I made fun of the way he saw the world through

rose-colored glasses, always pink and fresh.

Ever the cynic, I tended toward the argument,

the mistake made, the ironic.

But after so many mornings of him making

my coffee before I was even out of bed,

and hauling his telescope out on clear nights

and then asking me to come see the Moon,

I guess you could say

I’ve softened.

Yesterday, while washing his jeans

I saw grass stains where both his knees

had pressed into the ground,

remembered his old back hunched over,

his gloved hands pulling marigolds

from the beds around the dogwood tree,

how he came into the kitchen and asked

what I wanted to plant next, how I handed

him a warm muffin before he

went back out, how I saw the dried mud

from his boots on the hardwood floor not

as irritant, but as time itself dissolving.

Carey Taylor is the author of Some Aid to Navigation (Moon Path Press-2024) and The Lure of Impermanence (Cirque Press-2018). She is the winner of the 2022 Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, runner-up for the Concrete Wolf Louis Poetry Book Award, and has been published both nationally and internationally. Born in Bandon, Oregon, Carey has lived her entire life in the Pacific Northwest. https://careyleetaylor.com.