What are they called, those brown, curved, cashew-like parts of a pine flower? Strobili? I saw one on the sidewalk today and was suddenly in my maternal grandparent’s front yard, on a warm fall afternoon, sitting on the grass in the shade, with my back against the trunk of a large ponderosa pine, its rough bark of stacked puzzle pieces biting gently through my shirt, a dry strobilus rolled between my thumb and forefinger, quickly denuded of its granular substance, leaving a sharply convoluted stem. I have fragments of recollection, likely netted across a dozen or more years, where I can see small piles of harvested grains on the sidewalk beside me, microscopic corn rubbed from thin, brittle cobs.
There are thousands of these kinds of things littered throughout my earliest memories. Collectively they comprise the overwhelming bulk of my past, features of the world that have been swept into unimportance because of their mundane familiarity, rendered commonplace and banal by their lack of connection to the invented worlds I am expected to inhabit.
And it is not just in the distant past, or those things illuminated within the penumbra of childhood nostalgia. Yesterday harbors uncountable shards of similar momentary awareness, transient instants of wonder and discernment attached to concrete details perceived in passing, details quickly lost or forgotten, dismissed as insignificant, trivial characteristics of everyday life, not relevant to the goal presently being pursued, unrelated to the destination, part of the surrounding topography, minor stones on the pathway.
The pattern of shadow across the dog’s face. The chittering of the tiny bird just outside the window, and the way the twig recoils as it bolts to a different branch. The familiar fragrance of decay folded within the cool moist morning air on the first official day of winter.
