This is how she remembered it even though it never happened this way.
The road where she parked runs nearby but far enough away for the rhythmic noise of traffic to have been diluted and then consumed by her short walk here. The dense foliage of the horse chestnut trees that line the bridle path draws together like a zipper closing behind her as she climbs the gentle rise to the flat area they call the picnic table. In the distance, the land gradually slopes down to the maple trees that hide all but the gable window of the house where Mrs. McEwan lives with two long-haired dachshunds. The same trees that she knows by the end of summer will launch a thousand whirligigs, all hardwired to helicopter far from the shady canopy that will starve a seed of life.
She reaches the top and sits in the summer long grass of the meadow surrounded by memories. She lies back, slowly and deliberately, feeling the soft, jade green, tender tips of the long grass first resist, then bend and finally surrender to the weight of her arms and neck as she lets them fall in a gentle but persistent arc towards the damp earth. The coarser shafts at the base of the reedy stems prickle the bare backs of her knees and support her head like stiff bristles of a coarse brush, pinning her hair and capturing her scalp in a tight, gripped cap.
The shortest lengths of the grass now rise above the depth of her body so, buried in green, she disappears from sight. Down here, the grassy stalks collude to form a barrier that blocks her view to each side like the blinkers of a skittish racehorse. She stares at the white clouds that chase and clamber over each other on top of the flat blue August sky.
And then with all movement ceased, there is silence, and she waits for the show to begin. First nothing as the world around her adjusts to the alien in its midst. Nothing but her breathing and the flow and ebb of the blood that flushes with each beat in a torrent through her arteries and returns in the lazy rivers of her veins to the source. From behind, a gust of wind that she hears but cannot feel blusters clumsily, closer and closer, hunting left and right in growing frustration before breaking over her in a waterless wave that sweeps out towards the open fields.
Protected in a shallow grave of green, she feels safe and untouchable, forgotten but protected. A drone from her right announces the arrival of a tiger striped ball of unlikely flight, a bumble bee with pollen-heavy legs straining to keep aloft just inches above her face, drifting off like a drunken Zeppelin searching out a place to land.
She unclenches her fists and turns her fingers into the earth, feeling them slide through the soil to anchor her to this moment.
