The autumn moved in seemingly overnight,
its gray and watery chill seeping through
the windows while we slept. Suddenly,
has stopped for yet another year,
the green of lawns and hills grows less certain,
the leaves already folding in on themselves
like small hands clutching at the air;
and we stand, my daughter, her mother,
and me, in the hallway of this new school,
the light strangely familiar, as though bottled
from decades past and just opened again.
Our daughter is smiling but nervous,
her suntanned arms at her sides as she turns
with uncertainty, chin held tightly against her chest,
as if trying to find a doorway into herself.
But she turns instead toward this classroom,
her backpack comically large, her bag of supplies
so heavy that she pulls it at her side;
and we, her parents, turn with the ringing
of the bell, so startling in its insistence,
to leave, as ever, in our separate directions.
But of course we, too, are being pulled
forward, together, into all that we could not
have planned, the beauty, the boredom,
and wonder of this great unknown.
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