The Same Thing

Memory still anoints them, glowing in the ashes of childhood. The cypress trees in the parkland at the end of the street. Tall, knotted ladders to the heavens where a child’s outstretched hand could almost scratch the underbelly of passing clouds. You could swing on the uppermost branches as if riding a clippers mast bending in the wind, sailing imaginary swells to places whose golden domes shone through the darkest days. And in the cool shadows, the old stable, its doorway an entrance to worlds not known to other mortals. The dark interior lipped on the edge of a cave to the very interior of earth, holding hells and lava lapped islands populated by exotic beasts. Such things as trees and tumbled down stables were not weighted with the burdens of this world but were bridges, magical doorways to an elsewhere that existed in between, a special place with its contours bending to shapes made in the mind. I write to do the same thing.