as I tell her I’ll come back to visit another day. She grabs my hand with both of hers and holds on tightly despite the papery frailty of her bird-like fingers. She beams a smile, wide and bright, through my eyes and into my soul.
* * *
I hold a humongous red poppy in my two hands, cupped like the caress of a lover. I feel the nighttime’s rain on the waxy petals. I rub my finger on the inside and the pollen comes off, wet paint on my finger. I can write a book with that deep, black-purple ink.
* * *
I see her dash, my Sage – dog of all chasiness. Far down the wet-pebbled beach she goes to play with the river otter she sees bobbing up and down in the small waves of the Sound, a few yards from shore. That otter teases her - coming closer, backing up – testing my dog’s apparent resolve never to dog paddle except in emergencies. I silently thank that part of my dog that prevents her from remembering she knows how to swim.
* * *
A red flash! I gasp. The sapsucker. Back again this year. He darts to the thin alder, second tree in from the edge of the road. A while later I am driving: a robin flies horizontal to my path, fast enough to avoid my windshield…but only by a few inches. I gasp twice.
* * *
A friend says “hug me again” when I come to visit her at work. She is telling me about the “senseless” murder of her coworker, a mother of two young children. Her eyes fill with tears and I wonder why they don’t spill out down her cheek, soaking her shirt, making a river that runs out the open warehouse door behind her.
Remember those moments this week that stood still for you in the busy fray of your day. Reweave one of those memories back into the fullness of your life by giving it attention, cherishing it.
(Orig. written/posted in June 2012.)
*I'm almost finished reading Anthony Doerr's wonderful Memory Wall and I attribute my phrasing above to him.
