It was back in those days, the elementary school days,
when we were all friends, characters to one anothers plays of nonsense.
When we reigned over puddles with galoshes or brightly coloured gumboots.
When we wore capes and knew all the sing along songs.
And yes, I do recall, fondly so, that big park.
We were all there, whether in soul or in spirit,we explored the butterfly gardens, our parents and teachers were there too,
a school trip of sorts?
Just a vivid but fotgotten dream?
Who may answer these questions but ourselves by eventually succumbing to the universes natural way and forgetting the questions and finding and accepting the universes other answers.
The flowers of the light May day were in full bloom and that glass greenhouse, the one that intrigued me so, stood just like a castle.
After lunch, when the children were running throuhg green grass or wiping sticky hands from oranges upon the damper grass of the shade and while our parents and teachers sat on their coats dilly dallying, I stopped.
Stopped from my playing like a bunny caught in someones eyes. Was it a hand that grabbed mine or mine that reached out? Lead to a rivers edge, a little stream or pond. Ducking under willow and stepping over bushes and creeping through imagined dens of foxes or coyotes. My companion, my little friend, the face on the memory is blank, perhaps we had even more company.
We held hands.
We held hands like friends in our childhood innocence, before the concept of cooties, before the playground held terror. We sat hunched up by the pond poking sticks and reeds into the stream. Poking at the river flies and mud. Lost in a mystic realm of childhood unknowingness.
And then it caught me. A glimpse that magnified. The little water spider, gliding on the surface as though the surface were glass.
Oh water bug, from my bright eyes and blurred warm memeory you stood out to me. Majestically skating in the reflection of my face. As though you were that man mentioned in grandfathers stories from the book he said he beleived in, that man himself, walking on water. Such grace and beauty in you're perfectly casual stride, a quality I later noticed and looked for in people. Oh water bug, slipping your little bug fingers through glassy streams like a figure skater on an ice pond.
Do you remember me little bug? I was the one, the one with the little hands reaching out. I tried to hold your magic in my hands.
I was the one that in awe
reached out
But like a snap dragon,
in a blink, you were gone.
