Reply-Wind...(A)

I like that previous piece very much. Often with the kids when I find the pressure mounting I think of the future as the past, i.e., the memories I'm making right now. And surely it is enough to stop me from my petty concerns and frustrations and remember to be more loving and let the little things slide.

Your evocation of childhood summers in Maine is beautiful, I wish i had something equally evocative to share but I think as a kid I lived so much inside my own head in fantasies and books. I didn't have a lot of friends and the ones I did have were also kind of nerdy bookish types and we reveled in writing and passing notes making up jokes and stories. There is a certain sort of nostalgia for summer days, but mostly having to do with hanging out with my Dad doing something car related. It's those bonds with the now dead you're talking about too, the physicality of them finite, the memory of them ephemeral. But, if passed on, the bond is unbroken and it is almost as good as the concrete reality. But there are infinite stretches within that "almost" to be sure. Reality wants to teach you that missing someone you love that is dead is a self-indulgent nostalgia, what else can it be? I'm still trying to figure that out.

It's funny when I have memories the kind that pause you in your tracks, the kind that the wind brings to you through an open window on a summer's day, they're often of the trip I took in Europe by myself. Maybe it was reading all those Sherlock Holmes books that made the U.K. feel more like my childhood memories! (Problem is, Europe and its cultures really have nothing to do with me or my background. Paging adult identity crisis...) Anyway, I suppose we're not responsible for what speaks to us, although it's our choice whether to respond.

I don't find myself yearning for the past at all. But what I know I need to stop doing is this amorphous waiting although it's not done consciously. Living in the present sounds so simple, and I guess it is. But it feels like a struggle most times.

Alessandra-- I just found this bit of writing. I guess the time for writing comments is passed and it will only let me tag on. I think it makes sense that your Europe trip is what you pause for. I think that was your childhood. The time you let yourself be. The time when life that was swirling around you was just a backdrop to whatever you were doing in that moment. If you were a bit bound in books as a child, this was your "doing" childhood--your physical one.  I'd love to read some accounts of that time. As I suggested before, you could copy old journal in or just write a recollection.