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chalkdog
Sometimes a thing you find in a junk shop is just that: junk. It’s a relic that smells of rust and oil, and it might spark if you plug it in without checking the cord.
Sometimes, if the light hits it just right, it’s a conduit for a memory you should have held on to a little tighter.
This one, for example: a long walk back from the watermelon field on a hot, damp, yellow afternoon, back to the farmhouse with the little canning porch off the kitchen, the woods in a riot of bugsong all around. A chained wooden swing that creaks just so when you bend your tired legs and sit.
There’s a junky trellis made of cast-off lengths of pipe, low enough to hold a hummingbird feeder just over the snapdragons. The little birds zip to and fro by the dozen at this time of day, red throats flashing. You rest a bit and watch, with a long-awaited glass of iced sun tea chilling your hand. The old fan purrs along, swiveling slowly on the porch’s one table, doing its job in no particular hurry.
Back then you wished for that coveted mechanical breeze to carry you away to some other place, where your youthful concept of time could trick you into thinking it spun a little faster. But now, as you blow dust off the metal in that tricky sunbeam, you wish for nothing more than to lean back a little on that porch swing, just for a minute, so you can hear your grandmother humming in the kitchen behind you one last time.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, Jenn Wilson and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
