Shutterspeed

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I STILL HAVE PHOTOS FROM THOSE DAYS, SHOWING ME fair-haired and sandal-shod. My father holds me by the hand as we stroll along meadows dappled by the shade of poplars, during summers that now seem greener and slower than they were. By the wayside, at the foot of the railway embankment, on the rise to the bridge, my father startles butterflies on the flowering hemlock, and their motion, like my wonderment, is arrested in mid-air.

This is the timelessness of the world when he was still around and I had barely arrived. For all that I am there in the picture with my eyes riveted on the pebbly road, doubtless to avoid losing my footing, and for all that I cling so tightly to his hand, my existence has yet to begin.

I must be about two years old, and it is probably August. The sights around me are finite and warm. From end to end the horizon is serrated by lines of trees cropping the surfeit of sky. Everything about their meandering boughs suggests regularity. A train passing each hour. The stroke of a bell every fifteen minutes, high in the echo chamber above the roof tiles.

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