Just the other day, jouncing along on our old tractor trying to fill the gullies along the side of our driveway where the rain had eroded the gravel, I caught sight of something yellow and, in a heartbeat, found myself transported back across the decades by the memory of a similar moment, one I¹d been moved to write about at the time.
Later, back in the house, I paged through old journals and found the sentences I¹d scribbled 32 years earlier, which are what follow.
*****
We were walking, my 10-year-old daughter Kia and I, up the path to the raspberry patch when we saw it.
Straight ahead, just above eye level, hung a bright yellow leaf.
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"Look," I said.
She nodded.
"It won¹t be long until fall."
She shook her head in disagreement. "It's just the middle of summer vacation," she said. "There's lots of time till fall."
I shrugged, not wanting to puncture the magic bubble called Summertime. We passed under the yellow leaf and a few minutes later it was forgotten, pushed out of mind by the sight and the touch and the taste of ripe red raspberries.
We picked for a long time, talking and laughing and just having fun. Since every third or fourth berry disappeared down our throats, it took quite a while to fill the pail.
But then we were done and it was time to head back to the house. We walked together, hand in hand, and when we passed under the yellow leaf I was careful to ignore it and talked instead about how good the raspberries would taste heaped on a mound of ice cream.
Later, after the sun was gone behind the trees and the whippoorwills were beginning their evening litany, I found myself thinking about the yellow leaf.
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How sad, I thought. Summer will soon be gone. Yet how valuable it is to see the yellow leaf and be reminded that summertime isn't forever.
Like life itself, it is too quickly gone - and that is what gives it its charm, its piquancy, its quality of magic.
These wonderful raspberry days will never last - a fact which only adds to their wonder.
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