A Reunion

Desolate

Deceit is the nature of deliriums. They provide a closure that betrays the warmth emanated from loved ones. But it wasn't deceit that brought me into the city of living walking deliriums.

For quite a few people there resides an illusory gratification in the restorative idleness of solitude. The ability of remembrance is perhaps the greatest gift of mankind. In my radiant, indolent days at the Wells office where I was a head journalist, work was scarce and stress was little. It afforded me the freedom of recollection and reflection. The room overlooked a busy intersection and one could peer hard enough through the adjoining window and seldom be able to distinguish one bent head crossing the street from another. The people, the working class to be exact had this dull sameness to them. I found it particularly vexing, looking at the dusty, busy intersection in the morning hours. The office itself was quite monotonous in most aspects. The walls had a dark brown hue to them and so did the floor and table and furniture. Sometimes when your mind is pensive and you seek an escape into its realms, it helps if all the colors fade into one at the back of your eyes, and the room helped me accomplish that task wonderfully.

There were things about my childhood, about the town I grew up in that I couldn't understand with perfect clarity, nor remember. Fern Creek although smudged, was a restless little spot at the back of my head that loomed out of focus, slowly creeping into consciousness every now and then. It is the town that had been my home for a good eighteen years and where my mother to this date, continued on with her frail and old existence. I remembered Fern Creek, it's scented airs, it's rolling hills that were covered in dark and foggy forests before I had forgotten everything else.

It could have been January 7th when I started receiving troubling letters from my mother, whose contents would make her out to be a senile woman in my eyes. It started out as a plea to come back home to witness all the wonderful changes that were being brought to the town. She never once specified in detail what these changes were but would always stress how important it was for me to come see her at once. It wasn't until yesterday, the 22nd of February when I received a letter from her that would shake the very foundations of my perception of her and old age. Somewhere along the middle ran this-

"Dear Ritchie, it gives me boundless pleasure to tell you that your sister is having her homecoming this weekend. Soon she will be around us again. The murk that had brought the Miller's son back into their home has begun to envelop our house too. Only this morning I was hardly able to tell our house from the street. This can only mean that our beloved Emily is coming back to us. And you need to be here when she walks out of the fog into our lawn and lives. Soon all of us will be one big happy family again!".

It was as if my mother had shed the shackles of reason and given in to the whims of old age. The more I read, the lesser the letter made sense. But it was in that moment, that I knew a visit to Fern Creek was due. I hadn't surmised that all the interminable hours of recollection would fail to do justice to the reality of it.

And with a grim head and perplexed airs did I set out for the place that was once known to me as home.

Fern Creek, a small town on the western banks of river Clyde, resided under charmless grey skies, secreted in a pestilential mist that was everywhere. The sun was barely visible and so were the hills and forests which zigzagged alongst the road to the town. It was as if the whole world was covered in a horrid patch of unending bleakness and whiteness. Occasionally the tall spruce and fir trees would stand as guardians to a forested corridor lined with moss and shrubs and foliage, appearing as gateways into worlds unknown. The impenetrable vapor hung low between the spaces of the trees adding to the enigmatic aura of the woods.

A series of fields and rolling hills forced itself on me when the last of the fir trees fell back in the rearview mirror. The fields were massed with thickets of rhododendron, begonia, and heather. They seemed to color the mist above in a purple-green hue. There stood a man in that field, with a fishing rod in his hands. He was flailing it skywards. I couldn't comprehend what he was trying to accomplish but I drove on unbothered. The bells of the old church on the hills tolled and made me aware of its presence through the haze that enveloped the hills. Soon I could see the stone spires and the tinged windows at a distance. The church seemed to have been preserved with all its purity in time.