water-bugs dancing

Ghosts--they come in all shapes and sizes and forms. This week we discovered the image of a bird on our window.  Our theory is the bird--probably a dove--was fleeing from a hawk and in its panic mistook the reflection of the window for the sky.  The image left on the window is ghostly.  I can see individual feathers.  I can see the eye.  I can see the life and the fear.

Ghost of a bird
Photo by Wes Reid 11/2014

This ghost, this moment, is captured in an image.  Some moments are captured in sounds (those songs from middle school dances take me back every time).  Some moments are captured in taste--chicken soup at Grandma's house. Some moments are captured in smell.

My observations this week seemed to center around smell.   The smoke drifting from the chimney takes me back to backpacking trips--those chilly mornings when I build a fire while Wes is off fishing and Marisa sleeps in the tent (field-notes 11-8-14).  Earlier in the week, I raked leaves and again it was the smell that stood out to me.  I found myself raking the leaves with Megan and Marisa and watching them jump in the leaves, laughing and squirming when the itchy bits of leaves crawl into their clothes (field-notes 11-4-14).  I'm sure the act of raking was, in part, what took me back to those days, but I think the thick, decaying smell made the memory more real.

I'm not sure if everyone is moved by scent, but it seems to be a strong catalyst for me.  I know that when I run down the Sparks Boulevard path past willow bushes and cattails, the smell of the willows takes me back to the ditch banks of my childhood--building forts with my brother and cousins, looking for wild asparagus, watching water-bugs dance on the ditch water.   These smells seem to carry moments from the past that hover over the present, merging the two.

In many ways, I think the past is always hovering waiting to remind us of previous joys, previous sadness, previous life.  In the novel Beloved, one of Toni Morrison's characters, Sethe, is explaining to her daughter, Denver,  that places hold memories, that the past lingers  In the novel, Denver asks Sethe about the past:
                        "If it's still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.'
                        Sethe looked right in Denver's face.  'Nothing ever does,' she said" (Morrison 44).

I think the point is that memories have life; they linger like ghosts, and, I believe, there are triggers that evoke those memories--wanted or not.

Morrison, Toni.  Beloved. New York: Vintage, 2004. Print.