Spent yesterday driving across Kansas enroute to a family funeral. Sailing along at 75 I had one of those “trigger” moments that teleported me to an earlier time and in the process transformed the rest of the day. Off to the right and down a draw my eye caught glimpse of a gentleman, his dog and a double. His van was parked on the side of a gravel road and he was taking his first steps into the grass as his dog was already 20 yards upslope. The scene was like one of those live iPhone snapshots: a moment of movement and then freeze frame. For the next couple hundred miles as that scene played on a loop in my mind it was interspersed with memories of similar long ago scenes of my own populated by friends and dogs no longer with us.
I’ve experienced this before with just a whiff of wood smoke or a spoken phase. It’s pleasant. And powerful.
