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This morning I imagined my children skipping away from me down a country lane. They were beautiful in their joy, laughing and giggling, calling out to the nervous, alert quail and the invisible but always watchful red fox.

They skipped and they laughed, and soon they were out of sight around a leafy bend. I was far behind, walking slowly, smiling, then tearing up and feeling irrationally lost and afraid. What if they disappear? Suppose I never make the bend up ahead. How long before they'd realize I was missing?

I looked up at the sun through fluttering cloud-veils, felt the breeze come and go on my face and bare arms, connected in some alchemical way with the hidden, the observant, and the long gone.

Everything I felt and saw was like that. I balanced my fear by filling my ears with the hum of bees in the blackberry thicket. It's pointless to grieve because joy is fleeting. So is grief if we breathe, if we open our ears and eyes and mouths, and the intricate sensors in the tips of our fingers. Always in motion, everything passes, circles in ever widening arcs through the stars.

I will come to the bend or I will not. The children will return, not as they were in the moment I started this, or they will vanish, surprising even themselves as they go. There will be a moment, for each of them, wondering where I am, but swept up, they'll keep moving, moving, just as I am, here awhile, always in and out, then long out of sight.