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Description
Nestling into my side on the couch,
she murmurs half-asleep that
“Home always had a fireplace
for the winter,
even when we lived
in the Winnabow boonies.”
Her father would buy dried oak logs
from the beds of pick-ups,
later hauled in by her brothers
to join wood-smoke
with the home-smells
of vanilla candles,
baking bread and Brunswick stew,
drifting outside on wisps
of chimney smoke.

“When we were younger,
we were always dirty,”
she tells me, smiling at her dusty feet
buried in the light, silty soil
of her early-childhood island.
“But in a healthy, little-kid way, you know?”
They did not believe in shoes
and loved digging winter holes
in the dirt-sand beside the garage,
dreaming of China
and pretending to be meerkats
until real dirt and manure
filled the holes with spring garden.

Elbows on the ferry rail,
she leans forward, hair knotting
around her face.
During Oak Island hurricanes,
she would stand outside before the rain
and stretch out her arms
against the feral gusts,
feeling just a little more weightless,
just a little closer to birds
in the throaty hum of the wind
and the absence of taming voices.
“I used to sit in the very tops of trees too,
swaying, clinging to one limb, every moment thinking
What if it breaks? What if I fall?”
She looks over at me studying her.
“But I’m too big for tree-climbing now.”

Once, I told her that children
must remember their earliest heartbeats
in the primordial ocean of the womb
because there is something about water
that draws children like mosquitoes --
they splash in the puddles,
play in the tide pools,
stare over bridge railings
at the rolling dark of the rivers below.
“I never forgot that fascination,”
she tells me, tossing a coin into the sea.

Description
Nestling into my side on the couch,
she murmurs half-asleep that
“Home always had a fireplace
for the winter,
even when we lived
in the Winnabow boonies.”
Her father would buy dried oak logs
from the beds of pick-ups,
later hauled in by her brothers
to join wood-smoke
with the home-smells
of vanilla candles,
baking bread and Brunswick stew,
drifting outside on wisps
of chimney smoke.

“When we were younger,
we were always dirty,”
she tells me, smiling at her dusty feet
buried in the light, silty soil
of her early-childhood island.
“But in a healthy, little-kid way, you know?”
They did not believe in shoes
and loved digging winter holes
in the dirt-sand beside the garage,
dreaming of China
and pretending to be meerkats
until real dirt and manure
filled the holes with spring garden.

Elbows on the ferry rail,
she leans forward, hair knotting
around her face.
During Oak Island hurricanes,
she would stand outside before the rain
and stretch out her arms
against the feral gusts,
feeling just a little more weightless,
just a little closer to birds
in the throaty hum of the wind
and the absence of taming voices.
“I used to sit in the very tops of trees too,
swaying, clinging to one limb, every moment thinking
What if it breaks? What if I fall?”
She looks over at me studying her.
“But I’m too big for tree-climbing now.”

Once, I told her that children
must remember their earliest heartbeats
in the primordial ocean of the womb
because there is something about water
that draws children like mosquitoes --
they splash in the puddles,
play in the tide pools,
stare over bridge railings
at the rolling dark of the rivers below.
“I never forgot that fascination,”
she tells me, tossing a coin into the sea.