1.
Two 7 year olds in purple crocs, the heat not yet intense, the dark eggplants reminding me that we will make Greek food in a couple of days, the sound of water as they dipped their scoops and soaked each plant.
2.
He made cocktails, Aperol spritzes that reminded me of walking to dinner across the Campo Santa Margherita in Venice, students holding glasses of it in the cool evening, and the one we called Summer Roses for the pretty colour layered in the beaded glasses. Holding my drink, I remembered boiling the rose petals for the syrup, imagining him in the kitchen, mixing Empress gin and soda, adding some of the syrup, and all of us clinking glasses before going out to the deck to sit under the grapevine.
3.
When she sang “Tecumseh Valley“, I always thought of the road from Bridesville to Rock Creek, not the highway, but the crescent that we drove on a quiet morning, surprising a young bobcat on the shoulder, listening to yellow-headed blackbirds, pausing to take a photograph of the ranch I have dreamed of so many times, and how I played her music on every other road we drove on, and how she will live forever in the beauty of those roads.
The name she gave was Caroline
Daughter of a miner
And her ways were free and it seemed to me
The sunshine walked beside her
...Theresa Kishkan 