I am walking–just walking–on the shoulder of the road where the world is still soft and unpaved. I like the feel of the earth under my feet as I move-which is almost a song lyric but isn’t. And then there’s this hill to my right, a big cotton ball of a hill, steep but rounded; its grade littered with crawling things and dead leaves from the trees that protect it–that aren’t dead–and near impassable with weather-twisted brush and criss-cross thicket. Thicket so brown it looks like it’s always been brown, and not just after the heat of August.
 
 
But that’s okay because the hill is a replica of a hill in Lindley Park, the park we used to go to as kids as a family, the park with the A-frame picnic area and the most playground equipment, the one you had to drive to. And now I’m running up the hill, and twigs and brambles scratch me, leaves and bugs catch my hair but I don’t care–I am Briar Karen, barreling for the top of the hill that is Lindley Park, like I knew it would be, like I knew it could be, a sloping green of lumpy lawn bordered by pines as big as Redwoods.
 
 
And now I’m running past the doddering old man with a barrel belly and cane, and guinea pig glazed expression–fallout from doctors overeager to get their drug company kickback. I’m running past the thirty-something woman talking a blue streak to him–talking even though she’s exhausted from running in the thin air of Montana, and still catching up to herself–talking to him as if to an aging pet–
 

Are you okay papa?

Is the sun too much?

Are you okay?

You re’ okay…

(He isn’t)

 
–talking to him for the last time before he dies unexpectedly. I’m running beyond the sister who turned into a ghost long before she became one by her own hand, to the young family named Hope in the playground, to that sister and that man, to a world untouched by emotional and physical pain, persistent in the chest and intermittent in a head caved in by a car ten years ago, and scarier for that. Years fall like bricks and scars thin and fade.
 

And I’m so close I can smell it,

I can’t

It isn’t saltwater taffy and deviled eggs and sun-baked grass.

And it’s all these things.

 
 
 

And I’m so close I can touch it,

I can’t.

It isn’t sun-dappled leaf piles and bright orange sleeping bags and my very first passport.

And it’s all these things.

 
 
 

I’m so close I could change it.

I can’t!

It isn’t metronome memories and dandelion wishes and dreams of parallel worlds.

And it’s all these things.

 
 
 

And my insides swell into a bubble that pops
when I turn the corner at the stoplight…
and just keep walking.

 

Karen R. Sept 2, 2011