A Day in the Life of Sachi

As I stood on the back patio last night, late into the dying evening, I saw a sight that I thought I’d lost; my long forgotten moon. I’ve seen many moons over many years but none appear quite as this one does. I saw it once, many summers ago, when I was a child understanding that I would be an adult by that time the next year. Just as I saw it then, many years ago, my moon was golden and not the familiar silver to which I had become accustomed. Out of the sticky batts of clouds it ascended, growing higher and higher with each inhale and exhale of sweet, summer breeze. As it lifted, the batts broke free, fiber by fiber, until the moon was clear of the grip.

I stood in the darkness, now punctuated by a golden bulb in the sky, I smelled. (Not me, dork. The air.) I sniffed quick sniffs and drew deep breaths to absorb the world around me. Have you ever smelled the scent of a pine tree growing?

What my nose detected the strongest of all was the smell of my ancestral home that lays I the valley below me. The faint scent of a running creek, flood plains and wild grasses on which our cattle were raised. The soil, once rocky, that I tilled with my own hands as a child and the crab apple tree from which I picked apples while standing on the back of my horse. He allowed it only because I fed the apples to him.

For just a moment, I smelled myself in pig-tails, wearing cut-off bib-overalls. I think that I was barefoot. I smelled myself smiling at a childhood friend, Jenny, as we raced our horses about the neighborhood. I was wearing cowboy hat. As I stood there on the back deck, looking down over my childhood home some 300 yards or so from where I now stood, I swear I could smell Jenny and I racing up the hill toward my current home. They couldn’t see me. To them, this was just an empty lot filled with scotch broom and adventure. We raced through the brush, zig-zagging as we went, and we flew over the jump we’d placed in the middle for ourselves.

And then, all at once, it was gone. We faded into the mist and I couldn’t smell us anymore. But there was my golden moon, high above my head. It smiled down on my as I shook clear of my waking dream.

My heart can rest here. Only on this land can my soul be still; the land that my grandfather and great-grandfather tamed, the land on which my father was born and that he tended with his own hands. For the first time in ages, my mind has slipped free of the sticky clouds and I can rest again.