Rivers of Degrading Memory

Once upon a time I was merely prescient in genes and blood and air and water and other ingestions and digestions of our ancestors. Among these were Elders who may have stopped along the banks of the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers to drink from their sacred streaming source and fish and camp under maples and oaks nearby. When these elders return within prescient me to see these same rivers now, perhaps from nearly these same spots, now eight-lane concrete highways for transporting faster capital-invested competitions lacking sufficient slow river-time for healthy redevelopment, together we hear and smell, but dare not taste nor feel compelled to feel cool once-clear bathing and drinking water as when we were here back in the day and nights of great river love and life, happiness and vocationing prosperity with plenty of clean and delicious water and fresh fragrantly invigorating breezes of quiet joy with pine needles needless under sometimes naked running feet. But we, my generation and that before and before back discontinuously through industrializing and commodifying and commercializing and capitalizing degenerations, we are now trying to remind ourselves that what we currently must not drink or even taste, probably don't want to touch much less smell and even less actually jump into it and all the broken glass and rusted car parts embedded in its toxic death bed, this is what we must accept as our new normal. This unraveling of my Elders' rivers to the point of toxic exhaustion is my expected price of admission to all my New England happy birthdays for continuing prosperity and freedom and dignity for all, except the rivers and the air and those they feed, and the pine needle kindling that remembers our Elders to this day, back when we were more cooperatively invested in asking and responding to Why can't we all just get along together? Rather than compete for how rationally we could tear apart memories of Elders first seeing and hearing and smelling promising prescient delights of bountiful Hudson and Connecticut Rivers still healthy flowing for and with and of and in their great grandkids.