By my own standards, I believe I have lived a long life. I am older than my mother ever got to be. I remain active, in mind, body, and spirit. I am at peace in my day to day life and occasionally will attempt an endeavor that challenges my view of the world I inhabit. Seeing what is part of the familiar landscape from a different perspective often opens my mind to a new way of not just seeing something, but gives me a new approach.

There are some less than bright memories from my childhood. I think most adults could identify some moments from the past that deserve some illumination from a position that time, and only time, can provide. Throughout my adult years, I have spent some time trying to recall more than just snippets of mental pictures of my young self. All I had were vague images the people in my life as they moved through my life. Until I found the key.

I asked a trusted friend about her memories and how they come to the surface. I wondered if they just sat in a space in her mind and came through only when something jarred them loose like mine do. She said hers had more specific triggers. We were not talking about dark times or traumas, just the run of the mill average childhood memory.

I began to explore my past through other paths than the ones I had chosen. I had always relied on what my mind could hold, believing there is only so much space for what came before. I thought that as we aged, we lost some memories so that others could have some room of their own. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Memories or scenes from the past exist on their own plane, in their own space, with their motivations for remaining intact. Its our own human foibles that lead us believe we are the masters of our minds hold. Our minds capture ideas, images, feelings, and perceptions in a most exceptional fashion. I read that its a myth that we only use 10% of our brain power. I tend to believe that if could access each and every aspect of what our brains absorb, we wouldn’t have enough time in a day, or our lives for that matter, to process all of that information. Our brains protect us from, and for, us.

So I sat in my most comfortable seat in a place where I feel safest. Not having to have to be concerned with anything but finding, or creating another path to childhood memories. As it was, in that moment, I didn’t have a whole lot of them. I thought about what my friend had told me. She would be taken back to a specific time through specific aromas or flavors. In other words, her other senses would be the path back to her child self.

Growing up in the Filipino culture and never separating myself from it, the aromas of my childhood followed me throughout my life. The food I ate as a child is the same food I eat today. So I started thinking about the things in life I feel connected to. Not my family or anything so structured as that. The little passing things in my world that bring me back to myself and through that to other things in my world.

Bees are one of those that bring me back to myself. I used to catch them when I was a little kid. I would get an empty jar with a lid and a ask a grown up to punch holes in the top. Then I would put some leaves or blades of grass in it. On one side of the playground nearest our house, was a row of bushes that bees love to do their work in, though at the time I didn’t know that. I just thought they liked the smell of the flowers. I would wait for a bee to land then try to catch one in my jar.

I would hold the jar beneath the flower and keep the top near enough to the top so that all I had to do was put the top on and the bee would be in the jar. I could only catch one because once I opened the jar to catch another one, the first one would fly out. Once my sister caught two, but it was only that one time. When we brought the jars home, a grown up would tell us to let them go. Bees don’t make good pets.

I hadn’t thought of catching bees for a really long time. That memory came through the path of what connects me to my world. It wasn’t too long before I rediscovered other memories that I thought I had lost to time. In those memories are parts of me I forgot existed. Joys that had been mired in the muck of adulthood.

I still have to go to work and to take of al the other aspects of life that I dedicated myself to. But now when I see a bee, I am taken back to a time when my heart beat more freely, and smile sat just on the edge of my lips. Its as if the little girl me is within complete and total reach of the grown up me. And she lives untainted by the life that came after her.