Childhood

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Childhood was riding my bike
for miles outside of town,
laying it beside a gravel road
and walking in the mountains
among the thin dusty lodgepole pine,
unafraid of rattle snakes.
I would sing my way up the slope,
drink from an irrigation trestle,
breathe in the scent of hot earth,
pine cones and summer,
then turn around and walk back down,
still singing.

Once I encountered a herd of cows on a hill,
who fell in behind me, enchanted by my song,
hoping I was leading them home to the barn,
disappointed faces watching me over the fence
as I picked up my bike and rode away.

Childhood, a time of pent-up silenced emotion
in a bursting chest, let loose by music,
singing for hours upstairs in my tiny hot bedroom,
LP's spinning on a small box record player,
and more dreams than
one beating heart could contain.

Nature and music: twin themes,
that have companioned my life:
wonder, laughter, dreams,
bathed in the scent of
weeping willow, bull-rushes and lake-ripples,
forever echoing in a vagabond heart
deepened with the remembering.

For Elizabeth's prompt at isojournal: the wonder of childhood. Day 6, kids.