Buzz

I don't know if it's the nature of summer, or of infant care, or of shutting down much the apparatus of your life, but the memories are swarming these days.

It's almost like someone has taken a baseball bat to their hive.  They come spilling out, haphazard, buzzing, flying in no particular pattern.  And they sting- mildly, but every one of them stings.

Flat out on the living room floor, 2:30 PM, 16 years old and playing hooky, watching the sun's bars inch across the floor.

Walking and walking and walking through the summer streets of Bloomington; finding my shirt on the grass where I'd left it the night before.

Practicing after heartbreak; the melted crayon scent of that room.

Practicing after childbirth; a clawing back.

Practicing after a wedding, finger by finger.

Walking through downtown Indianapolis long after I'd lived there, weeping.

Walking circles around a house outside of Ypsilanti.

The last time my father said much that made sense: airport; weeping.

Weeping on planes.

Practicing and weeping.

(Too much walking and practicing and crying!  I regret nothing -and everything.)

The ache of one memory gives way to the mild throb of the next.  They are intensely specific, ragingly dull, searingly pointless.    I do not invite them, but must endure their arrivals and departures.  The people in them are gone, at least as they were.  The places in them are unutterably changed.