Sometimes, in the early spring my girlfriend and I, hand in hand, would walk slowly down the muddy street to the end of the cul de sac where a well-worn path rose from a narrow creek that younger children often splashed in during the warmer months, but we were intent on crossing to the other side where a less obvious path wound its way up the hill to a crest overlooking a large cemetery--the careful geometry of headstones set into the slope and here and there towering ancient solitary firs, lower limbs stretching out toward the ground in all directions and so our destination beneath the lowest boughs where I could spread a blanket--the snow recently melted--and we would lie down holding each other, kissing, lips and cheeks and hands clasped between us, and sometimes a comment or two barely above a whisper about classmates or family, and more kissing, and then she would turn and we would spoon in the late afternoon sun, and I would nuzzle her hair and smell the flowery shampoo--my eyes closed until no earth, no sky, no reason, no one else alive, there beneath the fir tree.
Lyman 2026
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