Today was special in a quiet way I didn’t expect. I woke up and the memories were just there, waiting, like they had been sitting on the edge of the bed all night. I don’t know where they came from. No photo album, no song on the radio triggered them. They just showed up, vivid and complete, like I could step right back into them.
First it was the lake, the one out in the forest where the trees opened just enough to let the sun fall straight down. The water was always cold for the first minute, that cold that makes you gasp and then somehow your body forgets. We would swim out to the platform and sit on it with our knees up, water dripping off our noses. The air smelled like pine sap, warm mud, and suntan lotion, and you could hear someone’s transistor radio crackling up on the bank.
Later, when we were shivering and wrinkled, we would pull ourselves out and crowd around the little fire pit ringed with stones, with marshmallows stuck on whittled sticks. We always said we wanted them golden brown, but we would hold them too close and they would puff and blister and catch fire, and we would blow them out fast and eat them still steaming, black on the outside and molten in the middle, tasting like smoke and sugar and lake water.
Then the memory turned to night as fast as summer nights do. Catching fireflies in Mason jars with the lids poked full of holes by a nail. We ran barefoot through tall grass that tickled our ankles, holding our breath so we would not scare them, cupping them soft in our hands around that little pulse of light. We thought we were keeping them safe. We lined the jars up on the porch rail and watched them blink at each other, out of sync and then, for just a second, all together, like they were talking.
What got me today was how physical it all felt. Not just pictures in my head but the feeling itself. The tug of wet swim trunks, the itch of mosquito bites on my shins, the way your palm sweats around cool glass. I could feel how serious it all was then, how a perfect afternoon at the lake or one more firefly in the jar was the most important thing in the world. We didn’t know to call it childhood. It was just life, just what you did until someone called you in for supper.
I sat with it most of the day and didn’t try to explain it away. Maybe some memories just get tired of waiting in the back and decide to come forward to say hello now and then. It was special, not big or loud, just clear and kind. For a little while I was out there again, in that cold lake and that dark yard full of slow lights, and I felt grateful to have had both places to come from and to still carry them with me today.
