Cherries Memories Quotes

But memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.

Sometimes tomorrow never comes and you're only left with the memories of yesterdays.

Sometimes when you miss a person, you can only focus on how sad you feel that they are gone. Other times, it's best to focus on the memories that bring you joy and laughter.

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.

I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.

I thought I had more time, but sometimes tomorrow never comes and you’re only left with the memories of yesterdays.

Sometimes when you miss a person, you can only focus on how sad you feel that they are gone. Other times, it’s best to focus on the memories that bring you joy and laughter.

When she remembered a summer it would be this one. When she remembered love it would be his.

Still, with him gone, everything around me has somehow slowed, and I miss the memories that never existed.

Sometimes I think my ability to concentrate is being nibbled away by the internet; other times I think it's being gulped down in huge, Jaws-shaped chunks. In those quaint days before the internet, once you made it to your desk there wasn't much to distract you. You could sit there working or you could just sit there. Now you sit down and there's a universe of possibilities – many of them obscurely relevant to the work you should be getting on with – to tempt you. To think that I can be sitting here, trying to write something about Ingmar Bergman and, a moment later, on the merest whim, can be watching a clip from a Swedish documentary about Don Cherry – that is a miracle (albeit one with a very potent side-effect, namely that it's unlikely I'll ever have the patience to sit through an entire Bergman film again). Then there's the outsourcing of memory. From the age of 16, I got into the habit of memorising passages of poetry and compiling detailed indexes in the backs of books of prose. So if there was a passage I couldn't remember, I would spend hours going through my books, seeking it out. Now, in what TS Eliot, with great prescience, called "this twittering world", I just google the key phrase of the half-remembered quote. Which is great, but it's drained some of the purpose from my life. Exactly the same thing has happened now that it's possible to get hold of out-of-print books instantly on the web. That's great too. But one of the side incentives to travel was the hope that, in a bookstore in Oregon, I might finally track down a book I'd been wanting for years. All of this searching and tracking down was immensely time-consuming – but only in the way that being alive is time-consuming.

I’d thought those memories would be the ones I always cherished, but as the days and years passed by, those beautiful memories became my pain.

Sometimes tomorrow never comes and you’re only left with the memories of yesterdays.

Everyone remembers things which never happened. And it is common knowledge that people often forget things which did. Either we are all fantasists and liars or the past has nothing definite in it.

The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.

Steven and I had always come to the market to check out the fresh flowers, so when Friday came around with the fresh roses, I always stood in the middle of it all, breathing in the memories and breathing out the hurt.

They thought more before nine a.m. than most people thought all month. I remember once declining cherry pie at dinner, and Rand cocked his head and said, 'Ahh! Iconoclast. Disdains the easy, symbolic patriotism.' And when I tried to laugh it off and said, well, I didn't like cherry cobbler either, Marybeth touched Rand's arm: 'Because of the divorce. All those comfort foods, the desserts a family eats together, those are just bad memories for Nick.' It was silly but incredibly sweet, these people spending so much energy trying to figure me out. The answer: I don't like cherries.

That was the thing about memories - they weren't always exactly true.

I don’t have many memories where I was truly happy.  I lived for the day and got along the best I could.  It’s always been my way.

She needed someone to fall into her memories and erase the dark waters she swam in each day.

I dragged my balls across your mother’s memorial cake, from cherry to cherry, and to each of the candles.

The heartbreak is worth those few moments of happiness, and the pieces of the shattered heart can be put back together. I mean, there will be cracks and scars, and sometimes this burning memory of the past, but that burn? It’s just a reminder that you survived. That burning is your rebirth.

Duty o'er love was the choice you did make My love you did spurn, my heart you did break Your penance to pay, no pride you shall gain Three sons on three sons find nothing but pain I gift you my powers in memory of me The joy of love no son shall ever see When a Lifemate is chosen by the heart of a son No protection can be given, again I have won His pain will be deep, her death will be swift Inside his heart a terrible rift Only freely given will this curse be done To break the spell, three must work as one.

Next to the tree was a short, broad-shouldered Asian man in overalls and a straw hat, leaning on a spade. His face was weathered, and in a halting English difficult to follow, he told Alma that this moment was beautiful, but that it would last only a few days before the blooms fell like rain to the ground; much better was the memory of the cherry tree in bloom, because that would last all year, until the following spring.

