day trip to Oak Glen 5,000 feet up home to California pears and apples you can pick apparently global warming created a warm winter suppressed spring blossoms, negating picking the fall fruit each farm stand was empty, so in a store I bought bagged apples with a ½ gallon of cider and descended the mountain there was a café serving apple pie but in that moment, indulging in such an American tradition felt sad and hollow, when the world keeps reminding me how the past i

remember priming each school year for acceptance and belonging via sameness and commonality? notice rabbits don’t duplicate the way another hops, or birds adjust their feathers to fly like others if we only knew then, the directions we could have taken, talents we turned from, we could have soared away or ran down any path, powered by passion with plenty to spare but hey, we’re still hopping around and even get off the ground sometimes, don’t we?

on not so rare occasions, when I approach newly fledged doves, tiny lizards and once a juvenile rat, they don’t rush away but stare at me, fearlessly comfortable and curious of the world around them one day they’ll have a first lesson of a lifetime of fear and survival lessons, with any luck not their last I bet it’s true that in every species there are the excellent learners, sponges that absorb all the clues, and the thick-headed and dumb, who can’t grasp the basic