August 8, 2012

Blank, mostly blue sky, how empty it looks without the clouds, higher and more smooth, more lonely.  No cicada sound this morning, just still air, green, and sunlight making some places much deeper in shade.  The golden wood of the crepe myrtle trunks is warm and inviting to the touch, the sun glinting off the water bowl is an invitation to coolness the birds are ignoring this morning.  Actually, it's been a slow morning for birds, and I have not seen the cat either, nor the squirrels.  The backyard is so quiet it might be a painting of summer instead of the actuality.

I found a poem by the new poet laureate of the country that talks of summer and memory.

Theories of Time and Space

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion – dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp – buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry – tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph – who you were –
will be waiting when you return

Natasha Trethewey

I guess that's something we all learn at one time or another, there really is no going home.  You take your changed self with you, and even at the end when Mom said she wanted to go home, home to North Carolina, it would not have been what she remembered.  I took a blank book, one Becky had given me home to write things in, and it went missing, vanished, blank but for a few scribbles in the front.  Perhaps it was meant to stay blank, even the smaller plain book I bought to replace it is still blank, but I brought photos home, lots of photographs of the history of our family, some old enough that no one now living remembers the people in them, saved in black and white in moments of staring at the camera, or the person taking the picture.  Many though are of times we would have forgotten but for the shadows on stiff paper, glossy and smoothed out.  Sometimes the person you were staring out of the photo is a surprise to the person you are now, and you wonder if the two of you would get along, would have anything to say to each other, if that person on the paper is so long gone that there can be little connection between you.  Yet . . . there is still something there, something that reminds us of what was, some part of us held in light and shadows stepping out to be remembered.  And, we do remember, a tug in our hearts for what we were then and what we will become.