Childhood Memory

There are moments in time that are so vivid, we can almost reach out and touch them.

I am 4.

I am standing in between a pair of sheets drying on the line. Through the gap in the sheets, the ellipse of sky above me is pale blue and filled with puffy, lake-born clouds, scudding by on the Northern summer breeze. I breathe in the scent of Tide and cotton, but there is also the sharper smells of earth and grass.

In my cloak of white, my fortress of fiber,

I am invisible. I am safe.

It is a moment trapped in the amber of my memory, fossilized into something gemlike.