Josh Rimmer

Sometimes if I am abroad on a cold winter night I am carried back to the sweet, turnippy, cow dung smell seeping past Josh Rimmer’s clumsy farmyard gate – the gate that was stiff to swing, and sagged, scraping noisily along the ground when opened or closed - and to Josh with his flat cap and the jacket secured with twine like a joke, clanking by on the tractor with the worn out tyres. His dried beefsteak face, proud as a charioteer, divided into a gristly smile, reminding me far too late of the mist that rose from the black earth on the Moss, telling me to take more care over my goodbyes and keep them safe.

Yet my youth was careless with such things. Though some I kept, like the first taste of her lips sheltering in the shadows beneath the bridge by the railway station and the smoothness of her skin between cool sheets, other memories I have lost. Like the smell of the fields in which we played, the rag and bone man’s call, the excitement and forbidden pleasures of the travelling fair. In my arrogance, memories were no more than dogs, destined to follow in my footsteps. I was not their keeper.

Only now do I see the truth of it; how every memory is a sacred treasure that must be held close against the thief of time. I know now. But now is too late. I should have heeded the warning from that clumsy farmyard gate and from Josh, with his jacket secured with twine for a joke. For now I know the true value of things and the true value of all that I’ve lost.