Harvest

[peter6]

We returned to the orchards,
and walked among the joyous families
celebrating the harvest,
eating peanut butter sandwiches
at picnic tables near the old barn,
the last of the season’s yellowjackets
presiding lazily over the feast.

A noisy tractor pulled a flatbed
overflowing with children propped on hay bales
to the old trees laden with ripened apples,
and the rutted fields
filled with the last of summer’s pumpkin crop.
It was late in the season and the meadows were littered
with the odd shaped and rejected.

We did not belong;
our children grown.
We were the old ones, invisible
to the beautiful, oblivious young.

How I wish they were still with us.
I’d even take the middle one, the restless one,
the one that liked to run to the farthest corners,
that found the farm cats, full of fleas,
in a box behind the barn.

We knew that we should go.
Summer had vanished,
a cold winter beckoned.

At dinner that night
we barely spoke.