It's been almost more than a handful of autumns, that beautiful season unfurling like surprised love. A long day of new challenges and old words ends, and the same walk happens, usually towards home along an avenue as familiar as the mottled history with an childhood friend.
There is one spot, though, that isn't meandered through.
A hidden corner where, that first fall, I sat by a fountain and billions of Christmas lights and remembered the brief moments when Florence would hold my hand, not as an old woman fighting mad her body was leaving her, but as a mother, ambivalent at caring, remembering her own broken heart, and hoping something, even a maternal gesture, might make it easier.
That first fall I would stop by that fountain and cried. However few those moments were, I understood no one in the world would ever hold my hand like my mother.
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