Pastoral Snapshot

Down the road and around the bend and I am transported magically back to the countryside of my youth, a rural time of pastoral endeavors untouched by progress. There are no gasoline engines roaring, smoking and choking the air, nor any high technology that would focus my senses for me with lurid detail, leaving nothing to my imagination, so unlike my so long-ago youth that alerted my senses, heightened them to new wonders, sights and sounds and smells. The wind, clean and clear, blew through the forests and fields in those youthful dreams I wandered in in search of nothing more than the sensation, the experience of wind and forest. The smells were pungent and sharp, earthy to my open nostrils, breathing in deeply, and the touch of meadow grasses soft on my legs, bare skin lightly tickled as I lie there staring skyward, the clouds abstracting into familiar shapes on a blue background.  The sun glowed warm on my face, and the sweet scent of daisies excited my nose; this was the magic of my youth, bright again in a vivid memory of an age gone by.