The Garden in anticlimatic

Something peculiar has happened to my memory over the last few years- how I experience my memories, rather. I don’t know if it’s the darkening authoritarian age, my dad dying, or settling down and plotting a future at long last- could be any one, or all of those- but something is very different now. Before, certain memories felt timeless and ever present- as though they had just happened yesterday, not 35 years ago. Yet now things no longer seem that way. Memories now seem to me so distant that they feel almost fake. Not my own. Fictitious. Some…conjuring, or fever dream. Barely there, in indecipherable light. Even events not terribly long ago.

Yet despite this new handicap on a number of my memory “hits” you might say, a resurgence of odd side memories and their corresponding feelings and fragments of mind have been spilling in, in place of others that once were too bright to allow lesser companions. A lot of my memories involve my parents when they were young- much younger than I myself am now. Kids, really. Fumbling their way through their environment and world with only their immediate world to guide them- family, friends, weather, and season. The garden of life in which they grew, grew them organically, with only localized nutrients. The things they were told were important, were important to their immediate communities, based on specific and overwhelming commonalities- local climate adjustment/preparedness, local economics, local sport/recreation, direct personal ties to neighbors, friends, and family.

The culture was decentralized. Community grew it naturally; individually- and in aggregate we really had something interesting and unique and new going for us in the cradle of western civilization here. But then the internet- and worse, the internet on smart phones for every average John/Jane Q Public moron.

Our gardens are no longer nourished locally, organically. Now people in a far off very strange part of the world nurture others with no corresponding commonality to give that nourishment merit. City people take their nourishment internationally, rural people take their nourishment from city people. Everyone is sick with it. In my 20s I dreamt almost exclusively of a world in decline; an apocalypse in every shade.

Was it foreshadowing?