To a Spurious Memory

I sit, to pick the memory apart – it stares at me with a wrinkled heart: yellow-strawed lofts and green summer scents attack my withered countenance. A pair of smiling faces, images of bliss unfold out of a hike, a ride, a mother’s kiss. I hear a sound, a river’s gurgling song – children’s voices laughing pleasantly along. Like color and taste, I have no firm measure of comparing this vision of distant pleasure with reality. I must admit adorned perception a stage of unacknowledged self-conception, and store the memory in a mindful place that only I can touch, and taste.