The Past
by Max Reif The past is an interest-bearing investment, an estate enclosing more territory each day, a delta always creating land. Now, in my 60s, I'm a great landowner, a don unable to survey all my holdings at once, even from the highest hill. To do so, I have to take to the winding back roads. Whole years I'd forgotten come into view. Everything is growing, rooted in soil. I didn't know the past blossomed with such passionate, poignant flowers or yielded such succulent fruit. Blossoms have faces and speak. Resurrected old homes straddle valleys. Memories graze on hillsides. I return from such excursions knowing there are still more such loops. How did the tiny sharecropper's yard I knew as a young man ever accrue to this? What Hand has watered the once-arid precincts and made them fertile? I wonder, hearing people say, “the past is dead”, when I find it so alive, nearly as unknown, at times, as what has not yet been dreamed, and ...