Three

That winter, in the field behind my house, we laughed to see the trees stoop under the weight of their thick diamond blankets. The impossible burden buried the world in silence and the late night was ice bright. The snow muted our excited steps, the gleam crushed all care. The silence devoured our laughter and we three felt absurdly light.

That summer, in the field behind my house, the rain threatened to wash away the world beneath our feet. We struggled to find dry land to stand on in the rivers, we fought to speak over the din of that deluge. The sky broke in hail and electric staccato strikes. Forty feet from where we stood, lightning roared to ground and shook the slackening ground as we huddled under the carport. The roar of thunder drowned out our gasps and wonder.

Now, in the field behind my house, I stand alone beneath the barely waning swell of this so recently full moon. We three have gone our three ways to live three separate lives in three separate cities. The cottonwood trees are half emptied of their paddle-leaves but them that remain still hiss against one another in the bite of the lengthening night’s breeze. The grasses blow in this last, lost summer, a dry rattle of one hollowing husk against another. I stand transfixed, alone and stare into the depth of the lidded moon until I can swear I hear laughter carried on the wind, blowing from beyond the end of the field, in the dark silhouette of trees, ephemeral, inviting. And I know if I were to turn and walk into that darkness, follow that laughter, I would be gone and this world would never know me again.

But I wonder, in this field behind my house, in this newly-minted autumn, if that’s a journey started too late. If you two were here, perhaps, and we all three heard that call and made that trip, maybe that would be a worthy journey. As it is, I turn and head back inside. I think maybe tonight, this long chapter finally reached its end. Tomorrow I will have to start packing and preparing after so long, to leave.

And yet in the field behind my house, the crickets continue their surging song that marks each night, and will continue long after I’ve left this place.

For DM and DK

We are already on the Further Shore. We arrived while you slept.