Forever and a Moment
The eternal sunshine of a present mind
Childhood felt like an endless summer. There was no “time to kill,” only hours to live. To run til our hearts and lungs were bursting. There were few pictures to take, nowhere to post them.
Moments lived in minds, instead of in our hands or in the Cloud, we laid our backs on the grass and drew shapes in the clouds. Those moments were eternities, rose colored, because we were there to see them. To feel them. To be them.
Racing around the neighborhood, free as carousels, our bikes went as fast as the Flash. Big brothers went even faster still. Roaming with friends from one house, to another, to another. Trampolines and running through yards, dirty, exhausted, and alive.
No fear.
Until Mom’s whistle rang out, loud and commanding over rolling Appalachian hills, joining the chorus of crickets rising with the setting sun. Time to head home, time to have dinner. Talking only to each other, because there was no one there to text under the table.
Life was in front of us, instead of behind a screen.
Perhaps childhood seemed like an endless summer because we were not distracted. We didn’t exit our lives and enter into a digital one. We were present in the moment, every simple or complex moment, of every day.
It wasn’t spotless, and it wasn’t all sunshine. Much of it was fleeting and many days were difficult. But even when our shoes squelched in the rain, because we spent too long outside, again, we ran with all our hearts and all our minds and all our strength.
We laughed and we cried. We played. We fell and we felt and we tried, over and over.
An eternal moment; an endless summer.
We lived and we were really there for it.
—Anna