Rescuing Memory
The daffodils are out. Crocus are pushing through the hard, brown earth. Yesterday I noticed two pots of pansies in an urban garden. Yet, fickle is the only word to describe spring. The flowers may be blooming, but there remains a frigid chill in the air.
After a long walk last weekend, I couldn’t resist preparing French toast with warmed New Hampshire maple syrup. It is after all March and my mind always slips back to sugaring off gatherings when we were children. The corn snow brought from the deep woods then covered with hot syrup that quickly becomes candy. Batches of raised doughnuts lifted from pots of hot oil and served with syrup, just boiled down from sap and carried in buckets from local trees. Plates of sour pickles on the table to help cut the sweetness. Taste sensations.
Now, at the end of March, we have been noting the second anniversary of the COVID pandemic arriving in the United States. It’s hard not to recall the moment when the world shut down. New York, London, Rome, Madrid, Tokyo. One city after another. Schools, theaters, travel shuttered. A situation not one of us could have imagined.
Memories. Glancing back causes me to think about time, and how we measure it.
Can we measure it? As we have all returned to a more normal or at least expected routine it doesn’t feel like two years has passed. Does it? Remember when it was difficult to recall what day it was, because our routine was the same then. Working at home, taking long walks, participating in a Zoom program of one type or another.
Jonas Mekas was a filmmaker who fled Lithuania in 1944 when he was twenty-two years old.
He arrived in the United States with a suitcase and boxes of books. Over the years he recorded his life through film diaries. There is currently as exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York entitled, Jonas Mekas, The Camera was Always Running. There are several screens in one of the galleries that continually run excerpts from his diary films including, Walden, 1969, Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, 1972, As I was Moving Ahead Occasionally, I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, 2000. There are scenes in one of the films from a summer in New Hampshire and lots of wildflowers and nature.
Memory carries us back to home. To what it is that has influenced and shaped our lives.
Tasting the sweet maple syrup on Sunday also brought flashes of being in Franconia. Having blueberry pancakes at Polly’s Pancake Parlor when it was just a little shack with three or four tables. One could watch the individual stirring the batter and then taking a hand full of, probably local, berries from the small box that was on the top of the shelf and dropping them into the mixture. Small and round pancakes were served four at a time so they would be hot and cooked to perfection. Now Polly’s has a large parking lot, beepers that let you know when your table is ready and an online shop that ships pancake mix and New Hampshire maple syrup far and wide. The taste and feel of memory.
In the description for Mekas’s film, Requiem, 2019, the curator, Kelly Taxter, writes: “Mekas swings between the urban and pastoral, invoking both feelings of great might and extreme vulnerability. Brutal, tragic images interrupt these movements, pictures that tell the story of the twentieth – and now twenty-first – century’s wars, humanitarian, and climate crisis, and the massive losse and displacements that follow in their wakes. Like a summation of life itself, these brief instants collide with many passages of great beauty, Mekas’s ‘moment of ecstasy.’”
The daffodils, the crocuses and the buds that that are on the trees are transforming the landscape into a “glimpses of beauty.” Spring reminds us to rescue our memory.