THE BUTTERFLY OF THE MOMENT

"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop." - Vita Sackville West

I'm not overly attached to material things unless they are things that have been passed down the generation thread; or created for me; or given to me as tokens of love and appreciation. What I am attached to, however, are the numerous boxes housing words, drawings and personal history. To others, my boxes are junk taking up space. But to me, they are life itself.

A friend and former colleague said goodbye to this world last Thursday. Her family is struggling with the reality of her not being physically present. My thoughts went to a letter she'd written in response to an article of mine. I re-discovered it a few months ago while rummaging through one of those boxes. Since my filing system is random, I dug out the boxes where it would most likely be. I haven't found it yet. But what I did find were two poems she'd written that I'd forgotten about but now am able to read with deeper understanding.

In my work as a music teacher and counsellor in an elementary school, I often received drawings as gifts from children. One of those children, now a mother, recently contacted me. She wrote about a memory she has of learning "Kookaburra"—a fun Australian song we performed with voice, recorder, pitched and un-pitched instrumental accompaniment, capped off with a raucous imitation of the kookaburra laugh. My boxes of school treasures are in the garage, so again I went rummaging. This time to find a copy of the piece that stayed in her memory. In that search I discovered something else: seven drawings she'd given me twenty years ago. It was a teary moment when I texted her those images. Today, her expressions of appreciation are in the mail and going back to her.

My novel, Please Write, would not exist without the letters written from Vietnam—now almost fifty years old—that triggered memories and enabled me to capture a moment in history.

How meaningful it is when we take the time to "clap the net over the butterfly of the moment" for the moment is all we have; and the butterflies are what we leave behind.