The older I get, the more I reflect on my past.
There is something innocent about memory—about the way childhood feels like a thin, gossamer veil stretched between wonder and the world beyond it. That veil is pierced far too quickly.
What I remember most are the Kelley Family reunions.
There were rope swings beneath looming oak trees and bubbling brooks that ran past my grandmother’s homeplace. There was the Happy Trail — a path carved through the woods by my Uncle Junior’s own hands. Back then, it was strung with toys: dolls, action figures, little treasures dangling from branches like prizes in a woodland wonderland. The youngest children went first, gathering the low-hanging treasures, while the older ones reached higher, stretching for what was just out of reach.
The reunions themselves felt like that—tender and full of discovery.
Potlucks with relatives you only saw once a year. Dear cousins. Choreographed dance routines in the Alabama heat. We tossed rocks into the old well and shouted into its hollow mouth, listening to our voices echo back from stone walls. We sat on the porch and listened to stories that had already been told a hundred times. Rocking chairs creaked at dusk. Someone always found a way to play music, instruments appearing seemingly out of nowhere. We played bingo for prizes and stayed outside until the mosquitoes gave up and the lights in the old wooden house glowed against the dark field, tucked into the woods.
It was simpler then.
Most of those people are gone now. The elders pass on. The young grow older. The magic changes shape. But the memories grow brighter, sharper at the edges, as if time itself polishes them.
It was like that once.
It will never be that way again.
Such is the fragile veil of childhood.