The Everlasting

I DON’T KNOW how long I waited.

You would have accounted for every day, but I let them run through my fingers like water. I didn’t want to know how long we’d been apart.

I know it was spring when the sapling first pushed its shoulders up through the earth, head bowed over the pale stem, like a sleeping swan. I fell asleep that night with my cheek pressed to the soil, watching it, and when I woke the first needles were outstretched, tilted toward the dawn.

I know it was summer, that year or the one after, when the first berry budded, hard and green. I touched it with my smallest finger. I thought of our son.