Summer/July

The Haunting Memories

The summer is at its peak. The chipmunks dither in the grass while the floral markers of the season pass by in generational pomp and color before my dimming eyes. Spots of yellow, white and blue crowd each other out to seek the momentary focus of a patterned sunlight. It occurs to me that I have been the only true viewer of these changing scenes for the past three summers since my wife died, a universe of years having elapsed under my feet. Memories haunt these woods I live in: searching through them each year with Jean for the prized coral mushrooms that poked their rough, calcareous fingers through the matted pine needles like bony eruptions on the forest floor; harvesting handfuls of wintergreen leaves and rubbing them until they gave off the pungent-sweet smell of toothache drops; awaiting the arrival of the "mercury" of the wood, the orange-red cinnabars, a chanterelle that sprouted in predictable patches along the roadside; picking at summer’s waning the odd straggler of lavender chicory or yellow coreopsis as specimens to be brought home to languish in vase or bottle until their delight withered from our view; looking up through the tops of pines to sight the fleetingly evasive pine warbler, its liquid notes bursting from tree to tree as it escorted us to the edge of the woods and beyond the border of its tuneful domain.

All these things still haunt me as I pass these ghosts who slowly fade away when summers leaves are sere and lifeless and the fall returns with that same old lonely sadness in its wake.

A few lines from Hardy. To any one of us, perhaps.

When the present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed like new-spun silk, will the neighbors say, “He was a man who used to notice things like that”?