Here are five simple rules for a powerful immune system that you should commit to memory: 1. Eat a large salad every day. 2. Eat at least a half-cup serving of beans/legumes in soup, salad, or another dish once daily. 3. Eat at least three fresh fruits a day, especially berries, pomegranate seeds, cherries, plums, oranges. 4. Eat at least one ounce of raw nuts and seeds a day. 5. Eat at least one large (double-size) serving of green vegetables daily, either raw, steamed, or in soups or stews.

You used to say you would never forget me. That made me feel like the cherry blossom, here today and gone tomorrow; it is not the kind of thing one says to a person with whom one proposes to spend the rest of one's life, after all. And, after all that, for three hundred and fifty-two in each leap year, I never think about you, sometimes. I cast an image into the past, like a fishing line, and up it comes with a gold mask on the hook, a mask with real tears at the ends of its eyes, but tears that are no longer anybody's tears. Time has drifted over your face.

How many rooms are there in the chambers of your heart? How many rooms full of memories can you describe like the one I’m going to tell you about. You know how you left him don’t you? The man you were so in love with once. Bing Cherry Silk. Another man left those for you didn’t he? And you put them on, just like I did.

My grandma always had chocolate-covered cherries," D said, his tone curled at the edges, like he'd surprised himself with the memory. Jack slid up a little so he could watch D's face. "Usedta love them things. The way they'd kinda burst open when ya bit 'em, and that syrupy stuff inside, then the cherry. I'd bite off one side a the shell real careful-like, so none a the syrup spilled, then suck all the gooey out, then fish out the cherry with my tongue, then I'd just have the chocolate shell left and I'd nibble on it 'til it was gone. She'd only let me have one or two so I hadta make 'em last." He glanced at Jack, who was just staring at him, his mouth open. "What?" "That is the sexiest thing I've ever heard." D flushed and fidgeted. "Aw, hell." "Seriously. Ask me how much I want to go get some chocolate-covered cherries right now just so I can watch you eat them.

That’s the trouble. We can’t cherry-pick the parts of our story we’d like to keep. Our lives are a melting pot of regrets, triumphs, sorrow and joy. You have to accept it all.

I hated my mind, how it remembered. Memories were daggers to my soul, and I hardly had any positive ones to hold on to. I

always put it off for tomorrow. I thought I had more time, but sometimes tomorrow never comes and you’re only left with the memories of yesterdays.

I always put it off for tomorrow. I thought I had more time, but sometimes tomorrow never comes and you’re only left with the memories of yesterdays.

I am struck by what a tawdry magician’s trick Time is after all. I am sixty-six years old. Viewed from your coign of vantage—facing toward the future—sixty-six years is a great deal of time. It is all of the experience of your life more than three times over. But, viewed from my coign of vantage—facing toward the past—this sixty-six years was the fluttering down of a cherry petal. I feel that my life was a picture hastily sketched but never filled in . . . for lack of time. Only yesterday—but more than fifty years ago—I walked along this river with my father. I can remember how big and strong his hand felt to my small fingers. Fifty years. But all the insignificant, busy things—the terribly important, now forgotten things that cluttered the intervening time collapse and fall away from my memory. And I remember another yesterday when my daughter was a little girl. We walked along here. At this very moment, the nerves in my hand remember the feeling of her chubby fingers clinging to one of mine.

I have to hurry up and write them down before I forget. I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.

Some call it the Cherry Hotel. But most just say it’s Madame Damnable’s Sewing Circle and have done. So I guess that makes me a seamstress, just like Beatrice and Miss Francina and Pollywog and Effie and all the other girls. I

Place gathers stories, relationships, memories. This two acres of sacred landscape in the mountains of Montana has provided the material conditions for preserving a continuity of story in the course of living in eighteen residences located variously in five states and two countries. It has provided a stable location in space and time to give prayerful, meditative, discerning attention to the ways in which my life is being written into the comprehensive salvation story. It is the holy ground from which choke-cherry blossoms scent the spring air and giant ponderosa pines keep sentinel watch in the forest. It opens out on an immense glacier-cut horizon against which the invisibilities of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit form a believing imagination where the “inside is larger than the outside.

He wasn’t speaking to me anymore. We were living in our own worlds of little memories, and even though we were both separate, somehow we managed to feel for one another. Lonely often recognized lonely. And today, for the first time, I began to see the man behind the beard. I

Even with the passage of time the deceased is in no way forgotten, of course, but 'the dead grow more distant with each day', as the saying goes. And so, for all the memories, it seems our sorrow is no longer as acute as at death, for we begin to chatter idly and laugh again.

Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.

Nostalgia can have an intoxicating and powerful effect. Looking back through rose-tinted spectacles can create false pasts that cherry-pick only the very best, while ignoring the worst and the mundane. While harking back to a previous golden age often triggers warm memories of supposedly better times, the process can be deceptive, misleading and wrong. In fact, today’s world is better in almost every single way than the world of the past.

5-4-10 Tuesday 8:00 A.M. Made a large batch of chili and spaghetti to freeze yesterday. And some walnut fudge! Relieved the electricity is still on. It’s another beautiful sunny day with fluffy white clouds drifting by. The last cloud bank looked like a dog with nursing pups. I open the window and let in some fresh air filled with the scent of apple and plum blossoms and flowering lilacs. Feels like it’s close to 70 degrees. There’s a boy on a skate board being pulled along by his St. Bernard, who keeps turning around to see if his young friend is still on board. I’m thinking of a scene still vividly displayed in my memory. I was nine years old. I cut through the country club on my way home from school and followed a narrow stream, sucking on a jawbreaker from Ben Franklins, and I had some cherry and strawberry pixie straws, and banana and vanilla taffy inside my coat pocket. The temperature was in the fifties so it almost felt like spring. There were still large patches of snow on the fairways in the shadows and the ground was soggy from the melt off. Enthralled with the multi-layers of ice, thin sheets and tiny ice sickles gleaming under the afternoon sun, dripping, streaming into the pristine water below, running over the ribbons of green grass, forming miniature rapids and gently flowing rippling waves and all the reflections of a crystal cathedral, merging with the hidden world of a child. Seemingly endless natural sculptures. Then the hollow percussion sounds of the ice thudding, crackling under my feet, breaking off little ice flows carried away into a snow-covered cavern and out the other side of the tunnel. And I followed it all the way to bridge under Maple Road as if I didn't have a care in the world.

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you'd never be able to let go? Now you're not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you're picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you've ever wanted in the world.

I always loved Woolworth’s because of the pick ’n’ mix; the memory of all those cola bottles, cherry lips, and flying saucers still makes me smile. Lily’s favorite shops were Our Price, where she went to buy the latest cassettes and music posters, and Tammy Girl and C&A, where she and Rose shopped for clothes. I always enjoyed our trips to Blockbuster Video—even if I was rarely allowed to choose which film we would rent—and visits to the little independent bookshop with Nana were my favorite outings. Buying books was the only form of shopping she ever enjoyed. It makes me sad to realize that none of those shops exist now. So many high streets are more like ghost towns these days.

His eyes light up. “Wait, this is a sakura mochi. How did you remember—" I glance down and curse internally at the faintly pink, round dessert, pale as a cherry blossom petal. How did I remember his favorite? His mom used to take us, Cam, and Remy down to San Jose to go around Japantown, picking up bentos from a homey restaurant to eat at the park, and then we’d stop at Shuei-Do Manju Shop. Every time, without fail, Jack would choose sakura mochi. The times that there was only one left in stock, the rest of us purposefully ordered other sweets, just so Jack could get his favorite. And his eyes would shine with delight as he munched on the pink rice cake, the way he’s smiling now.

This garden was peaceful and calm. Pink cherry blossoms and violet plum blossoms graced the sweeping trees. The petals fell like snowflakes, dancing and swirling until they touched the soft, verdant grass. There was something familiar about this place. Her eyes traveled down the flat stone steps. She knew this path, knew those stones. The third one from the bottom had a crack in the middle- from when she was five and the neighbor's boy convinced her there were worms on the other side of the stones. She'd hammered the stone in half, eager to catch a few worms to play with. There weren't any, of course, but her mother had helped her find some dragonflies by the pond instead, and they'd spent an afternoon counting them in the garden. Mulan smiled wistfully at the memory. This can't be the same garden. I'm in Diyu. Yet no painter could have re-created what she saw more convincingly. Every detail was as she remembered. At the bottom of the stone-cobbled path was a pond with rose-flushed lilies, and a marble bench under the cherry tree. She used to play by the pond when she was a little girl, catching frogs and fireflies in wine jugs and feeding the fish leftover rice husks and sesame seeds until her mother scolded her. And beyond the moon gate was- Mulan's hand jumped to her mouth. Home. That smell of home- of Baba's incense from the family temple, sharp with amber and cedar; of noodles in Grandmother Fa's special pork broth; of jasmine flowers that Mama used to scent her skin.

