Brief Moment in Time

I understand, now, why she told me of the lions in Africa. And described the smell of rich, dark coffee brewing in the morning. And how it felt to drink this coffee from a china cup and look out from the veranda on to a land where zebra grazed in the distance and lions waited quietly, watching, while the silver clinked against the porcelain plates and she ate her jellied toast.

She instilled in me, from the time I was a little boy just old enough to imagine, a desire to explore this country yet I never did know why she, herself, had not made her own sojourn to this part of Africa. I knew that she had wanted to. I thought, perhaps, that she preferred her imagination to the reality she might encounter.