I’ve decided there may be a time and a place for everything,
but place has a distinct effect on time, and access to the place of a memory
only makes it stronger.
We spent yesterday at the Brimfield
Flea Market, a massive week-long event extending over two miles. Brimfield’s
whimsically pink town hall is where our daughter was married over 20 years ago,
and yet it feels like only a handful of years past.
My Guy grew up in the town we live
in and he can point to where his nursery school used to be, and to this day, on
his bike, he’s still dodging the same telephone pole on Main
Street that he dodged as an eight-year-old. The
field where he played softball might now be a solar farm, but those memories
are as fresh for him as if they happened last month.
On the other hand, my own childhood –
spread out over Virginia, Oklahoma, and back again to Virginia – feels long so ago
it could make me a believer in the concept of past lives. Surely it was in
another life that my neighborhood gang dug a giant hole one summer – with no
purpose other than to dig a big hole, and it was in some previous era that I
walked barefoot across the still-hot flagstones of my grandfather’s driveway,
the summer cicadas chirping in the trees. It feels that long ago.
Time is infinitely flexible. A lifetime ago can feel only minutes past when the triggers are right. And yes, you are right, it can also seem like a past life. Even the past life of a stranger.
ReplyDeleteit's all relative. my childhood, like yours, seems long ago even though I have no real sense of time passing. I couldn't tell you if a particular event happened ten years ago or twenty.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you. My childhood was long, long ago.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard for me to fathom that a decade has already passed since I hit retirement age. And two decades ago, I was a completely different person than I am today. But every once in awhile, I'll relive something in my past and it seems like just yesterday. Time is a liquid, it seems. :-)
ReplyDeleteTime and geography is a good link. It makes sense.
ReplyDeleteTime, or our sense of it, is a funny thing. Sometimes, it seems like I've just existed for minutes, and sometimes the past does seem long ago.
ReplyDeleteI suppose remaining in the same place, and being in touch with the same physical reminders, gives your husband's past a sense of immediacy that yours doesn't have. I can see that.
ReplyDeleteIt is a bit of a rubber sheet, isn't it. Flexes all over the place. A lot of the old b/w photos my mother took, haul me right back to my first Christmas, and I am once more agog at the magic of that strange tree!
ReplyDeleteMy favorite photos are of me and the family ginger cat, (now there was a forecast...), one of me in my playpen on the porch, joined by the cocker spaniel AND the cat...it was yesterday. It was a day ago. I still remember the sun.
As long as we can remember it, it's not that long ago.