They say there should be no crying out. They say what they had closed should not have been reopened. They say that's why they locked you up. They're right. I'm going to die of these words. I'm going to die of being closed in. I don't want to. It's too late. There should be no consent. But I'm not the one. I'm not the one who cries out. I'm not the one who writes. I'm another woman. She lives in my body. She doesn't have my horrid severed fingers. She loves the fields and the rivers. She loves the baskets and the cherries. She loves them so much that she wants to join them, be one with them. Her name is eternity. She's called memory. She's called death. She pursues me. She clings to me. She talks to me of former times. She talks to me of before. She settles down in me. She grows there. She invades my flesh. She takes my life.

I left you with my address and you wrote me a gorgeous letter, but you included a photograph of yourself in a blue Polo shirt. "In front of my car," you'd written on the back, and the car was a cherry-red Lamborghini, but it was clearly also in motion, driving away from you. I was naïve but not entirely so, and it made me sad to think that you believed I'd believe this. And so I never answered, and I never discovered whether your gentleness that afternoon was truly kindness for a bedraggled stranger, or whether you were the predator two decades have taught me you might have been. But this is the power of memory: the person who owns it can morph it to her desire. I'd like to judge you for the intense courtliness with which you treated me, the conversation, the sunlight in which we sat. I won't ever know the truth, but I choose to believe you were good and that your arrival took me away from worse. So thank you, Enrico Ferrante, for what didn't happen, for what you didn't do, for what I didn't find in that menacing dreamland of Palermo, for the way your gentle intervention sent me away.

In a study involving the offspring of stressed male mice conducted at Emory University School of Medicine in 2013, researchers discovered that traumatic memories could be passed down to subsequent generations through epigenetic changes that occur in DNA. Mice in one generation were trained to fear a cherry blossom–like scent called acetophenone. Each time they were exposed to the smell, they simultaneously received an electric shock. After a while, the shocked mice had a greater amount of smell receptors associated with that particular scent, enabling them to detect it at lower concentrations. They also had enlarged brain areas devoted to those receptors. Researchers were also able to identify changes in the mice’s sperm. The most intriguing aspect of the study is what occurred in the next two generations. Both the pups and grandpups, when exposed to the blossom odor, became jumpy and avoided it, despite never having experienced it before. They also exhibited the same brain changes. The mice appeared to inherit not only the sensitivity to the scent, but also the fear response associated with it.64

My mother had a passion for all fruit except oranges, which she refused to allow in the house. She named each one of us, on a seeming whim, after a fruit and a recipe- Cassis, for her thick black-currant cake. Framboise, her raspberry liqueur, and Reinette after the reine-claude greengages that grew against the south wall of the house, thick as grapes, syrupy with wasps in midsummer. At one time we had over a hundred trees (apples, pears, plums, gages, cherries, quinces), not to mention the raspberry canes and the fields of strawberries, gooseberries, currants- the fruits of which were dried, stored, made into jams and liqueurs and wonderful cartwheel tarts on pâte brisée and crème pâtissière and almond paste. My memories are flavored with their scents, their colors, their names. My mother tended them as if they were her favorite children. Smudge pots against the frost, which we base every spring. And in summer, to keep the birds away, we would tie shapes cut out of silver paper onto the ends of the branches that would shiver and flick-flack in the wind, moose blowers of string drawn tightly across empty tin cans to make eerie bird-frightening sounds, windmills of colored paper that would spin wildly, so that the orchard was a carnival of baubles and shining ribbons and shrieking wires, like a Christmas party in midsummer. And the trees all had names. Belle Yvonne, my mother would say as she passed a gnarled pear tree. Rose d'Aquitane. Beurre du Roe Henry. Her voice at these times was soft, almost monotone. I could not tell whether she was speaking to me or to herself. Conference. Williams. Ghislane de Penthièvre. This sweetness.

