Appetite

“A sparrow is hunger organized.” —Wendell Berry I read the phrase and see back years to our eager daughter, unaware in first grade she’d become student: animated for the daily walk to school with her next-door friend under oak and birch sidewalk kingdoms, rich with green and yellow, leaves kept moving by flocks of small birds. On their way, they always bowed to The King of the Corner: bright fire hydrant they moved past with grins and solemn genuflect.

It’s called that to this day in my family— King of the Corner: the story-landmark all the childhoods were mapped around: don’t go past the King of the Corner; meet me at King of the Corner; collect acorns across the street from the King, hoard them like gold under the backyard slide.

With an appetite for space and surface and making, they chalked their names and hopscotch grids under bird sounds, held the neighbor cat back in its high place on a car hood, lifted it, hind legs dangling, into their playhouse after school.

Not blackboards in memory from that season, only the yellow, the green, the yellow, sun engraving edges of leaves, King of the Corner a private overseer to an age of brevity, energies organized in color and light, now perceived like a sparrow’s swift flight down the mind’s zones of time.