Listening to the light lapping of the water and squinting into the gloriously vicious burn of the sun, the young man I used to be stares into me from the past, straining to see exactly what I’ve become. He couldn’t see then what I see now, and maybe that’s for the best. It might have caused horror or consternation, or happiness and ease, and none of that would have been very helpful. If it was bad, he might have been scared off, if he had been glad he might not have tried as hard. Those tricks of time, those points of perspective… ever-shifting, like quicksilver and quicksand – and dangerous in all the ways.
Around the pool, trees that I planted as little saplings now tower twenty to thirty feet in the air. I held them in my arms as bare root babies, not even a foot tall at the time of their planting. Today they stretch high and wide above us, providing shade and umbrage (in the very old-fashioned sense of the term). Time measured in the trunks of trees, time measured in the crawl of branches, time measured in the unseen burrowing of roots – and time measured by the cruel fit of a Speedo.
