Sound bites.
Audio memories.
Sounds bite.
One year ago my mother drifted from this world to another.
I hear voices, memories really, of specific moments frozen by the utterance of words from one person and trapped inside my head as a recording. I hear the telephone ring and when I answer, she says, “Cheryl, it’s Mom.”
Then, last year my brother called early one morning and said, “She’s gone.”
I am quite accustomed to recollections that are sensory. I can smell Noxema from 4 feet away and be transported back to high school. I hear a Beatles tune and am at the teen dance at Le Sourdsville Lake again. One spoonful of black walnut ice cream whisks me back to the Park Street Ice Cream Shop, which closed decades ago.
Most of the audio memories that I have are pleasant, or I may even find amusing today. But there are those few like the two I mentioned that are edgy. I miss hearing my mother’s voice on the other end of a phone line. I can still hear the tone in my brother’s voice as clearly in my memory today as I heard it in reality a year ago. These are the sounds that etch a lasting impression of something past into my mind. They have sunk their teeth into my memory.
Cheryl
