Lost and found is my eureka! blog, my rediscovery of my short fiction and poetry submissions published in literary magazines and university literary journals some decades ago. Interspersed, occasionally, with more recent, hitherto unpublished pieces.
In the still solitude of the winter woods a hush hangs on the landscape of dark tree trunks standing like sentry posts amid great pine forest giants anchored firmly by an accumulated snow pack sifted generously with fresh-fallen snow.
The sky, too, hovers, a mirror image of the ground billowed with snow, shimmering pearl-grey, silver, white. The silence suddenly broken by a coarse, hoarse racket of deafening dimensions. A murder of crows slaughtering the peace.
They shift and shuffle around the prickly, lofty spires of two-masted pines whose size bespeak their majesty, dignity offended by the rudeness of the invading horde; cackling, croaking, lifting their black wings outspread like phantoms circling the landscape of the sky.
There, there's that silhouette lodged deep in my heart. I see him even at that distance, in that crowd descending the airport escalator, even as his father declares "there he is!" And, there he is, as we grasp one another, we and our youngest.
His face now defined and finely chiseled with his own years on the very cusp of a half century, his smile broad, this child of ours, asking how we are, seeing how we are beside him, sheaves of grey in his beloved hair.
How strange it is to welcome briefly home the child we loved, cherished and nurtured then bade farewell as he confidently and with ease sought his own life where we are mere postscripts. How sweet it is for the distance breached, hearing his broad laugh directly beside us in the gentle flesh.
She is young and vivacious though as a mother of two young adults, not that young in fact. Yet so much in life is so obviously relative and to the grey-haired woman beside her, the pretty, charming woman was young and gregariously extroverted, so much so that their brief companionable proximity serendipitously served in its warmth to gift the elderly woman with the sweet illusion of herself, renewed in youth. Fittingly, or not, the younger woman wore casual exercise pants and as the two ambled side by side in the woods, the legend, coyly, perkily appearing on her derriere read, "Naughty". Delighting her companion no end.
