In it is summer, and midday, and immortality

~ Live & Learn

“He was an art student, and he spent the day at the lake drawing a study of sky and clouds. Nothing else. The grown-ups had little to say after looking at his creation. But I liked the clouds, they were of the cumulus variety, my favorite, eternal wanderers, clean celestial mountains. They’d hung above Lake Hepojarvi for a while that day, and then left. The cardboard painting was placed on top of the sideboard; it soon fell into the crack between the sideboard and the wall. But then—a few years later—I found it; bending some wire into a poker, I pulled it out, along with a thick layer of dust, dead flies of years past, and a green leg from a plastic toy hippo. I took the cardboard picture and thus appropriated a singular day of eternity. In it is summer, and midday, and immortality. Certainly immortality.”

~ Tatyana Tolstaya, from “The Invisible Maiden” in “Aetherial Worlds: Stories” (Knopf, March 20, 2018)

 

Photo by William Eggleston via Time Lightbox

15 thoughts on “In it is summer, and midday, and immortality”

  1. Some of the most essential moments, when retrieved from the recesses of our memory, are held onto with similar passion. – though they too are found amidst the detritus of past lives.

    Needless to say, that visual was powerful in my book…😉

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  6. Isn’t it amazing the power that objects from times past can have? Images can be particularly powerful, of course, but even the quotidian can become weighty with time.

    Picking up my grandmother’s rolling pin is almost akin to stepping backwards in time…I am instantly transported to her kitchen…she is standing before me in one of her brightly colored aprons, a smudge of flour dashed across her cheek, an errant curl falling down across her brow. The room is warm and dominated by the smells of baking…yeast, butter, perhaps the filling for a cream pie bubbling on the stove. She is laughing, regaling me with a story from her youth, or perhaps my mother’s. I am warm, safe, loved and so very, very content….

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  8. In with some family photographs I salvaged from my grandmother years ago I found a folded piece of manila construction paper. When I unfolded it, it was a tulip drawn in crayon. Green and red, the colors quite vibrant. Down at the bottom was the name “Jack”, scribbled in black Crayola. My dads name.
    By the penmanship exhibited it looked like maybe dad was 6 years old when he drew this tulip. The tulip was pretty well done, and if dad was 6 when he did it, it would be 95 years old this year. The colors still look like it was done yesterday.

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