It is late afternoon of a beautiful summers day and the boy stands alone on the hilltop, his eyes taking in the surroundings. All is quiet now, no boats are on the water, his friends have disappeared somewhere, he could be with them but for some reason he wants to be alone today, as if waiting for someone or something, yet he isn’t expecting anyone. Suddenly and without warning a strange feeling comes over him, it is a feeling of homesickness, yet he is little more than sixty yards from the house that has been his home for all of his twelve years. He knows too that his parents are there inside the house, and that his two brothers will soon be home. Yet the feeling of homesickness continues.

Suddenly he knows that this is not his home, that he doesn’t belong here, that he doesn’t really know the people who live in those houses around him, yet they are his family and friends. He looks towards his brother’s house next door and the feeling is the same. The landscape too looks strange, yet he isn’t afraid. He feels that he wants to cry out, but he has no words. There is a longing within him, a longing for another place another time, yet he doesn’t understand, only that the more he thinks of it the more real it feels. He closes his eyes for a moment and scenes flash before him as if he were watching a movie, yet they pass so quickly that it’s impossible for him comprehend anything. He feels a sudden excitement, a joy, he has never known before as if anticipating something or someone. As quick as it started it is over, the longing is gone, the homesickness is gone. He realizes he is hungry.

Throughout the years, that day and those moments will keep returning to his mind, although he will never completely understand it or know why it happened to him. Sometimes too, he has to relive these memories, or like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner tell it to another before he is free of the homesickness that always comes with it. Today he feels that a very thin veil separates the physical and the spiritual, that the two are much closer than we think and there is nothing to fear. He knows too that once on a sunny afternoon, so long ago now, he remembered – and nothing that has happened since can take away the knowledge of that experience.