Saisons

A fairytale about a dream a girl and achieving immortality by living on
in the hearts of the ones we love.

Epilogue

~ ~ ~ * ~ ~ ~

    “All that we are is all that we leave behind.”

…
    
    She returned on the promise of spring.

    Her heart overflowing with anticipation as she skipped along the sandbar and yet nestled to her breast was not her familiar book of dreams but a sapling of which she had nursed all winter long from the keepsake of green she had plucked from his heartwood. So proud was she of her endeavor that she gingerly carried the sprout within her bosom as if it were a child of her own.

    Thus ecstatic with her accomplishment she rounded the river’s bend rambunctiously stirring the morning’s mists into awakening with her bare feet and yet she was not greeted by the bustling sound of his coat and leaves but  rather the silence and echoing poetry of their summer’s past. Then so her enthusiasms were muddled by her confusions.

    What stood before her was barely a ghost of itself. Its once bountiful limbs and green canopy had been stripped and now laid strewn, windblown and broken. The stoutness of it’s trunk of heartwood had become desiccated, writhe and hollow. Then so what were once the muscling roots that sank deep into its mother’s earth were now merely gnarled, shrunken and withdrawn.

    Thus she knelt before his memory and kindly placed the plantlet respectfully within the weathered arms of its fathers hold. Then covering its tender roots gently with mother’s earth that whether it was the meadow’s dew or the mourning in her eyes, she lovingly watered its destiny and dreaming with the somber tears of her heart’s…

    Remorse.

…

     Then so I am my father’s son.

    That I was borne from a wood of cotton and height.

    Thus she returns to me on each and every promise of spring for there is sincerity in my sway as she sits in solace beneath the comfort ability and canopy of my bustling coat of emerald leaves.

    Older now that the silver threads of wisdom accent the wind in her hair, still she settles into the sanctuary of my hold and finding a particular page marked by a crumbling leaf of ocher she softly clears her throat and reads aloud from her tattered book of dreams…

     “Once upon a time…”

…

finito

© Charles Coakley Simpson2003