The boy who came out of the sun

My husband, Alexx, as a young man of 18 or 20 in the mid-60's posing on the roof of the family Zephyr by the side of the road on the way south to Canberra.

His friend had taken the photo looking into the early morning sun, surrounding Alexx's head in a suffused golden glow which made me think of him as a magickal boy who flew out of the sun to travel down all of our years to my heart and my soul.

Over the recent Christmas break we had dragged out dusty shoe boxes of old black and white family photos from the '40's and slides or transparencies from the '60's. If you know me you know I love history, family history and the notion of time-travel. Oh! god! how I wish I could time travel!

Sitting out in the garden on a summer evening peering down into the slide viewer, the extraordinary clarity and luminous colour of the slide format transported me, drawing me deep down into the past.

I emerged from the activity quite shaken and unsettled, like earth fresh harrowed. In those images I could almost reach out and touch Alexx when he was a fresh-faced, bright-eyed boy with the whole world before him, and his choices unmade and their consequences unfelt. It made me reflect on our lives, on life; the process of living; of the green, smooth sappy sapling growing and twisting, bending and scarring and bleeding into the old gnarled tree. The old gnarled trees that we are fast becoming.

I was back there with him, on that bright cool fresh morning, feeling the warmth of a still kind sun, feeling the soft smooth sap of a world not yet grown hard.

I wept then. Wept for that innocent boy, thinking the world was his and nothing not possible, trapped now, forever, a numinous memory in luminous colour on a thin speck of film in a tiny plastic box. I wept for the sweet, sweet, strongfrail man he'd become, by my side, in my bed, in my arms, I in his. I wept for he and I both, arm in arm, picking our way down from the heights of promise, bearing our treasure of what was done, what was undone, irrevocable; of our exquisite joy and our exquisite sorrow.

Oh! Time travel! Where we touch, for a brief, moment all those fascinating things: growling, grimy, green and cream double-decker buses, coral pink lipstick and white alice bands, shiny black winkle-picker shoes and racy Zephyr cars.

But we touch too, like ice, like fire, the heart and the wound of this, our tiny, fleeting instant in the sun.