I am like a glass of sweet iced tea on a dimly lit screened-in porch on a Midwestern summer night that sounds of cicadas and smells of field corn and moist cut hay. The night is more still than a night should even be capable of on a planet that spins around a star. The moon is full and covered, like everything else, in a thick, humid haze; and I am beaded with sweat that meets up like mountain streams that meet lowland rivers to run toward steamier places. I am the only thing that is cool around these parts, and I am quickly and steadily losing my cool as my sweetness becomes well watered down.
As I walk I breathe what could only be considered water vapor. It smells and even tastes earthy - like the dirt from which it is rising so silently on a night so wide open with possibilities it could only end in the deepest of sleep. The dogs skitter in front of me and behind me - exploring all the sounds and smells the darkness affords with night vision keen and obviously superior to mine. All I can see are their silhouettes moving silently through the dewy grass on a path dimly lit by a mist-shrouded Midwestern moon and a few obliging fireflies twilnkling intermittently to the rhythm of eternity... which is, of course, as unpredictable as it is lovely. The soft soles of my shoes give way to the crumbled limestone rock on the gravel path beneath my feet in a stillness so soft that not even the dust stirs beneath my soles.
These are the things inherent in fondest memories - the place in the mind and outside the body where temporal meets eternal and where man-made meets heaven-sent. These... the very reason that God conceived of blessing us with a terrestrial existence and which consumed Him in a yearning to experience such an existence for Himself. These are the things that I will remember fondly in a hospital bed one day and forget completely in a heavenly home the next.
