Precious Memories

It’s not hard for the hidden memories to find us. Often just showing up in life wakes them up.

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Ah, April, the barefoot days of youth begin.
Who forgets? Memories persist, never die, though they lie buried,
Sleeping at peace in the inner chambers of our souls,
Like us, like nature, waiting to live again.

Flash-backs recollect and resurrect with taste:
A watermelon, thick, pale red, juicy, black seeds,
Transports back, relief from the heat of the day.
Mama’s call comes again, clearly resonates.

The blueberry patch, we ate more than we kept,
The strawberries, wet with dew,
The wild blackberries, thorns like barbed wire,
The cobbler worth the barbed conflict.

The fishing hole, the swimming pool,
And beach that stole our hours,
The secret climbs in sturdy oaks,
The bike rides up to town.

We stand in shadows, in the shade of a tall pine tree,
Matt and I, yesterday, in Woodbine, barely a town,
Caught in the same time warp as our memories.
Empty sidewalks, a vacuum of stifling heat. Nothing moves.

Around the corner they come. One bike, two boys.
One peddles, the other rides free, standing on the rear wheel struts.
Summer is getting closer, South Georgia at its best.
They own the road. They own the scene. They own the day.

Like cumulus clouds in motion slow they pass by unconcerned,
Going nowhere fast. Which may be the point of it all.
In shorts, shoeless, shirtless, oblivious, all they need to own,
No watch, no wallet, no wireless, no worry.

They will likely not recall this day, for memory seeps in slow.
They have today what we had in ours, freedom just to be.
Though they or we give little thought to what it means,
Still they know it, not in words, but in how it feels.

We feel it, too, the frosty Kool-Aid days of years gone by.
We hear a song, familiar, unforgotten, from a church far away,
“Precious memories, how they linger, how they ever flood my soul
In the stillness of the midnight, Precious, sacred scenes unfold.”

O, if only life were always so simple,
as in the barefoot days of our youth.



Bud Hearn
April 27, 2018