for joe

My friend Joe revered about the mystery of some shapes grabbing our attention among the sea of shapes that flood our vision every moment of the day. I know that when I look for my keys (a climactic and thrilling adventure taking place daily between the walls of my room, occasionally also in the kitchen and living room) I notice an odd sock that was so dearly missed after last batch of laundry, Amartya Sen book I feel guilty about for not finding time to read, camera that belongs to Kris... I don't notice a tea cup on my dresser,hairspray, my purse, or thousands of random (mostly useless) items that clutter my room. When I sit down behind my desk to work, my eyes glide across photographs I put on my wall. One in particular succeeds to always make me nostalgic, even if it is just a meta-nostalgy somewhere on a parallel level of my consciousness and only for a split of a moment.
Mountain ranges do that to you. Krivan is a signature mountain of High Tatras. When that range enters my eyesight, even if it was pencil drawn against a background of EKG curves, it sets off a whole pallette of sensory and emotional triggers. I smell the wood smoking away in a fireplace in the mountain cottage where I spent every summer, every winter of my childhood. I almost taste a wild mushroom omelette that auntie Hanka would make in the mornings, after we did our chores. One of the chores was washing dishes in a freezing cold spring pool that uncle Vili built. I can feel my knuckles hurting from the rushing cool water. I can smell the wild strawberries and cranberries and the tingly sensation in my stomach of suspecting a bear lurking in raspberry bushes. One or a few specific memories fleet through my head: us, four girls, daughters of two sets of parents that spent all vacations together,collecting cones for stove fire for cooking; a bee that stung me on my eyelid when dragging wood to my dad for chopping; or that old sheppard that used to come by and sit in front of our cottage, baffled by my mom, demanding :"Jolka, talk about something, anything." For a nanosecond all these little fireflies of memories storm across the darkness of my head behind my eyes like little Halley's comets. All triggered by that familiar curve of Kriváň. For a nanosecond I am oblivious to the noises of the city seeping through my window and babble of people behind my back. For a nanosecond I am ultimately happy.