For A Little While©
by Freddie Holder

Come and go with me for a little while. Down into the woods where we will sit awhile, and consider all that is happening in our world. Sit here beside me on this felled oak tree trunk. It is high enough that I, who am growing older, will be able to rise again. Look at me but then look away for there is a pain in my eyes I do not want you to see, even as I long to reach out and comfort the unspeakable in you.

We sit and do not speak, you run a long stick that you have found, back and forth, and back and forth, through the leaves on the woodland floor. Stirring them and showing their colors muted from death. We take note of the sun filtering light through shadows and brightening all it touches. We see the leaves, the golden ones that still cling to the trees. They move ever so slightly from the same breeze that gentle blows our hair.

I want to say to you all the things I want to say to you, but discover, with a terrible ache to the heart, all is unspeakable. I cannot look at you now, if I did you would see the tears crowding my eyes and making little traces down my face.

So I pretend to be interested in a woodpecker in the top of a tall poplar tree. His pecking echoes through the woods, I close my eyes and listen. I love the sound, and for a moment I hold it to me as if I could save it for.................

Fighting the tears, I do what my mother, a long time ago, told me to do. I straighten my face up. And say, it sure is a pretty day. And you agree.

You have not uttered one sentence, not one word that speaks of knowledge we do not want shared. I think you say something about winter coming on, and I nod my head, it probably is. We rise together from the felled trunk as if synchronized. We stretch, still seeking. I want to turn to you, to convey to you; how much knowing you all these years has meant to me. How, now that we are parting forever, I wish we could begin again.

We began to exit the woods; we speak off-handedly about trivial things, nothing significant. Something about, being hungry, but is is not our bellies that feel empty.

At the woods end, our world is still waiting and someone is hollering for us, and we must go. But because God is good, tomorrow we will forget, for a little while, our walk in the woods.

freddie, on a golden day