It was at Shively Park and the surrounding old-growth forest we once walked hand in hand with stitched art-books in our free. I’d glued a songbird on mine, and you drew the picnic table just like a student of architecture would. I was so impressed.
Walking beneath the trees, a lone conifer quite suddenly pitched all of its pinecones on our heads, causing the hairs on my arms to rise.
A warning.
My 1942, Webster’s collegiate, sandwiches parasol: a light portable sunshade between parasitism and parastichy: an oblique or secondary spiral line joining leaves or scales where the internodes of the axis are short and the members crowded, as in a pine cone.
Parasitic have been the other two women you invited to eat at our table, perhaps imagining how you’d fill the empty one you’d drawn on your book? There were no protective parasols to guard us from the heavy raining of these seeds.
Photo credit: Ferrera/Unsplash