The Lantern

We are so many different people in one lifetime.

It is what it is. Either walk on, or accept.

I marveled at how they were all closed up, asleep with their secrets unseen until you reached up and took the book down from the shelf.

Even as winter comes, mornings are crisp, and the big, blue sky seems to hang newly washed over the sea of hills.

When I as reading and writing, I was in that exhilarating place where the life of the imagination is more real than the tiles and soil and rock under my feet.

Sometimes you can tell all you need to know about a person just in the way they ask the question: politely, or with genuine curiosity, denoting a fine understanding of all it might reveal – from a rich inner life to a point of compatibility between strangers.

I have heard it said that a happy childhood is a curse, because what follows can never measure up. All I can say is, those people must want too much; they can't accept that life is a series of struggles and that happiness can be found in overcoming them, drawing strength from the reserves laid down in the good years.

I sometimes wonder how much of our life is rooted in the imagination, in the stories we tell ourselves and others in order to make sense of what has happened along the way.

You can look at a photograph, years later, of a place that is vivid in your memory, and find that it looks nothing like the pictures filed in your brain. Only a few specific details will tally exactly, making the rest a strange reminder of what has been forgotten.

Some scents sparkle and then quickly disappear, like the effervescence of citrus zest or a bright note of mint. Some are strange siren songs of rarer origin that call from violets hidden in woodland, or irises after spring rain. Some scents release a rush of half forgotten memories. And then there are the scents that seem to express truths about people and places that you have never forgotten: the scents that make time stand still.

Adrenaline fizzed in my veins, provoking that surge of self-doubt you get sometimes on the edge of some high place, that you might - just might- throw yourself off, powerless to stop it from happening.