When you were 4, you fell like Jack

tumbling high to low through the tree house doorway

cracking your skull on a hard edge of wood.

Those were the years of cowboy boots

little pointed toes catching all the world's sharp edges

your universe a gauntlet from the beginning.

You were cute as hell, anyway

a little bruise and row of black plastic stitches running through the fields with me

catching spiders

catching sunrays

catching fairies, then falling stars.

Our childhood was swiss-cheesed with hot days

reading books on a scratchy old couch from the 70s

hanging popsicle stick ornaments from the sticky tips of a Douglas fir by the window.

One bright but deadly summer we filled our Radio Flyer with box turtles

and jelly jars with tiny toads

our hands smeared with blood shot from a horned toad's eye.

That was before you nearly drowned.

Summers in Texas are Shakespearean

a playground for brandishing pecan daggers

as Perseids shoot across a blacktop August sky.

With our swords we challenged sun-bleached crawdad claws

and shrieked at their ghostly snap,

running fast toward home, a brave army of two.

The baked pavement gave beneath our footfalls

etching our joy into the road.

An unfurling path is eternally hopeful.

Maybe this day it will lead someplace different.

Remember how we dared the bull to charge?

The hay bale we destroyed one gleeful pull at a time?

Remember eating flavored ice beneath the dripping wings of a weeping willow

where we waited on the cicadas?

We dreamed of digging into their lairs, following the tiny roads rolling downward

of donning their armored shells

living safely in the dark.

In the dark is where you always held my hand, wiped away my tears.

We never made it there, but we did dream

And then one summer the cicadas roamed from their underground castles by the hundreds.

They were 17

and we were only half the age of an insect.