Katie

Over my 30 years of teaching, Katie was hands down the nicest kid who ever sat in my class. We kept in touch over the 18 years since she graduated in 2007, documented over her world life experience. We met today at the rooftop bar at McMenamin’s Hotel Oregon in McMinnville, recreating a visit we had here nine years ago in 2016. Katie came through a particularly rough (to say the least) stretch of her life then. I wrote a poem about our exchange then, and placed it in my latest poetry collection that I just published. We arranged our meeting today, on the same rooftop, so I could give her the book, with two other books of mine, to her, personally. She read it, and it drew another tear.

Here is the poem:

View From The Rooftop
(For Katie)

We talked on a rooftop over lemonade and tea until the cold wind forced us inside.

“You never really stop grieving,” you said,
“you just learn how to carry it.”

Below us the trees of spring spread their green limbs, and land ran away to mountains blue and gray.

You said, “Rumi said to welcome and entertain all of our guests, even those who would violently sweep our house clean of its furniture.”

You smiled through a small tear,
and all I could offer were the trees,
the green of spring,
and the mountains blue and gray.