I have the feeling of doing all this before. Up in my old bedroom, playing with a stone knife my grandfather found on a mountain in Georgia and now I have inherited, looking at my parent's vegetable garden. Everyone still in bed, so just hanging out by myself. Opened a window. Wherever you are in NoVa, you can always hear the highways.
When I logged into my gmail, I found a note to myself in my phone from earlier: Fiat justitia ruat cælum. I got it out of a book I'm reading about Thomas Jefferson; obviously not something he came up with, but what he adopted as his personal maxim up on his little mountain, contradictory as ever.
Justice, even if the sky falls.
Last night, my mom and I sat down by the creek until it was too dark to see. She told me how every time you access a memory, it changes, takes on a little of the flavor of your day, your version of your own story, whatever would come to pass afterward, until whatever it is looks entirely different from whatever it was. I thought about that as we watched all the color and light from the sunset extinguish in the creek ripples below that good sycamore. My grubby little fingerprints all over my head. But I guess it's making something new, too, it's generative. It doesn't fade every time, it just changes. You retell it to yourself.
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