A Glimpse of Heaven

We went for a walk on a summer evening, down the dirt road by the river. My brothers rode their bikes ahead and back around us in circles. Their shouts were like ping-pong echoes in the distance. Dust trailed behind their tires in little puffs and plumes.

My mom and I stopped to eat wild plums. A soft breeze lifted her hair, making it dance around her face while we sucked on our plums, laughing at the sweetness. The gravel road twined away in the distance, and the smell of the dust, mixed with the sharpness of Queen Anne’s lace and wafts of honeysuckle, swirled around us like some exotic perfume.

Deep blue and gold streaks ran across the sky. My mom stood laughing like a little girl, only a shadow now in the deepening gloom, holding up her plum-sticky hands for me to see as the light fell away.

There was a certain quiet in me that evening, a feeling that the world was a wonderland. I do not know why I felt that way, but the feeling is still very strong. Even after so many years have passed, I can still hear my brothers’ voices and the sharp, clear laughter of my mom. I can smell the dirt and the plants, and almost taste those wild plums. The sunset light of that evening lives somewhere in me, as if the whole scene burned itself so deeply into my memory that it still lives there, replaying itself over and over.

I think memories like this stay with us for a reason. They have something important to say. Maybe they have been saying it for years, and I was simply too busy to hear. Now I spend more time with my memories. I suppose that happens to us all as we get older. Memories grow around me, and it is as if they speak, or at least seem to want to.

The moment there on the road that I remember so clearly was perhaps a way of seeing heaven, a small glimpse of what it might be like to live purely immersed in a vision that is fully lovely. Maybe, in a way, that is true. Perhaps that brief moment of childhood, when nothing was there to intrude with worry or stress, was a promise. Perhaps that is why it is still so deeply present.