MonkeyPants

Nirvana.

Today was a gorgeous day and as I bumbled around in the garden, hammering and wandering and planning, I remembered another gorgeous day, one of my favourite memories. I take it out on cold nights, carefully, so it doesn’t get too faded. It warms my jaded, cynical, cruising-toward-middle-age soul. Now I’m sharing it.

We are a gaggle of teenagers imported to clean up the camp before the scouts get there for their jamboree. We are clearing storm debris, chainsawing clearer boundaries for sites, and goofing off, building tremendous appetites for epic consumption of pizza.

In memory, the very air is golden, smelling of sun-dried cedar and fresh grass. Perfect May sunshine pours down and dapples in pools on the cedar-needle paths and campsites. I am warm and strong and invincibly fourteen.

Of course we have music with us, in the form of a gigantic ghetto blaster. I’ve never heard The Cult before, and I can tell right now that I am going to get a tape of this album as soon as humanly possible, because this music expresses everything I am thinking and feeling. The guitar echoes into the woods, ringing out like bells declaring freedom. It caroms from tree to tree like maenads released. We move in time to the music; dancing, working, playing are all the same on a perfect, breezy, spring day.

I float through day and night life, well most of the time
Till I hung up my blues on a nail in your wall
It rained flowers when the music began
Love all around when the music is loud

Every day, nirvana
Always this way…