Wednesday, May 04, 2011

A Familiar Face

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The nightmares have stopped: Dreaming that I am awake and can't remember where I am with an urgency that I need to be somewhere else and I can't know where else is until I know where here is.

But during the waking hours, names and faces on this side of the pond are conflated and muddled with names and faces from the other side of the pond and both time and place are jumbled. Thus, I struggle to put a surname to a given name and link a girl that I went to grade school with. That is both distracting and difficult to explain. And so I am back smiling a lot and avoiding conversations whenever I can.

And so my morning walks in my neighbourhood offered up an extra bonus when I could look this bonny flower in the bloom and say without hesitation--Caltha palustris. She nodded and smiled into my camera. Out of her hearing I can assert that she is no less beautiful for being rather common. I was surprised to learn that she is a native of the UK because she grew so nicely on the edges of my yard in Indiana where the ground was dampish. Sitting here in a wee Scottish burn, however, she is clearly at her best.

2 Comments:

At 2:43 PM, Blogger The Curmudgeon said...

Seeing people in the 'wrong' place sets me off. I know the people in my parish -- sometimes by name, always by face -- when I see them in church. But if I should come across someone from the parish while strolling in the Loop, I am seized with panic while I wait, hopefully, for the tumblers to click into place.

These locations are 13 miles apart, not 1,300 -- or, in your case, three times 1,300. I suspect 'jet lag' might be the least of my disorientations, but I'm not likely to put that theory to the test anytime soon.

 
At 9:27 AM, Blogger landgirl said...

For some inexplicable reason this comment was stuck awaiting moderation. What a funny term--as if it were im-moderate to start with.
At any rate, yes context is very important for our wee brains and age, which shrinks our brain seems to shrink more on the people-face-name database than on the childhood jingles retrieval engine. Yeah, test it out.."N E S T L E S" Do you see Farfel and have to fight from saying "CHAWK...LATE" Hee hee

 

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