It’s Sunday, and for once in Titahi Bay there is very little wind. Jamie stands on the deck in his backyard and listens to the tuis chortle and sing. Their unique song is a range of whistles, pops, and hollow clicks. Over the rise and less than one hundred meters west is Titahi Bay beach. He listens for that distinct note of waves breaking at a distance, and hears the slightest shush. Close by, the pointed fingers of a cabbage tree tickle themselves in a slow breeze.
He rubs his eyes, which ache slightly after a night of heavy drinking. I’m surrounded, he thinks, by sounds I recognize, but of which I am natively unfamiliar. Memories filled with of the resonance of blue jays are almost inaccessible. The past, unless it is a vivid flashback, must be created. He tries to focus his attention on a memory wherein he lies on his back in early summer and watches the cottonwood cotton drift against a pure, blue sky. The event was real, but the thought of it feels contrived, somehow false. A doubt troubles his mind. When do we stop growing up? When is it we reach the age we are? He remembers a line from the Duino Elegies where the reader is told that there is noplace we can remain.
Without a signal of its intent, the tui shoots from its perch and disappears. The wind dies. Even the relentless surf seems to pause for breath.
2 comments:
Had a similar kind of feeling the other day as I was kicking (what I *think* are) horse chestnuts while walking down the sidewalk here, and I thought about those big spikey bramble-y things that used to be littered along Indianapolis. I haven't seen them anywhere else.
Those spikey bramble-y things were probably gum tree seed pods. Not the Australian gum tree, but gum tree, none the less.
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