Twenty years ago

They walk side-by-side, hands brushing together with summer’s hot thoughts in their hearts.

Their shoulders bump. Their shadows blend behind them.

I glanced back twenty years as they passed me, the house, the mailbox.

In twenty years they would remember, when a boy and a girl walk by with summer’s hot thoughts in their hearts.

Lily and I chased Hershey to the brink of a dried vernal pool’s gray leaves. Puddles after a storm wrapped around Hershey’s feet. Bandit settled his too-big belly into the mud. Free from her leash Lily is a veil of shadows and pockets of light. Back with a stick and panting in the swath of stone and grass between fallen trees, I see Lily again. She is just a tan and black dog staring at me. Good girl Lily.