I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

It's such a strange and dreamlike thing, the memory. Strange and dreamlike in the way it operates,

what it picks up, and what it leaves lying there, what it holds onto, and what it eventually lets go of. I don't know why I remember the dress I wore

on my eighth birthday, ruffled and beige with tiny blue flowers. While entire important conversations I had in adulthood have slipped away from me.

I don't understand the sorting the mind does and how it decides what to put in the keep pile

and what to put in the pile labeled give away.

I don't understand it, but I'm so intrigued by it.

I love when I'm someplace and I'm reminded of someplace else.

In those moments, it's like my brain is tapping me on the shoulder,

trying to get me to make a connection.

Hey, remember that time when...

It might be the quality of the light, or smell or a sound, or even the sky can be a reminder.

For example, whenever the sky is very clear and very blue, I can't help but think of the morning of September 11th. Maybe you know what I mean.

Hard blue, some people called it. Meteorologists often describe that deep, intense blue sky as severe clear.

What a phrase given the tragedy that unfolded in the air that day.

There's an art installation at the 9-11 Memorial Museum called Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on that September morning.

The large installation by Spencer Finch is 2,983 watercolors, each a shade of blue. The museum has called Finch's artwork a tribute to the enormity

of collective loss and the individuality of each of those who were taken from us far too soon.

I admire how today's poem is as much about memory and the connections our minds make as it is about loss.

Tara Vida by Lisa Heighton.

My mother kneeling next to the hybiscis with a little hand shovel planting hyacinths when I came to watch her.

I must have been seven or eight,

...