There is a place in the kitchen where the angle is just right, and standing inside you can see through the window and over the back wall, and right between a light-post and a steep hill of ivy stands a tree with the brightest, reddest, orange leaves you have seen in this city or the next. When the orange glow of the setting sun hits those leaves, they glow like hundreds of young embers, and the tree looks like its on fire. You might be standing in the kitchen, trying to figure out what to do with yourself, when out of the corner of your eye you see this brilliant dash of red-orange, and you wonder what in the world that could be, with a color like that. You walk out into the backyard, and there it is, beyond the wall, standing in the middle of dull browns and greys, and maybe some greens here and there, with some muddy blue overhead, unless the sky is especially clear that day, or a darkening purple-orange, if you are lucky.
And then maybe you start hearing the voices of children, or the brief, dull roar of passing cars, or the buzzing of a passing plane, high above, a bright dot of white floating across the sky. You might even smell something that reminds you of this exact moment, in the exact circumstances at some obscure time you cannot recall. This smell might be a fire in the chimney, or a steak on a grill, or even just the air itself. You'll probably feel a very soft breeze, barely detectable but just the right temperature to accentuate the moment. You might start feeling that old feeling, that old feeling that you could not begin to describe with just one of the senses, or all five of them combined, or any kind of semantic memory you can think of. It is just there, and you can feel it, like feeling that groove in your shoe that has been there for ages.
And in this trip to god-knows-where that is taking place right in your backyard, you might forget yourself, and forget that you have been chased into a cave of the roughest walls, of the darkest shadows, a cave that you could have never foreseen 5, 6 years ago, a cave with seemingly no escape, except right out the top, for just a second, with unexplainable moments like this.
Not quite humane, yet not quite primal.
