Memory's Gift

     Windy day. The sun was shining and the wind was up--not gale force, but strong enough to lift the hair from her forehead and cool her face as she walked.

    You walk too fast.

    Who said that first? Not her mother. Not, not Mother. Mother called her Pokey Polly because she walked so slowly, stopped to look at everything--ants in a sidewalk crack, odd-shaped rocks, the deep yellow of dandelions in the grass. Not it wasn't Mother.

    Let's go, let's go! Mother said every time they left the house. It will be there when we get back.

    Which, she learned, was true: the trail of ants was endless, the rock was immobile, and even the clover and dandelions rooted in place. So now, she too was a walker, a brisk walker, fast and with purpose enough to make any mother proud. Well, any mother who cared, which might mean only her mother--which made her laugh, then smile, then stop walking altogether and shake her head with that slow back and forth movement of a new thought, a realization that she was still linked to those old tapes, tapes from her long dead mother, even tapes from Henry, may he rest in peace, because peace was always so elusive for him, something to be caught rather than savored.

    They were gone, both of them, gone, the people she had loved, and here she was on a beautiful, windy day, here with the joy of movement, of being alive and moving in an overflowing world, at her own steady pace, with memories celebrating the simple pleasure of walking, however you do it, whenever and wherever you go.

  Yes, it was the gift of memory that gave her pleasure with nothing to earn, learn, improve, or fix: the definition of a true gift . . . and still there even as she slowed down.