The Reckoning

The days of youth are long in leisure. It then was easy to neglect the duties that in retrospect become the measure of a man. I'd leave my job half done at noon to check the meadows, creeks and hills and often I would stay too late, nor think of food upon my plate while I was figuring the will that caused an indigent daffodil to bloom among the ferns and vines so far in time from human kind. Whose ancestor had passed this way and planted flowers as if to stay and was that all he left behind? Oh, I knew of a fire that scorched the brick and melted glass that lay beneath the old frame house where supper waited. I knew we had built on his foundation to try and work out our salvation without much thought to when or where he laid his flowers out with care. But a man's youth is only a page and a man's dream in a different age is harder to reckon that why a boy stays late in the wood to merely enjoy the yellow blooms he picked for his mother or a few yellow questions saved for another.