introspective periscope : peeking inside since Y2K ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- silent these days 3 hours until the dawn - 27th august, 2005 "wherever i go, doesn't it show? It's you. Wherever i go, i want you to know, it's you."~marianne faithful I grow more and more introspective every day that you are gone. My words are silent and concave. My senses have been inundated with veins of things which are not, prophecies of things to come. I was driving back to work. It was raining but sprinkler systems on timers did their duties, flooding the summer sun-dried dusty landscaping of the industrial park. The scent of rain and an artery of something that smelled like fall, pleasant and promising, interrupted an overpowering sense of the summer when we had the Slip-n-slide set up in the front yard of our house in Syracuse. That summer, my lungs hurt from hurling my round belly into the ground after a running start, the air knocked out of them violently as my body heaved down the cold-water-wet slippery industrial grade strip of plastic. This was supposed to be fun. That summer, the bees came up from my father�s hives to drink because it wasn�t raining enough and I got my first bee sting. It didn�t hurt as much as everyone had cautioned that it would. My father squeezed the honey bee stinger from the bottom of my foot. As the bees convened on our homemade water park, we decided we were done slipping and sliding for the day. The bees drank heartily from muddy puddles formed where the plastic sheet was laid over the extended woody roots of a maple tree (is there a perfect yard for a Slip-n-Slide?) and we found something else to do. Later in my life, I learned was not a Slip-n-Slide at all but the knock-off version, the Wet Banana. The thing about Slip-n-Slides and their subsequent copy-cat counterparts (and their modified versions summer�s later: Crocodile Mile; you run, you slide, you hit the bump and take a dive!) is the smell. Warm plastic smells from the slide itself and the rubber hose water, squeezed through a �sprinkler apparatus�. Distinct. Unnatural�and yet, somehow familiar and comforting. The smell of rubber hose water reminds me of my father, the yellow banana-shaped mechanism that screwed onto the end of the hose, of honey bees, and all of the memories associated with those docile insects�all stream of consciousness to memories of other landmarks from a childhood over which I�ve given little thought�no reason to, really�the orange 55 gallon drum with the centrifuge for expelling the honey from the comb, canning fruit, my father peeling grapes for grape juice, blueberry and raspberry stains on white blankets...buckets of mud-pie lobbed at my mother�s white pants, gathering bowls of cherry blossoms, running from my grandmother and the fly swatter she aimed to spank us with, my grandmother mixing raspberries to a whip to have with angel food cake�chalk lines on the pavement, a fort in the weeds knocked down by the state, planting little magenta-coated kernels of corn and pinches of seeds in moist dirt�ramen noodles with vegetables and egg, raw rhubarb soaking in sugar water�riding a white huffy with pink roses with the appropriate �desert rose� moniker with the red screw on AM radio blaring Mr. Mister while I crooned along, feeling the wind in my very short hair like a music video on MTV that I�d caught when my parent�s weren�t home (we weren�t allowed to watch MTV). Overwhelmed at the scent of rubber hose so much so that, in that split-second moment, I contemplated stopping the wagon, taking off my sandals and running in the rain to play in the grass that nobody walks on under sprinklers that didn�t seem to notice it was raining already. A moment later, I was in the parking lot of my office building, gathering my messenger bag and cell phone, returning to my tasks. The misty rain wet the skin on my face and arms and bare toes. For all of the thoughts of summers that flooded me with the brief recognition of the rubber hose-smell, I could still detect a streak of autumn, a promise of the crisp clean that September and October will bring. Since you�ve been gone, the time dashes and drags its feet at once. Perhaps I will do better in these turns of the wheel to think of your absence in terms of the number of winters�the number of harvests�the number of plantings�the number of rebirths. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .what came before. - .what happened next. a diamond at the bottom of the drain - 20 october 2017 |
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