By KATHLEEN GOEDERT

            My memories hang silent like multicolored pictures floating in dark timeless space. Some are immediate; recent, fragile like the new snow floating down just yesterday and again today. Others are the crucial memories which have molded and scarred me, from childhood and into adulthood.

            So much of every day is forgotten! It seems only the painful and the especially wonderful survive in our memories, but rarely the common details of each day: the snow frosting the rails on the deck, the dog sleeping on the couch next to me while I write.  Yet, even the difficult things can be forgotten, or at least dulled, over time: the painful deaths of my stepfather and more recently my brother and father-in-law. The pain does ease with time, whether I am ready to let it go or not.

            I anticipate with some pain and technically no “memory” as yet the deaths of others in my family, the predictable and the unpredictable, the friends who are older than me, my pets, but mostly those who are a lively part of my happy reminiscences: my summers water-skiing and fishing at the lake as a teenager, my family’s motor home trip across the U.S. and back across Canada, my daily walks with my English Springer Spaniel to visit my elderly neighbor. Places cause me some anticipatory grief as well: perhaps someday we will leave our small, happy house outside of our small town.  It will depend on what is required in the family—both older and younger generations. We are in between those generations now. But someday we will exchange one place for another, and this home will become a precious memory: seeing the deer in the yard, the graduation parties, the book-lined sunroom, and the comfortable “man-cave” in the basement.

            I gave up photography years ago in my attempt to ground myself in the present rather than constantly videotaping and taking pictures: recording, rather than participating. I wanted to really see things and people, especially our children, without having as my priority the act of taking a picture to keep for the future. I have spent much of my life trying not to remain in the past or dwell in the future but to exist as much as possible in the present. I’m not sure how well I have succeeded, however. Quite often, we relate to current situations with others from our perspective on and in the past. We project into the future from our past experience, whether negative or positive. 

            The present, as the saying goes, is a gift. Yet talking about all those yesterdays ranks high on the list of most-favored pastimes. We talk about our past experiences and what we have learned from them.  We remember what we said and what they said. We know what changed as a result of the interaction. Sometimes our impression of a situation has grown vague, but other times the impression it has made is so very acute that maybe it will never fade from memory.   

I anticipate with gratitude and thanksgiving the memories I do not yet have—the experiences yet to come. With sorrow, I reflect that there will be a time when memories will be all I have. The images and stories may hold steady as old age encroaches or else fade with time. There may be a moment when the reveries that taught and entertained me so much become nothing more than beautiful baubles that sparkled with wisdom.

* * *

Autumn Anniversary

By Kathleen Goedert

   The day will arrive

            soon

   and still I remember

all the details I must never forget

      of the time of your death:

The falling sheaves of gold

   and how they blew

  skittering down the street,

How warm it was

         for late October,

How my clothes didn’t fit,

     And how I nearly fell

             when I saw you.

I have not seen

   even a picture of you

    this past year:

But consider this…the

     benediction,

     the Grace

Of a golden warm autumn day,

  just like then,

  only today,

              Today.