We see with our mind's eye.
When I look at Honda Odysseys I see hearses. Hearses were shaped like that when I was growing up.
Looking at chilly, wet, leaf strewn yards late in the day makes me feel at home and centered. I am reminded of evenings when my mother came home from work my senior year of high school and we were ready for dinner. Our family gathered and lamps shed their warm yellow light in cozy puddles around the living room, assuring us that all was right with the world.
Trains bring back memories of long summer nights in the fifties when my sister and I were tucked into our bunkbed and the world was safe and snug with my parents close by. We could hear the distant chug and plaintive wail of the trains across town and I imagined folks in them, their heads silhouetted against the lighted windows.
The smell of vegetable beef soup frames a picture of us sitting around the dining room table for lunch when I was three and my dad came home for lunch from the U of I.
And so it goes through out my life. I am always half here and half some place in the past where the warmth came from feeling safe and loved in a family that changed everything except their ways of being.
Automobiles were snug places that held the whole family safe on the roads at night. Homemade cheeseburgers eaten on plates we held in our laps while watching television were Sunday night rituals. And moving meant packing it all up and moving to a new house or even town, secure in the knowledge that nothing important would change. There would always be mom and dad and the four of us forever and ever.
Until there wasn't.
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