Little Reverie

My memories stand upright, jutting out into the winter air like needles. “It’s wintertime!” he exclaimed to his grandmother, still strutting up and down the street in her white Reeboks, stained glass wrapped about her head like a scarf. The little boy in the stroller would be a memory-hoard, would rocket through the years like a steel ball, given to hot and to cold, given to lustrous fevers. The bracing air, the passionate leaves (now dust, for the most part), the setting sun a strange distant sadness like the sound of traffic through shallow woods. All of these things can be spied in a puddle of street water, greased with truck oil.