Can You Remember?

Can you remember being a child on a hot summer day, cut-off blue jean shorts, clean t-shirt that smells like Tide, running, climbing, playing? Your friends are called to dinner but your mother is working late so you amble home … disappointed they’ve had to go but pleased as the sweat begins to dry and you realize it smells sweet like fresh hay at Grandma’s, or the beach.

 Inside the white picket fence you recall the shade by the bay window at the side of the small white house and it's patch of clover so green it leans towards blue so you go and lie down to rest. The excited breath of your play slows, eyes closed for a moment or two until they open to a sky deep and blue like some fantasy painting of scudding clouds on an infinite pallet of possibility.

Can you remember the sense of well-being, limitless hope and the joy of friendship, this secret place where you know some other child has been? "John and Suzie" … handprints in the concrete under the old, used to be a carport, yet they are as much of you as this clover and this sky. They are as much of you as your dreams and the questions of youth and images of dappled shadows in the woods. Walk like an Indian, strong yet flowing as a cat on soft ground.

Can you remember when your breath was like honey dripping from a spoon, rich and golden, part of the light that danced in the corner or on the hardwood floor … reaching for you … asking you to reach back into it's dust dancing spell?

Can you remember them calling as you crouched under the house breathing the damp red clay? Calling, calling for you to come join them yet you could not. Like something was holding you back yet knowing all that caused you to remain is the witness that speaks from within.

“Stay … stay … here ... with me. They will always call and you will go until I am forgotten. Then you will ride the storm until your bones are broken and your flesh is dry and you begin once more to try and play in the whispers of light that still remember my name."