Childhood
Memory: I am six years old, lying on the silvery, mica-flecked sandbanks of the creek. I am wearing only swimming trunks, and the sun is burning on my back. I am watching the slow, exhausted lashing of battered salmon as they arrive at the last cascade of Swiftcreek, their ancestral spawning beds. They have completed the five-hundred-mile journey from the sea. They will give birth and die. For the first time in my life, I feel the immense dignity of life’s determination to prevail over death. I fall passionately in love and slide down into the cold waters of the creek to join them. I am a fish.
Memory: The first snow, two, maybe three years ago. It falls at dusk, late afternoon. The world is hushed, and the children run out through the back door and hurl themselves into it, making snow angels. After hesitating, I run out, too, coatless, and fling myself in between them, making a man-sized angel between the cherubim.
Memory: Deep winter. Bam, Ziz, and I are curled up together on the couch in front of a blaze of pine knots in the fireplace. Our hands dig into the greasy popcorn bowl while a blizzard howls outside the picture window. I light a candle and begin to read to them from Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
~Michael O’Brien (Plague Journal)
Memory: The first snow, two, maybe three years ago. It falls at dusk, late afternoon. The world is hushed, and the children run out through the back door and hurl themselves into it, making snow angels. After hesitating, I run out, too, coatless, and fling myself in between them, making a man-sized angel between the cherubim.
Memory: Deep winter. Bam, Ziz, and I are curled up together on the couch in front of a blaze of pine knots in the fireplace. Our hands dig into the greasy popcorn bowl while a blizzard howls outside the picture window. I light a candle and begin to read to them from Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
~Michael O’Brien (Plague Journal)
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