Remembrance of things past

"Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

I cycled along Brookside in Cambridge in a philosophical mood today, and was suddenly reminded of all the years I had walked this way and seen these trees.

I remembered the dayI crossed the road here and nearly got run over because I wasn't looking..

The day I walked back from class clutching a silkworm cocoon, and my mother was cross because she thought it might hatch and cause trouble (!)..

The day I walked here with my striped yellow and brown kneesocks which were the CRACK that year (and in which my stocky legs must have looked truly shocking)..

The day I was on my way to my wedding (the first one)..

Coming along here with three small children on our way to the panto..

And in the last years, the days I'd walk up here to take my father out in his wheelchair to the botanical gardens..

All those versions of me at all those ages and every one of them in the seconds it took me to cycle 100 yards.

As you get older, memories become increasingly palimpsestic