BEFORE ALL OUR LIVES BEGAN TO CHANGE

Before all our lives began to change
time was stretched between holidays like
carnavale lights and summer lasted forever
every year until Labor Day mysteriously
arrived again to change living to another circle

It seemed we played all the time -- haircuts on
darby horses and watermelon seed fights, building
castles of sand and jelly fish oozing against the
jetties, discovering the nesting holes of horseshoe
crabs below the high tide line, and snow forts drifted
three stories high every January and February, sledding
hellions down Cooperstown Road, the cold and snowflakes
cutting younger cheeks, with the excruciating pleasure
to do it, again     Playing "I have a little umbrella,"
dragging the chair covers across the sand like dragon tails
or lizards or princesses     Shrieking to begin hide-and-seek,
crouched under the crocheted orange and blue and brown
comforter -- dying to be found and hoping that we would
never be discovered, because that discovery always
ended in a serious session of being tickled until we
could not breathe

But, then, living changed us into other circles,
other places, other people.

~ Jessan Dunn (DeCredico) Otis

Dedicated, with Love & Memory, to Barbara, Genevieve, Helen, Mahlon & Tacy

(c) 1997 RHODE ISLAND WOMEN SPEAK: An Anthology of Authors and Artists, The Rhode Island Committe, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, p. 19