Do you know what a hillock is?? I didn’t when I first saw one over two decades back. This one was peculiar, yellow, almost limestone like, and lined with a certain shrub I haven’t seen since; a shrub that, for me and other people I knew, was a distinct reminder of pain. You see this shrub had long, thin, straight, surprisingly supple, green stalks that when peeled of its bark became long, thin, straight, surprisingly supple, white stalks that an irate, long armed teacher in a foul mood could use to admonish his wards. But despite all the understandable hatred this shrub would bring to its rock ridden medium of choice, the hillock, my own mountain of the skull had one redeeming feature. Right in between all the greenery and the occasional yellow flower was a small bit of smooth, pressed earth.

If you had the gumption and the necessary cunning to climb up the leeward side you would be rewarded with a short, almost euphoric ride to the bottom.

All you had to do then was either attempt to repeat the experience or silently slink away to the nearest water source and attempt to clean all the dirty yellow evidence from your backside.

Now over two decades since I took my first mudslide on this peculiar hillock I realize I’ve been slow-walking myself to a personal epiphany ever since. An epiphany whose core message I think I’ve known all along. Life, at least mine, is (has been) about the small things. Any epiphany worth its salt should be earth shattering but this one seems strangely mellow. Little things stick in my head! Why??! I’d like to think that the larger meaning of life is simply futile to comprehend and we get by on the little things, those little experiences we gather along the way. I believe that’s why I remember the urine soaked roots of a young tree and its valiant attempts to grow in an overwhelming abundance of urea.

We take a strange, almost voyeuristic, interest in someone else’s stories and all these somehow change and become our own.

A kiss in the rain is romantic for that reason. We are experience hunt-ers gathering bit by simple bit, the people we meet, the conversations, images and so on are all, for lack of a better cliché, part of a collective tapestry of sorts. I am glad that the limestone yellow hillock with the pressed earth slide and the green shrub with the yellow flowers are a part of mine.