wind chime

A tangle of painted glass and cotton threads lying on a table at the local car boot sale one bitter morning in early February catches my eye, occasions a start of recognition, for this is something that I have not seen since childhood, when it's replica hung at the window of my parent's kitchen forty or so years ago.

Fearing that the frail object may not be complete, that some of the glass may be broken, I carefully take it up in my hand to examine it more closely. Once suspended from my fingers, the threads realign themselves, and the glass pieces swing freely from them, an evocative, delicate mineral chime sounding on the cold air as they touch against each other.

What chance that I should find undamaged, save for the loss of the bottom most central pendant, such a thing, on such a morning as this, when the wind blows without inhibition from the North, and my joyfully resurging memories are of balmy afternoons in Spring, the kitchen window flung open to admit the scented moving air, my younger self transfixed with pleasure at the complex configuration of pellucid sounds as the fragile chimes strike one another in  response to the tremulous breeze?