Morning Maudlin Maunderings

Lately Susan’s garage sales prep has been making for an odd mood, stirring up as it does old memories attached to the stuff from the old house which has been in storage for years. They are like memories made solid, often of ‘stuff’ you had forgotten, stirring up the ambience of a time. Not particularly stuff you care to keep, but redolent of things that once were from a time now gone.

I have plenty of ‘relics’ from Loop Drive, but they have several new ‘layers’ of experience on them. When I see stuff I haven’t seen for, say, fifteen years, I get a fresh steaming slice of nostalgia, not goods that have been going stale on the shelf.

But it’s time this morning to stride forward into how things are; to watch cartoons and pray the Litany and my Rosary, to bake chicken legs when everyone’s gone to run the sale, to check the mail. And so Time recedes ever dimmer and dimmer into the past, while the future unrolls before us into unguessed panoramas, clutching the battered souvenirs that we desperately hope will anchor us to our lives and our lost ones. But so it goes. It’s possible my new books will start coming in today; tomorrow almost for sure. Must keep the flag of Now flying. Here at 6 AM it’s time for old Popeye cartoons; so the past flows into the present.