Yesterday my husband and I were walking the path around a neighborhood park, where softball games were going on, one Little League and one adult, in fancy fields with high backstops and well groomed diamonds.  I remembered a time before they remodeled the park, where I was one of a group of moms informally assembled with our kids in an impromptu pick-up game that was all about helping the kids succeed.  I was pitching, slowly, telegraphing clearly, willing the bat to connect with the ball, and it often did.  This was a game I had never played well as a child, and the kids here were also not ball players.  In that short time, sun setting in early summer evening, we all had a glow of success.  Now that scruffy, climbable backstop is gone, and the kids are mostly grown, one of them married.  And I only see the moms occasionally – years can go by between the times we casually run into each other.  This poem arose from those thoughts and images:

We move within uncomprehended rules

of what will stay and what will fall away

What’s solid ground will shift and sink, we’ll stray

No way to hedge for what we’ll win or lose

The field we played on then is gone

So, too, are all the kids we played with

We couldn’t even hold the friends we stayed with

Our life arcs intersected and moved on

Back then it seemed that we invested time

and thought one day to reap time’s golden fruit

but many never pollinated – dried on vines

of fading memories, and many lost pursuits

turn out to matter less than we had thought –

What we have now worth more than what we sought.