With the temperature at 77--low humidity, and a soft breeze coming off the ocean--how could I have even thought of not going out this morning! If I had stayed in, I would have missed the sweetly acrid smell of tar. The roofers were working on a building on Meridian Avenue. I smelled tar before I saw the tar truck.
These trucks were common when I was growing up. We children, who played on the streets, would watch the glossy black tar heat and stream from the trucks. Nothing more glossy except, maybe, patent leather. We liked the filthy trucks. I like them still. It's possible to become nostalgic for almost anything, even mosquitoes, not that I want to actually go back to the past. Last week I wrote this nostalgic poem:
Young and Bitten
We had so much to give—pennies, kisses,
blood mosquitoes love. We would let them land
on the back of a hand kept still and watch
the frail, tiny body fill and darken.
It was always twilight. The wings blue,
the legs weightless. Always we were quiet.
We’d let them fly off with nothing we would
grandly call “life.” Curiosity
made us generous. We’d go home tired,
in the air ripe with wings, bitten and young,
in the shadows of leaves, in the smell of phlox,
in the soft dark, in the world where we fit.
Tell me about your bouts of nostalgia?