Then his tears came once more, and feeling cold he went into his dressing-room to look for something to throw around his shoulders. But he had lost control of his hand so that it moved like a brainless creature and completely failed to carry out the small mathematical operation which consisted, because the inside of the wardrobe was dark, in fumbling a way through the different velvets, silks and satins of his mother's outmoded dresses which, since she had given up wearing them, for many years, she had put away in this piece of furniture, until it could feel the wooden jamb, far back, which separated these garments from his own, and, on reaching the second rough-surfaced coat, to take it from the hanger from which it depended. Instead, it tore down the first piece of fabric it encountered. This happened to be a black velvet coat, trimmed with braid, and lined with cherry-coloured satin and ermine, which, mauled by the violence of his attack, he pulled into the room like a young maiden whom a conqueror has seized and dragged behind him by the hair. In just such a way did Jean now brandish it, but even before his eyes had sent their message to his brain, he was aware of an indefinable fragrance in the velvet, a fragrance that had greeted him when, at ten years old, he had run to kiss his mother—in those days still young, still brilliant and still happy—when she was all dressed up and ready to go out, and flung his arms about her waist, the velvet crushed within his hand, the braid tickling his cheeks, while his lips, pressed to her forehead, breathed in the glittering sense of all the happiness she seemed to hold in keeping for him.

The village square teemed with life, swirling with vibrant colors and boisterous chatter. The entire village had gathered, celebrating the return of their ancestral spirit. Laughter and music filled the air, carrying with it an energy that made Kitsune smile. Paper lanterns of all colors floated lazily above, their delicate glow reflecting on the smiling faces below. Cherry blossoms caught in the playful breeze, their sweet, earthy scent settling over the scene. At the center, villagers danced with unbridled joy, the rhythm of the taiko drums and the melody of flutes guiding their steps. To the side, a large table groaned under the weight of a feast. Sticky rice balls, steamed dumplings, seaweed soup, sushi, and more filled the air with a mouthwatering aroma. As she approached the table, she was greeted warmly by the villagers, who offered her food, their smiles genuine and welcoming. She filled a plate and sat at a table with Goro and Sota, overlooking the celebration. The event brought back a flood of memories of a similar celebration from her childhood—a time when everything was much simpler and she could easily answer the question who are you? The memory filled her heart with a sweet sadness, a reminder of what she lost and what had carved the road to where she was now. Her gaze fell on the dancing villagers, but she wasn’t watching them. Not really. Her attention was fully embedded in her heart ache, longing for the past, for the life that was so cruelly ripped away from her. “I think... I think I might know how to answer your question,” she finally said, her voice soft and steady, barely audible over the cacophony of festivity around them. “Oh?” Goro responded, his face alight with intrigue. “I would have to tell you my story.” Kitsune’s eyes reflected the somber clouds of her past. Goro swallowed his bite of food before nodding. “Let us retire to the dojo, and you can tell me.” They retreated from the bustling square, leaving behind the chaos of the celebration. The sounds of laughter and chatter and drums carried away by distance. The dojo, with its bamboo and sturdy jungle planks, was bathed in the soft luminescence of the moonlight, the surface of its wooden architecture glistening faintly under the glow. They stepped into the silent tranquility of the building, and Kitsune made her way to the center, the smooth, cool touch of the polished wooden floor beneath her providing a sense of peace. Assuming the lotus position, she calmed herself, ready to speak of memories she hadn’t confronted in a long time. Not in any meaningful way at least. Across from her, Goro settled, his gaze intense yet patient, encouraging her with a gentle smile like he somehow already understood her story was hard to verbalize.

An ancient fruit tree of some kind, an apple or cherry, grows in the park a little way from here. Every March, it blooms. Ten thousand pink and white flowers bloom and shake for a week. Then, all the flowers fall, and for a while the tree stands in its own memories.

In the bottom of the box was a framed silver fork. I closed my eyes as I held it in my hands. I sat in the pile of memories

Yeah, just what I needed, a massive three-day Hostess binge, followed by a week of trying to replicate recipes so that if no one decides to buy and reissue Twinkies and Suzy Q's, I'll be all set. It was a ridiculous endeavor, since most of the experience of Hostess is in the slightly plasticky tastes and textures, which cannot be replicated in a home kitchen. You can make a delicious moist yellow cake and fill it with a marshmallowy vanilla cream, and it will be spectacular, trust me; I ate at least a dozen. But it won't taste like a Twinkie. The cake won't have the springiness, the filling won't have the fluff, and it is impossible to get those three little dots in the bottom. Which would be fine, since I hadn't actually eaten a Hostess product for the better part of a decade, hadn't missed them either. But that little news item hit, and in a Pavlovian fit of nostalgia, I was off to the local gas station to load up on white boxes with blue and red details. Twinkies, Sno Balls, Ding Dongs... even a cherry Fruit Pie. All of them the flavors of my youth, and proof that there are certain things you should leave as fond memories, since they don't really hold up.

