Slivers

     Playing outside. In the early spring. In the house on the hill. We learned from a slightly older cousin, who lived in the city and had been exposed to Catholic schooling so she should know, about the creation of life. If you take a corncob, wrap it in mud and breathe on it, it will come alive. We were always ready to meet new playmates, so we spent some time rolling old corncobs in mud, and bringing them to be breathed upon and then placed in the old nesting boxes against the side of the deserted barn. Whether we checked the progress later is forgotten. the hope lay in the moment where life was to be created; the future was ahead and so didn't affect what we were doing.

    Another lesson may have been given during that same time. I have a vivid memory of the mud puddles being covered with a very thin layer of ice. If you stepped on the frozen layer with the water beneath, you could see patterns just beneath the surface. And if you stepped just a certain way, you could form the shape of a number of different things. I carefully was able to make out the shape of  a little dog, but I was unable to retrieve it from its icy covering. I could see it was there, but it would slip away.

   It was a memory I still have of not being able to capture what I thought I could see. I think of this now when time is running short, and thousands of other recollections flash through my mind, just glimmers of past times and events. Mostly, the memories, those sudden clarified images of the past, are unrecounted, as no listener is within earshot. At  times  my mind is jolted by a scene from the past and a person is present, and I am tempted to verbalize the vivid memory.  I think it's a truth that all such glimmers of a past life matter only to the one who has lived through that life. What happens in the past stays in the past..