My Body Remembers What It's Like...

I was driving down the street yesterday and saw two men putting up a chain link fence.

This isn't a very common occurrence where I live. Almost all of the fences in this area are wood. That's just the way it is. But where I grew up, in Colorado, trees don't grow naturally except along streams and rivers. It's just too arid. So chain link fences are everywhere.

And as I watched those men yesterday, I felt that fence. Down in my feet.

If you were a child in a chain link area, you know exactly what I'm talking about: The pinch-and-pressure of the metal on your keds-clad foot as you climbed up and over.

(You're feeling it now, aren't you?)

We used to have to climb the three-foot fence to the neighbor's semi-regularly to get the baseballs we'd blast over. (Don't be too impressed. Our yards were small.) At school we'd sometimes climb the six-foot fences, when nobody was watching. Just because we could. I can still remember that climb -- up and up and up, then grasp the top rail and carefully throw one leg over, and then figure out what to do with the other leg, and pry the foot out of the hole, which is harder when you're sitting on top than when you're climbing... And then the final decision: whether to climb down, or just jump.

(When your feet get bigger, as mine did early, climbing down becomes less of an option. And I can still remember the reverberations in my feet and legs after that five- or six-foot jumb.)

Tactile memories. Muscle memories. So different from visual or auditory memories. So much more like...reliving the experience, even when you haven't done it for twenty or thirty or even forty years.

Curious. What kinds of things does your body remember?