good mourning dove

                  A mourning dove called outside my window this morning, transporting me to my childhood home, where I am leaning back on my elbows in the grass of our front yard. It is 6:00 on a late June evening, and I have spread myself out in the vast sprawl of green grass that sweeps down a hillside in front of my parents’ home (pre-cellphone, pre-ticks). I hear the mourning dove’s haunting call, and it stirs something sad and magical inside of me.
                   I didn’t know about mourning yet at age 7, so I puzzled over the inapt name – why do they call it a morning dove, I wondered, since it always sings its song in the evening?
                  Accompanying the dove’s plaintive coos every evening were the distant tower bells that played hymn-like songs at 6:00pm. The Reader’s Digest building’s headquarters was a mile from my house, and the sound of bells wafted easily from their hilltop tower, over the trees, to child me, basking in the bliss of a beautiful summer day, the keening dove, and the music of bells.
                  Memory is tantalizing, evocative, a gift. I hear a dove, and there I am in a romantic childhood swoon, listening to an orchestra of sound, feeling the cool blades of grass on my arms and legs, staring at the clouds, my only concern a puzzlement of words. Thank you, little dove.