Together, The Persons We’ve Become

 

The table is laden with leftover bottles of water, cans of tea, chips, nuts and plates.  The chairs and tables have been folded and returned to the barn.  The microphone cables have been coiled and the sound system ensconced again in its corner of the basement.  The farmstead has quieted again to the usual crowing of the rooster and squawks of the hens and occasional grunts of the alpacas next door, and our routine shufflings here and there.  

And the enduring whispers of memory.

 

On Friday evening, as this holiday weekend commenced, we hosted the opening gathering of Lori’s high school reunion.  Memorabilia hung from tree branches, and animated tables.  Music from the ‘70’s backgrounded conversations.  An “In Memorium” display sobered one end of the displays, while nostalgia and news and food lubricated the rusty relationships.  There, under the waning daylight and beside the fire pit, the flowers and the expansive sky, a remote season, once again, drew near.  

 

Memories are mercurial – ephemeral even.  “Do you recall…?” someone would ask from this corner of the gathering, and then another.  And the answers varied.  “Yes.”  “No.”  “Kinda.”

 

Pictures helped.  Artifacts nudged.  For every anecdote reanimated, two were irretrievable. It has been a long time, and many roads have been traveled. Some things are dearly held, while others are best forgotten.  We don’t agree on which is which.

 

The evening crackled with laughter and conversation, and stories etched into older faces.  For a few hours we were younger again.  Me, as well, for though these were not “my people”, rooted in a school and a community 1000 miles from my own, their memories reanimated my own; their rapport refreshed the faces in my heart of names and personalities with whom I had shared classrooms, built homecoming floats, made music…and a life.  “Me,” along with the other spouses along for the ride.  We, too, listened and told stories and found our places in narratives that preceded us.  It was nourishing to inhabit, if only for an evening, deeper recesses of my beloved’s life in which I had had no part, and vicariously to retrace a few of the lines of my own.  

 

And to marvel afresh at the myriad fingers that shape us.  

 

I have long found evocative the assertion of one of my teachers that, “We are all born human, but we become persons by our associations, our affiliations, our conflicts, our relationships.”  

 

On Friday evening, it was good to touch our fingers, again, on the cooled forge that formed at least a part of the persons we’ve become.  

 

And to give thanks for the gift of those days, and this one.