\ glide

once, when i was very young, i remember playing with two little girls from across the street, neither of whom spoke anything but spanish, and they would come over to talk with my grandmother, to deliver, in trade, some paper bag full of tamales or cilantro or cassette tapes with Ronnie Milsap. and in an act of childish cruelty, one of those early tests when you figure out on your own what is right and what is wrong, i rolled up a ball of dirt, back in the garden where my grandmother would bury potato quarters, and pretended to stuff it into my mouth, watched the younger girl expectantly, and dropped the hidden mudball from my hand when she ate her own. she immediately burst into tears and ran home, and for days i expected trouble, and wandered the house quietly and hidden, the only RSVP to a guilty party. i learned very early on that if you did something wrong, a useful alternative to confession was minimization.

later, we played with buttercups, each of us plucking and sniffing the blossoms close enough to our faces so that our noses were dusted with pollen. we would bite the petals, or pretend to, and sometimes it is impossible to believe that so many of these flowers were poisonous, as all my field guides now assure, for surely none of us would have survived into our very old age. along our sunday walk, the path's side is crowded with poison hemlock and st. john's wort, the one, perhaps, the very cure for the other.