The pictures she drew on were vibrant as ever, though. The crumbling stone farmstead overlooking the great Luberon valley where she was born. The blending room of the distillery in Manosque where she had experienced a kind of rebirth, beginning the transformation into the woman she was now. Scent was memory, and memory a complex blend of scent and emotion: the perfect flowers of the lavender hills, like millions of mauve butterflies fluttering on stalks; the violet; the heliotrope of home, with its heart of sweet almond and cherry vanilla. She mixed them all into her signature fragrance Lavande de Nuit, along with a breath of civet musk and a haunting trace of smoke.

She is like the cherry blossoms of spring, not only beautiful and welcoming, but delicate with a life that is too short. And like the cherry blossoms, she will soon be but a distant memory for the people that have experienced her time here.

Every person in this world has a mixtape of sorts, a collection of tracks that defines their lives. Each memory is a song, and they all come together to create a masterpiece.

We can’t cherry-pick the parts of our story we’d like to keep. Our lives are a melting pot of regrets, triumphs, sorrow and joy. You have to accept it all.

always put it off for tomorrow. I thought I had more time, but sometimes tomorrow never comes and you’re only left with the memories of yesterdays

memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.

Memories were scary, how they could break you with simply your own thoughts.

sometimes tomorrow never comes and you’re only left with the memories of yesterdays.” When

Jamie always wanted me to build her a library; I always put it off for tomorrow. I thought I had more time, but sometimes tomorrow never comes and you’re only left with the memories of yesterdays.

Liv applied cherry red lipstick in her rearview mirror with the precision of experience, her brand of war paint to give her confidence today.

Spit it out, Win,” Vane says, his bright violet eye searching my face. I don’t want to tell him. He’s going to lose his fucking shit. I close my eyes and try to conjure the exact memories, the exact words, the exact look on Cherry’s face…

The mind of a horse is a very limited concern, relying almost entirely upon memory. He rivals our politicians in that he has little real intellect.

Every person in this world has a mixtape of sorts, a collection of tracks that defines their lives. Each memory is a song, and they all come together to create a masterpiece. So, tell me about your story. What lyrics, what melodies, live on your mixtape?

Most people have a catalog of scents in their heads: coffee, rainstorms, that awful cherry-scented mopping soap they always seem to use in hospitals and apartment buildings. All of these scents are attached to the memory of sensations: emotional, physical, existential. And everyone’s associations are different.

It’s the sharpest intake of breath that causes me to glance up. I know that sound. As slight as it is in the giant room, it sinks claws into my gut and twists. It’s the sound Alana made when I popped her cherry. My cock is already stiffening at the memory, at the potential of her being near, when I look up and find her staring back at me. My little girl is sitting in the front row. Of my fucking lecture

It’s the sharpest intake of breath that causes me to glance up. I know that sound. As slight as it is in the giant room, it sinks claws into my gut and twists. It’s the sound Alana made when I popped her cherry. My cock is already stiffening at the memory, at the potential of her being near, when I look up and find her staring back at me. My little girl is sitting in the front row. Of my fucking lecture hall.

18 Jail-Time He was in Gentry's loft. He was watching Cherry do nurse-things to Gentry. Cherry looked over at him from where she sat on the edge of Gentry's bed. 'How y'doin', Slick?' 'Okay... I'm okay.' 'Remember me asking you before?' He was looking down at the face of the man Kid Afrika called the Count. Cherry was fiddling with something on the stretcher's superstructure, a bag of fluid the color of oatmeal. 'How y'feel, Slick?' 'Feel okay.' 'You're not okay. You keep for-' He was sitting on the floor of Gentry's loft. His face was wet. Cherry was kneeling beside him, close, her hands on his shoulders. 'You did time?' He nodded. 'Chemo-penal unit?' 'Yeah.' 'Induced Korsakov's?' He - 'Episodes?' Cherry asked him. He was sitting on the floor in Gentry's loft. Where was Gentry? 'You get episodes like this? Short term-memory goes?' How did she know? Where was Gentry? 'What's the trigger?' 'What triggers the syndrome, Slick? What kicks you into jail-time?' He was sitting on the floor in Gentry's loft and Cherry was practically on top of him. 'Stress,' he said, wondering how she knew about that. 'Where's Gentry?' 'I put him to bed.' 'Why?' 'He collapsed. When he saw that thing...' 'What thing?' Cherry was pressing a pink derm against his wrist. 'Heavy trank,' she said. 'Maybe get you out of it...' 'Out of what?' She sighed. 'Never mind.

