12 Oct When Memories Reveal Themselves
The clear plastic container was the kind you’d get at a deli. It might have originally been filled with chicken noodle soup or pasta salad. Whatever it was first used for has been lost in my memory.
Now the container is filled with seeds Emma and I collected during her kindergarten year. Every day after Emma’s school day ended, while waiting for Ella’s later pickup time, Emma and I would unfold a bright yellow picnic blanket near a shady mesquite tree. There we would sit and snack on crispy wheat crackers and break open seed pods that had fallen off the tree. The blackish-brown seeds that came out of the pods were small and oval and somewhat flat.
We had collected thousands of these seeds for no reason other than the fun of gathering them, adding 20 or 30 more every day during our after-school time together. When it was time to go through the pickup line, we would carefully add our daily collection to the larger collection we kept in a zippered sunglasses case.
At some point – I can’t exactly remember when – the seeds had been transferred to this plastic container and had been sitting on a shelf in our garage.
“What should we do with these?” I asked Emma.
“We could plant them. They would grow into beautiful trees,” Emma suggested.
I held the container in my hands, feeling its weight and listening to the seeds moving around as I shook the container. I thought of these memories from so long ago. The details of the sweetness of that time came rushing back: The smoky smell of the mesquite tree, the taste of the salty-sweet crackers, the texture of the yellow picnic blanket, the smoothness of the seeds between our fingers.
So many of our memories are stored in this way – in colors and tastes and sounds and smells. They stay rooted in one place amid the clutter of our minds, waiting patiently to unfold into the fullness of the experience from long ago when something triggers their recall.
I put the container back on the shelf. The seeds were perfect right where they were, inside that plastic container on the shelf of the garage. Tiny seeds of memories that didn’t even need to be planted to grow into something beautiful.
They already were.