Drifting memories

There is no substitute for the feel of paper in hand.  Real paper.  There is something about the substantive feel of something real that that can be picked up set down and come back to.  The experience of glancing through titles in neatly arranged rows – be they books, albums, CDs or DVDs – is a distinct experience from running through a listing on a screen.  I can pull a title off the shelf, begin reading and replace it knowing it is there.

Now I suspect that anyone who grew up digitally, with no comprehension of the recent past, would argue that all of this perusing could be accomplished equally easily with the touch of a button.   Nonetheless, the experience of looking at a physical selection is innately different in a couple ways.  First, it limits the selection to what is seen, present – particularly if we are looking through a personal collection, ours or someone else’s.  Either way, there is an intimacy in the objects that have been held and experienced by others; there is touch and smell and an emotional context, as well as sight and hearing.  There is also a randomness of chance encounter.  Each title is more than words.  Some are worn in unique ways or there is something in the material or design of the cover that beckons unceremoniously.  Thus, without realizing it we are drawn into a place of exploration and experience before we read the initial lines or move the needle into place that informs us in a way that descriptive summaries cannot.
Recently, sitting at the edge of a lake, I watched as a single leaf drifted downward from the crown of a nearby white birch tree and settled on a dock.  Retrieving the leaf, I had looked around for the source, that single individual releasing its fluttering fledgling to the wind.   All of the shorelines of the small lake were visible then.  Clusters of cottages kept watch as clouds raced toward the distant opposing shore, circling around a single island, its inhabitants – trees, bushes and presumably herbaceous and fungal plants clustered equally densely on the floor and  beneath the concentrated forest canopy a host of animal inhabitants co-existing in a paradise known only to them.  So dense was the visible vegetation that the potential for humans to venture inland, despite an easy paddle to the shore, seemed untenable.

Sitting still, I watched as a pair of Bald eagles soared against the winds along the westerly shore.  They circled downward and alighted on a branch at the top of a pine tree.  Sitting there, they surveying their surroundings inquisitively, their voices rising into the wind, until they lifted gracefully into its current.  They followed their same pathway away along the shore until they became curved lines, like a distant bird scratched into a water color wash in a gesture of completion, then circled behind the island and disappeared from view.

This experiencing a moment, capturing a memory, reminded me of another time when I witnessed a row of screech owl fledglings assembled on the bottom branch of a white pine.  I had heard first their soft cooing, before my eyes adjusted to the descended darkness and saw their gremlin shapes neatly arranged in a row.  It was then, at that moment, that I thought of running for a camera to capture this image; who, after all, would believe such a spectacle.  Then thought twice about it.  Instead I remained still, in the shadows, and watched as each owlet took brief introductory flights of exploration before returning to the branch.  They did this for some time, flying further with each outing – then were gone into the darkness.

Sitting on the shore in the aftermath of the eagles visit and exodus was when I picked up the leaf, the single leaf that I had seen fall.  A couple had joined us on the beach and hastily set up a camera on a tri-pod.  They aimed it strategically into the wind with the island in the background and, I presumed, placed themselves in front of the lens, set the timer and captured their time there, on the beach – a moment as fleeting as that single leaf’s descent.  They will experience that moment later, an image of a moment by a lake on a screen.  Not dissimilar at all to the process of swiping or clicking methodically through a selection of digital titles.

Returning to our cabin, I placed the leaf between the pages of a book.  Choosing to capture that single yellow leaf, an ordinary and mundane specimen distinguished by its mottled brown drying edges and a small hole gnawed into its veined surface, could be seen as my pathway to memory, much as the couples’ captured image speaks to theirs.  Later, as I pull titles from the shelf, I will shuffle through the pages and discover this single leaf.  Perhaps, I will turn the leaf in my hand, fold it back between the pages and wonder how it came to be there.  Still, in that act of retrieving that single book, in discovering there the dried leaf, turning it in my hand I may momentarily retrieve the memory captured by its fall.  There, will be the eagle’s flight, and even the couples’ captured grasp of fleeting time.  Perhaps in that moment of rediscovering that single drifted leaf tucked between the pages I will see the mist, close enough to touch from the end of the dock when I first ventured to the shore, unaware that an island waited beyond sight.

D.E. Bentley

Editor, Owl Light News