to reconnect

friendship

A friend.

though years have spiraled us away from each other,

the years have now also spiraled us back together here in the mountains,

how wonderful it is to have known each other

when we both were forming response

to the tempest within and without

that was college to us in the late 1960’s,

each of us from mountains,

each of us wanting to make our families proud,

each of us working at the Language Lab at Duke to help pay the bills,

rock music, civil rights, the Vietnam War:

all fires fueling the fire underneath the self we sought to be,

how we “found” ourselves as different, and the same, as can be:

graduate schools, jobs, the call as to how

we each might respond to dysfunction in society and people,

the call of another to help us be more complete,

the call of children unborn who ached to be,

the raising of those children to reveal the best of who they might become,

and now grandchildren, as we push at the end of our careers,

the Smokies were where we deepened our connections,

and today we walked the high valley again

in search of the spring ephemeral wildflowers we all love,

it is good to reconnect and feel the friendship,

that, once forged, endures.

by Henry H. Walker
April 3, ‘18