For my favorite uncle in the season of daffodils.

~~~

The path is soft and easy like the filtered light that trickles through the pines and dances across the brown floor of sand and pine needles.

Creeping cedar and ferns line the sacred aisle and reach into the air as if to say, “We are here.  We have always been.  We will always be.”

A black and tan hound defies his name, Speedy.  His ambling gait and tail punctuate 50-year-old tobacco rows, the work of honest hands.  Up and down, side to side, he saunters through the screens of green and smell of loam.

A lone innocent obeys his pattern.  Straight past the main garden beyond the turn to the Old Place and through the big field where Daddy tended corn.  At the place where the Jeep was parked to light the nighttime planting, a slight angle left down the narrowed path across washed-out roots.  Then Kit Creek.  Step down, across, up the slope on the other side.  Step step step up the bank to the last field on the left.  Look up and around to the tree where Mama laid a pallet for the babies.  I, a baby with blond curls and blue eyes like Mama.  This is where I will sit.  I will sit for a spell and think.

Daddy and Mama whisper through the breeze.  “We are here.  We have always been.  We will always be.”

© Mitzi Viola, 3/30/11