Wind Shake

The trees form a straight green hue across the peripheral. Driving uphill, circular clusters of light are blinding. This time of year all reds turn to crimson. The hydrangeas, that haven't already been pruned, hang crisp in the wind. Most wasps have abandoned their nest or died. We make a habit of looking at the colors change. Right where the hill drops, down the bend, it is there. Bricks must have been laid out no later than the 1900s and it is still there. Been trying to form an idea of it, the root memory, but there are none. Behind us, all traces of the city are gone. In his Mystic Writing Pad, Freud proposed a model of memory as a layered surface: a wax layer that retains permanent impressions, hidden beneath a transparent sheet, which can be refreshed and marked anew. What remains and what is newly inscribed reflects the mind’s capacity to hold both enduring unconscious traces and conscious perception. In the semi-detached living room it was always there. The first painting I ever saw. Houses interlocked between naked trees– warm textured yellows. I remember tracing the surface with my fingers. I remember laying backwards on the dark green couch, my feet defiantly up against the wall. Town has changed a lot since then. In the kitchen, a neuroscientist discusses his discoveries on the radio. Memory is not a fixed record but an act of continual reconstruction. We remember not to preserve the past but to imagine the future. Memory is a simulation engine, an interpretive act that helps us navigate what comes next. To remember is, in a sense, to anticipate. Each recollection reactivates and reshapes neural networks, blending the past with the contingencies of the present. Road goes by so fast, it all disappears. The dark bricks, the front porch, the shadows of the trees around it. Only caught a glance. Wind Shake, and the thought is gone. Time always seems to stand still outside the window. Exhale on the glass and trace out an outline to look out from. Hidden within the grain, a Wind Shake or Thunder Shake reveals itself only when the wood is planed. These internal fractures, born of stress and weather, weaken the structure as they record the history of forces endured: imprints of having been moved, and moved again. Originally referring to the shake, Anemosis, from the Ancient Greek ἄνεμος (ánemos, “wind”) and νόος (nóos, “mind”), is now used to refer to a pang of nostalgia for a time or place never directly known.