How To Remember

It’s a little bit windy and more leaves are falling — golden flickers in the lovely bright and beautiful sunlit, almost always blue skies of southeastern USA. There are a few gray and white clouds, suggesting a little more rain, floating lowly. It’s the last of the leaves and it’s starting to make me crave going home — with all that that might mean. Don’t ask me why. It might be Christmas-magic conjuring spells that call for lonely.

I’m reaching out, in my soul, for those I’ve known that brought that magic to me at the first of my being. I miss them — those who’ve mostly gone — one way or another. I wonder if he’s still alive — that boy I knew when I was seventeen. I want to go and find him or visit the city where I knew him just to see if that old magic can be brought back to feel another time. That city I made my own to visit when I felt I missed him more than I could stand — but I’m afraid to know the truth now even though I know my time is moving on and there might not be many chances.  For years he twinkled when he saw me if I showed myself or when he came to see me on his own — he missed me some too.

Home again, home again — where was or is that home?

I have barrels of tears from those days. They seem to make cycles. His friend’s father was a music man and his friend’s father’s girlfriend made sticky buns that smelled yummy in a little house made for squirrels under a big tree and we were among the drums speaking — it all made the falling in love easy. I wanted to live like that forever.

I never have known how to let a thing go gracefully. Sticky buns are sticky. It isn’t easy for me to make those happy moments so I store them for remembering like how to remember roses in December so December isn’t too bleak.

More leaves fall and rush off in wind to go wherever they go. I try to make the longing thoughts go with them but my feet are far too itchy. What to do with the cats and where to get a car that can make the trip is a trouble. Maybe I should just move there where the trillion memories live that were good enough to store for December. Maybe it won’t be December when I get there, but, after all, it comes again every year. I can be there waiting for the Christmas-magic that always seems to call for being lonely.