The martini glass teetered on the edge of the tray. When my waiter handed me the glass, the darker pink of the liquid splashed onto the lighter pink of the tablecloth. Maraschino cherries rimmed the orange slice floating in the center and the grenadine tinted the ice cubes pink.

Adults didn't like maraschino cherries; nobody ate them but me. "Never give Charlotte just one cherry in her Shirley Temple," everybody said. "Make it at least five or six." But I tired of cherries, just cherries. So after a time, lemon, lime, and orange twists snaked around the brims. Dollops of Chantilly cream floated like water lilies on top of mint leaves in the fizzy pink water. The bartenders dipped sugar swizzles in grenadine overnight so they would look like pink rhinestones, capped cocktail straws with berries they had rolled in honey, and looped lemon peels around the stems of martini glasses. Everyone on the staff called those ones "Bondage Shirley Temples," and then they would wink at one another.

There is a sort of fascination with the past that is an act of deliberate forgetting: it’s called “nostalgia.” Religious communities are particularly prone to this. Faith is “handed down,” a matter of traditio, and hence faithfulness can be confused with preserving the past rather than having gratitude for a legacy meant to propel us forward. The most significant problem with nostalgia is not that it remembers but what it forgets. “So much of the trouble of this world is caused by memories,” wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard, “for we only remember half.”19 The “past” that is pined for is always selected, edited, preserved in amber, and thus decontextualized, even if this past is invoked as marching orders for restoration and recovery.20 Whenever the past is invoked as a template for the present, the first question we should always ask is, Whose past? Whose version of the past? And what does this invoked past ignore, override, and actively forget? Which half is recalled? Whose half is forgotten?

i loved you quietly wanting only to baptise you with light upon light for the way you laugh into your neck in the courtyard of your dreams i loved you soft like satin wind gliding across the river of music and memory i kissed the cherry trees you crossed the scent of nostalgia wild under warm vernal rain i danced without a sound i loved you solely you between damp pages of starlings and songs while the moon wept i held you like a holy yes in my infinite solitude

Autumnal Leaves & The One Who Greaves! Leaves, few green, and many pale leaves, Nature greaves, as Autumn their life steals, And casts them into the lap of gravity, As it leaps at them like a predator that is remorseless and beastly, One by one, all pale leaves with red veins lie striven on different surfaces, Of parks, gardens, pedestrians and that long promenade where summer still exists in traces, In those pine needles still hanging on the tree of life, Piercing deeper and deeper in the true spirit of life’s endless strife, And the aching branches sigh a little louder with every new piercing, But they sustain the pain in hope of adventing Spring, And the river that still flows merrily through the fringes of the town, Looks at the falling, pale leaves and aching pine trees, with an ever deepening frown., The cold cast iron benches on the promenade lie empty, Where just a few months ago lovers kissed in an absolute feeling of felicity, Now occupied occasionally by the regular joggers trying to understand why it rushes, this ever flowing river, Unaware and heedless towards the lovers’ loss and the naked branches with green leaves fewer, And nature, the true lover of us all, Yet thanks the seemingly melancholic season of fall! For to better preserve the heritage of beauty, Time and death too need to fulfil their duty’ For what exists in the form of beautiful memories, Resides in the sanctuary of immortality just like the sweet taste of last season’s red cherries!

Since 2011 cherry trees, a symbol of life and rebirth, have been planted in great numbers near Fukushima, in memory of those who died and to help resurrect neighbourhoods washed away during the tsunami.

