Reliving the Past

I went to the Orem festival last night with some friends. I think the last time I went to the Orem festival I was around ten years old. As we drove down the streets that I've ridden on for 18 years and walked through the park that I spent my childhood summers at--climbing trees and going to baseball games. A flood of memories streamed into my mind. I got that empty feeling in my stomach that you get when you miss someone or something. I thought it was the place that I missed...but I realized it was my childhood. Then I smiled a little inside when I thought, I had the best childhood anyone could ask for! Usually we express grattitude for the things we have...well today, I'm grateful for what I had. I'm grateful for the chance I got to live a worry free childhood. Several people close to me did not have that same opportunity and my heart goes out to them. I'm lucky to be able to go back to where I grew up and have pleasant memories of that place. It's one of the sadest things for me to hear when someone says they had a hard childhood. No one should have to go through some of the things these people had to go through as a child. So from this day on, I'm making it a goal of mine to make sure my future children have the best childhood I can provide them with. Once again; you get one life, one chance, one childhood--so live like you'll die tomorrow and dream like you'll live forever.

 

Food for Thought

Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.
~ From the television show The Wonder Years

The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold,
Of being only four years old.
~Christopher Morley, To a Child

We do not remember days; we remember moments. 

~Cesare Pavese, The Burning Brand

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town.  Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.  Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once.  A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth. 

~Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses