How time flies. And with it memory, as swift or swifter.

I picked up a book, The Fall, with me over fifty years, how I couldn’t say. I thought all the books from those years were left in a barn in Peculiar Missouri. Some of those books, only a few, i would have liked to see again. The Shadow Line of Conrad for instance, a first edition.

But this book I picked up from my shelf here in Valldemossa in 2014.  The Fall by Camus. I opened the cover. On the flyleaf, in her flowery handwriting,

Mari 1958 St. Louis.

She bought that book two years before we met.  I haven’t seen her since 1968.

I decided to look at surnames of her family in Pleasant Hill.  There I found the obituary for her brother Norman, and listed among siblings who had predeceased him was Mari Elizabeth Meadows.

After those intense five years we lived together, how could it be that when she left the earth I did not know it? It feels now like a message.

Almost every book I have owned since then was taken away when I sold my house in Deià.

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This is an excerpt from a collection of files Patrick called Scattered Notes.odt dated from 2014 to 2016. I’ll continue to add other segments as time allows.