Sometimes you know where the triggers are. A certain date, or a certain food, or a certain place, and you know the memories are going to come flooding in and you're sort of prepared to deal with it.
Other times, you just get whacked behind the knees and crumple a bit. Like this evening - I was taking my walk, and saw the white blossoms of the low-growing nettles. And there's the flashback: we were still fairly new out here, young (-ish, meaning early 40's), healthy, in love, and outside on a beautiful evening, and, well, "things" happened, right there in nature. Unfortunately, things happened right on top of a couple of nettle plants and I had serious itchy rashes for days.
So I'm sort of nostalgic about nettles.
But that's not what I came to write about. I watched the Disney animated "Coco." And had all kinds of flashbacks, because although they didn't say it, it was obviously set in a village in Oaxaca, Mexico. I've been there three times. The first time was on a ancient fiber arts tour. I loved the historic city so much that I was really sad that Bob had not shared it with me, so a few years later we went back together. We were staying in a small, rather "rustic" hotel, but it had a nice rooftop courtyard and we would sit up there in the evenings. One evening, in the church next door, a high school band was practicing, and they began to play "La Llorona." We danced.
Have you seen (or been) a little kid who ties a bath towel around his or her neck and then feels like a super hero? In reality, it was a little bit like that. We had to admit that the high school band wasn't particularly good, but then, again, neither was our dancing.
Screw reality. Our alternate reality, the one I remember, was dancing in Bob's arms, on the rooftop in the moonlight, with that beautiful haunting melody floating up from the church.
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