It could have been the radio or maybe a cassette that echoed out of cheap speakers in another world and sent waves miles deep into that Midwestern living room, filling, enveloping, forcing a young boy to swim unknowingly in the nostalgia he was born into, that which would remain a given until long after it had been taken away. Lying on a carpet fuller and softer in memory, he soaked in the afternoon slant of warmth that freely passed through open windows onto the sofa and piano bench and potted plant and floor. The mother labored in the kitchen, probably, and siblings were absent, apparently, and a young boy knew nothing outside of his living room. The curtains of linen or a less-expensive cotton billowed with the exerted sigh of the mother mingled with a warm, seasonless breeze, casting permissive shadows gently across a contented cheek and a careless belly and a pair of legs that were hobbled in this domestic corral. He dozed in an eternity that was truncated by a drop in temperature that outran the setting sun in a gusting harbinger of storm. Miles away across field and something less than forest, the winds and rains shouted their approach with the slightest shift of midday’s changeless perfection, and a child felt the excited expectation of hurry against unexpected complication. But the mother was yet too distracted with baking or cleaning or another mysterious motherly duty, and obliviously allowed a boy to relish this elusive sense of change, of time passing into the inaccessible reaches of yesterday. Her mostly inconsequential neglect permitted a sharp snap of wind to rush through the window and flick the soft curtain in a gentler sound than its canvassed cousin on open ocean, just enough to prompt a parental, responsible shutting of all windows. The air-conditioning kicked on then or years later, and just such a dream remains at sea disturbed by endless eddies of concern.