From the open balcony door the wind caught my ear. I raised my eyes from what I was reading – Les Miserables (1862) de Victor Hugo “Un texte du domaine public. Une édition libre. BIBEBOOK www.bibebook.com”) – to a sea of drifting cornstalks; and in the distance the faded base of shimmering upturned leaves. The whole was nonetheless critically defined, contrasting perhaps its mixture of golden verdancy with the dome of blue sky and the ribbon beneath of a meandering saddened river.
Sudden flourishes of cryptic memories of the AIA (Scenic and Historic Coastal Byway) along the North Atlantic coast from about St. Augustine, Florida southward. Happy yellow rich and balmy stores like charge to the heart. And then – back home – I saw fluttering in the distance a launch upon what was now shiny blue water mottled by cups of wind upon the surface. The two scenes – amid the piano of Florian Christi – blending, impossible to remove thinking of either.
A flock of small dark coloured birds passed before me from the shoreline and headed upland across the fields visibly struggling with the wind. From my ambivalent perspective the texture of the day combined the mirth of summer and the freshness of autumn. What a redeeming reunion after the grey clouds this morning and threats of rain. The accommodation of life was once again avoided. And by nothing other than recalcitrant stimuli, the voyage ever homeward. Like my favourite homemade fruit dessert, the sweet is at the bottom, the convincing but unsuspected blend of flax and locally harvested maple syrup.
As the shadows elongated darkening the trees on the opposite shore, my reverie lapsed to fundamental matters – details which we frequently recall but about which it is now far past the advantage of either promotion or dissolution. Oh! So many instances of choice. So many challenges and channels of thought. What could I have known otherwise? Was there no one to warn of danger?
But surely – whatever the insight or foresight -I would have had no other design? Was the contemplation though years out of sync purely then as now rhetorical? Moments are hardened onto the bark of the tree irrevocably and hastily. Turning back from the past is an inescapable peril – fiction or drama – but seldom change. We learn to live with what we’ve been and done, hopefully convincingly. The resplendent late summer evenings dwindle. The fresh breeze has now a whistle not a whisper. Soon again we shall heat ourselves.