Sometimes thoughts just swirl in my head like leaves and discarded
wrappers caught in a breezy interior corner of a rural shopping plaza,
at the right angle bend in the sidewalk between the edifice and the
asphalt.  The same thoughts lift from the pavement time and again, then
something unobservable shifts and a leaf, long motionless is suddenly
riding the heights of the diminutive tornado.  And as if caught up in
an entropic jihad others which had seemed pinned down and half buried
rally behind the pioneer.  Before settling into a new, distinct pattern
a brief adrenal euphoria surges through my neurons, outwardly it is
only a slight superior contraction of my facial muscles, a perceptible
smile.

I just had such a one as this, a memory risen to the surface like a
dolphin after a twenty minute dive.  An image of non-orthogonal cement
and blacktop paths and roadways sectioning a green grass landscape,
sparsely grown with large hardwood trees and aging but well kept houses.
Also here are a tennis facility, a pond with paddle boats, a larger pond
with an island and geese--it seems like a lot of geese.  Further over is
a park housing native animals and a Japanese garden on a rolling
antebellum estate in this city that was the capital of the Confederate
States.

A flat and easy peddle from their apartment a young couple cross on
their bicycles from the busy boulevard running along these parks, past
a fountain and into the parks proper.  Looping unhurriedly around the
exercise trail, perhaps stopping to gaze at the geese by the larger
water, they ride through the warm autumn air.  Probably on over to the
estate to view the bison grazing on several acres of hillside and then
up past the carriage house with it's free-roaming peacocks and stabled
horses, on around and down past the bamboo, beside the waterfall to the
goldfish pond; here to dismount and wander a while among the rocks and
trees; occasionally enticing the bright koi to the top of the water with
bread crumbs left behind by another reveler.  Eventually they head back
out the gates and past the gaggle, through the urban neighborhood
returning to the second floor garden apartment that is home.  

Later we walked to dinner at a nearby cafe.


            --  A Memory of
                Mamont Park and The Fan District, Richmond, Virginia 1985
                     (written October 17, 1991)