This time’s forever. I couldn’t imagine spending another day without you by my side. I love you, Shay. More than words, I love you, and I am going to spend the rest of my life making up for all the memories we missed out on creating. This.” He said, pulling me in closer to his chest. “You, me, and us. This is only the beginning of our beautiful story, and I cannot wait to see what else we write against our pages.

bathroom. Nothing. She came back into the bedroom, got down on the floor and reached the penlight under the bed. She flicked it on, revealing the space to be empty save for an assortment of dust balls and a room service menu. Cassie got up and went into the living room, where she surveyed every square foot of the room but found nothing that even hinted at the location of the briefcase. She started panicking and thinking about her decision earlier to go down to the bar for a cherry Coke and to rekindle memories of her last moments with Max. During that time had Hernandez possibly gotten up from bed, left the suite and stashed the briefcase, only to return and go right back to sleep? It seemed ludicrous, except for the fact that she could not find the briefcase. Suddenly she remembered the safe. Hernandez’s keys had inexplicably been inside it. Cassie tried to determine what this could mean and quickly came to a conclusion. The keychain held keys that opened the briefcase and the handcuffs. To put those keys in the safe rather than to take measures safeguarding the case and its contents would be done only if those measures had been taken in some other way. If Hernandez had not left the suite, how else other than with use of the safe could he safeguard the case? Cassie moved back into the bedroom and surveyed the bed. She visualized

For first names, make up a Substitute Word for the name and get it into your picture. Once you make one up for any name, it will become a standard for you. You might use all in for Alan, robber for Robert, cherry for Jerry, floor ants for Florence, bride (marry) for Mary, shield for Sheila, hairy for Harry, gym for Jim, and so on. You can put anything you like into your original picture—the person’s business affiliation, spouse’s name, children’s names, hobby, how much money he owes you—whatever. Of course, it will take longer to form the original picture or association, but it would take longer to remember all that information in any case.

Not since Mr. Kaiser,” they would say, as if the construction of the Hawaiian Village Hotel on a few acres of reclaimed tidal flat near Fort De Russy had in one swing of the builder’s crane wiped out their childhoods and their parents’ childhoods, blighted forever some subtropical cherry orchard where every night in the soft blur of memory the table was set for forty-eight in case someone dropped by; as if Henry Kaiser had personally condemned them to live out their lives in California exile among only their token mementos, the calabashes and the carved palace chairs and the flat silver for forty-eight and the diamond that had been Queen Liliuokalani’s and the heavy linens embroidered on all the long golden afternoons that were no more.

Dennis and I followed the slippery eel of I-5 and listened to the trees: the moan of a madrone, the counsel of a Douglas fir, the shimmer of a cherry tree, the whine of a whitebark pine, paper birches, dogwoods, and oaks and maples and sweet gums and cedars and elms. Some shared memories of things that had occurred many, many years before on the land around their trunks, slow stories of fights between lovers, the massacre during the lumber industry boom, the Great Seattle Fire, and the Klondike gold rush. Trees are super nostalgic. Others recited soothing poems in sotto voce—oral balms learned as seedlings. Some spoke of when the bison and the wolf roamed this land; they talked of change and whispered about a predestined event, repeating the word “renaissance” in harmony. I had no clue what all this had to do with Michelangelo, but you don’t argue with a tree.

I remember watching my grandmother build her fire, the honest kindling, the twisted newspaper, the tiny tower of good black coal. And how, once lit, she'd hold a sheet of newspaper across the fire and say, 'watch it suck, dear'. - An Old Woman's Fire

You're inside at the kitchen table wolfing cereal when she says, 'you have accomplished a great thing.' You say, 'and what would that be, bwana?' Meredith says, 'you're your same self.' The truth of this flickers past you, gnat-like. For years, you've felt only half done inside, cobbled together by paper clips, held intact by gum wads and school paste. But something solid is starting to assemble inside you. You say, 'I am my same self. That's not nothing, is it?' That catchphrase will serve as a touchstone for years to come, an instant you'll return to after traveling the far roads. Like everything else, Meredith thought it up. You were there solely for embellishment and witness: you were there to watch.

Now all of those memories are just melting away

Hey, you guys. Sorry I haven’t visited. Truth is I was trying my best to run from you, because I didn’t know how to live without you. I abandoned you and went searching for a replacement. For someone who didn’t even exist, because I couldn’t imagine not having a family anymore. I couldn’t imagine living in a world where you both weren’t. I don’t know how to do this without you. I don’t know how to exist… so just tell me what to do. Please. I’m so fucking lost. I don’t think I can do this without you.” My heart pounded against my chest as I slid down to the ground, finally allowing myself to feel the loss of Jamie and Charlie. They were my world. Charlie was my heart, and Jamie was my soul, and I’d let them down by turning away from them both. By not mourning their memory the way they deserved. “Please wake me up. Wake me up. Wake me up and tell me I’m stronger than I think I am. Wake me up and tell me my heart isn’t breaking anymore.