I raise my eyes, and watch a bumble bee, hovering around the pink flowers that grow alongside our screened in porch, one to the other, to the other.

I had a dream, last night, where I dove deep in the ocean to scour a ship wreck for gold, and what I ended up finding, was that the gold was inlaid within the matchbooks, sunk at the bottom of the sea.

"i don't know when we'll meet again, or what will happen in the future, but desolation, desolation, i owe so much to desolation, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned all. now comes the sadness of coming back to cities and i've grown older and theres all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upside down in the void, god bless them, but you and me forever, we know, o ever youthful, o ever weeping," down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared and i said "god, i love you" and looked up to the sky and really meant it "i have fallen in love with you, god. take care of us all, one way or the other." and, in keeping with japhys habit of always getting down on one knee and delivering a little prayer to the camp we left, to the one in the sierra, and the others in marin, and the little prayer of gratitude he had delivered to sean's shack the day he sailed away, as i was hiking down the mountain with my pack i turned and knelt on the trail and said, "thank you shack." then i added "blah" with a little grin, because i knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world."

i pull my small jetta into the grass at the side of the road, and venture back into the graveyard that had been our playground for my late child hood through early adolescence, where we'd race after barn chores were completed, still in our paddock boots with zoe and elmo and disappear into the home that we'd created, amazonia, it was ours, and i pull my now 22 year old self up onto the crumbling wall, still in my paddock boots, and its there, still, far more overgrown of course, but the remnants of our three tiered swing even hang askew, from the branch. dusting the cement wall with my fingers, i see my name, in the cockeyed print of a nine year old, JAMIE, carved into its face.

i think of her, of her independance, of her spirit, of her thirst for adventure, and smile "i'm doing this girl justice."