The Marsh View

My parents moved recently– a nice place, marsh view, plenty of trees and walking trails a nice big kitchen for Scottish breakfasts. Their deck upstairs looks out on the marsh water shining in the sun. The aquatic landscape broken only by the stilted legs of hungry herons. The floorboards no longer creak beneath my ocher footsteps and I feel like a visitor here–tourist Then I wonder, how much of myself was left in those creaking planks? How much of my life is threaded in their wooden veins? Perhaps this new deck doesn’t creak only because I’ve shed the weight of my childhood, the cloak of memory–disrobed and I am refreshed like new bamboo shoots in spring.