Smoke

Upon walking out the back door this morning, entering the yard, I had one of those strange experiences of walking not onto one's own property, but into a property of time and memory, where one world, the world at hand, disappears for a moment and is replaced by a world kept alive in the deepest recesses of recollection, of sensation and scent, the invisible bonding fabric of what has been, is no longer, yet somehow still exists, as immediate as laughter, as sharp as pain. I was swept away by the smell of autumn leaves burning, and saw in my mind's eye the little brown and reddish mound my father had set fire to in the street gutter beneath our row of unclothed maple trees, their old garments tossed casually upon the grassy banks as if upon the shoulders of a rumpled bed. The smoke from the smoldering leaves remembered the crispness of a northern clime and whispered tales of rakes and brooms, and swirls of wind, and crackling, dust-shedding cyclones kicked up from the toes of tennis shoes, and of the bing cherries that had fallen between the back porch and vacant, impecunious garden and now bled blackly between the crooked arms and the gnarled fingers of the earth hugging roots. A blond-haired boy stands at the center of the yard, of the world, the smoke, the wind, the sun, the red and brown and yellow leaves, and thinks of apples from the neighbor's tree, and of walnuts and chestnuts, of this certain sort of like and unlike splendor which must both always be and must soon be washed away, little knowing, still far from conceiving, that the bounty will end up on the other side of space and time, spilling from the inexhaustible cornucopia of memory into an old gray man's back yard.