Shakes here...
Standing out back behind my office, a cool breeze cut through the warm, heavy air, and for a moment I could smell mulberries, the scent of which always takes me back to a time that I recall without words or much meaning at all—when I was still a toddler, and the tiny house we lived in had a backyard with a big mulberry bush. The moment got me thinking about memory, which is, perhaps strangely, one of my favorite topics of directionless, daydreamy contemplation. From the moment I was old enough to look backwards at a definable period, and realized there seemed to be a particular feeling with which I associated it, I began to wonder occasionally how I would remember the time I was in at the moment. I'd even make predictions, but of course by the time I was looking backwards, the predictions had faded, not to be recaptured.
I kicked off my sandals and walked barefoot in the grass while I smoked a cigarette, and I started to think about how I might recall this time, five or ten or twenty years from now. Will I remember hopefulness, anger, fear, which I seem to feel in equal measure? Will this, too, have passed, ending not with a bang but a whimper, and lay itself across my memory with less effect than I expect? The tones and shades of my memory of this time may well be influenced by how the nation chooses to regard it.
