Sunrise

I thought the things we remember were supposed to be emotionally laden, shot through with fear or ecstasy,:what Virginia Woolf called "moments of being."  And sure, I've got memories of "being" my way through my children's births, winning things, hearing bad news, etc. etc.  But I also have all these sense memories of the mundane.

Why would I have retained running under that particular I-64 overpass in Richmond, VA?  What good does it do me to be able to revisit, with a clarity so exquisite it is almost painful, that one time I drove down Curry Pike in Bloomington, Indiana?   Or past a cheese mart in northeastern Ohio?  How about that random stadium in Cincinnati?

I don't understand the presence of these places in my mind, but I am not ungrateful.  It is reassuring, somehow, that memory isn't only a plot junkie, that it is capricious and perverse and, in the end, unknowable.  I find it oddly comforting that this particular sunrise might end up being as much a part of my remembered life as my first kiss or my son's first smile.

Half-hearted, today.  Clouds and a fine, humid tension to the air; cicadas and muted birds. Only a little pink to the sky, quickly wiped away.