I can remember exactly how it felt, and then it’s gone. The look of the sky when it started to change, how clear the seam between summer and fall that year we spent in Germany. How the winery workers appeared with their buckets on the hills and we had to shut the windows at night, and mom got the candles out. Fall meant it was time to leave so we packed up the car and headed north. The Virginia Creeper turned red and choked the sides of mom’s old house. We packed up our guitars and games and cooking pots and drove the A7 to France, stopping for a night before we carried on to Holland. We climbed the crooked stairs of our rental and spent a few nights more, then caught a boat to Newcastle and landed in the UK. We braved the rains, toured the castles and tried our hands at trick or treating in Scotland. We scoured the lands and causeways. We did the same in Ireland, and mom met us for Christmas in Cork. We went dry in January and left out of Dover, returning to France…and in the afternoon we were back again, in Germany.

I could remember exactly how it felt but only for a minute, and hardly that…in the shower, on my walks, thinking that was maybe the best time ever. And I tried not to mourn for it but it was hard. The clouds came down…the season started to turn, and it felt like it once was, but never would be again.

Categories: Memoir, travel, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, mid-life crisis, prose, William Pearse writer