When You Are Four
Imagine you are yawning,
sleepy from an unfinished dream.
In your nightgown you toddle across the linoleum
push open the back door of the yellow kitchen,
the screen door slams behind you.
The smell of outside meets you,
a smell damper than yesterday when it was still summer.
Something bitter wafts from the well where, at its base, leaves collect.
Your bare feet recoil at first contact with the grass,
still wet and cold with dew,
but you quickly adjust and concentrate your nose.
You’re four so the back yard goes on for miles.
Something in you calibrates whether there’s enough time
to explore even a third of it, your favorite third,
before the cream of wheat gets hard.
A barely discernable draft pushes you toward the laundry line.
Sheets hang from yesterday, like stiff walls of a tent, and you think:
this would make a perfect house, these sheets should stay here,
be here all of the time, they smell so sweet,
and then, when a shadow crosses over,
a cloud shadow so large it shades the valley you live in
and chills your arms,
you point your face to the sky and feel rain.
Remember the Way
He stuffed the borrowed pebble in his pocket.
Of course, if his grandfather discovered the bit of grit was missing, he might not have agreed that it was a loan. After all, he had nothing to do with the placement of the pebble in the Sam’s pocket.
But both Sam and his grandfather appreciated the value of this small nugget, a rock that started its planetary life inside a big bang some time before now. In turn, molten lava spat and piled and cooled, leaving islands, then continents in its wake. Covered with seawater, frozen for millennia, built bigger by centuries upon centuries of snowfall, glacial movement as it charged and cut through rock mountains, carving valleys, shaving centimeters from canyon walls, widening the path for the melting ice to surge and descend to sea level, eventually carrying a boy, Sam’s grandfather, along with his three friends, boys all barefoot, drifting in a boat, burning in the sun, to the mouth of a river. When the dinghy finally spilled into an estuary, mixing sweet into salt water, the hull scraped to a halt on a rocky beach. Sam’s grandfather, about to turn ten, reached for a pebble smoothed by water and time.
This, he whispered to his future self, is so I never forget how I found my way here.
Karen Andrus 