Pecan Trees

She liked best to kiss me under the pecan trees that bordered the east side of her parents' property, when the long winter was just starting to blow in with the evenings. She'd put her hands around inside my jacket, beneath my shirt, leaning in to get out of the wind (if there was some) and sometimes tucking her hands in just below my belt in the back, making the ache I was already feeling for her just a little bit harder to bear.

We'd walk out most nights that I came over for dinner, or to study, or just to hang out and watch bad movies with her younger brother or something. I don't know why he always got to pick; maybe it was just that he was far more interested in the movies once they started than we were, and I guess it was in our best interest for him to be as engrossed as possible...I still can't flip past a scene from the Police Academy series on a Saturday afternoon without feeling a twinge, without missing her just a little bit.

We'd watch for as long as we could stand it, hands moving softly and slowly as we could manage so as not to call attention to where they were and what they were doing. Then she'd excuse herself for a moment-just to find her folks and let them know that we were going to "take a walk"-and we'd head out to cover the quarter mile or so, fooling no one who had even the faintest memory of their teenage years about what we wanted to be alone to do, but unable to be bothered about caring. It was innocent, after all; that's why her folks never objected, why my mom would have a smile in her voice as I called for the fourth afternoon in a row to let her know that I was going to abandon her for the evening once again.

All of this is in retrospect, of course; at the time we felt that we had the wool over everyone's eyes, that our time together was somehow stolen right from under the noses of everyone that we imagined would disapprove for some reason. The saying is that youth is wasted on the young, but that's not quite right...I'd say that a lack of excess introspection is happily granted to young people, that they may neither analyze every urge nor feel the need to rationalize every decision. The phrase "romanticizing one's biology" would never even have occurred to me as I held her head against my frantically pounding chest, there in that orchard, and I'm thankful for that small kindness every time I think back on it.

It seemed like an eternity, back then, but really it was just the fall of my junior year into the spring, and then she left in the summer to go to college while I fell briefly and passionately for a succession of other girls at my high school. She didn't come back that first winter break; I think her parents were more surprised than I was, but I was the most deeply hurt. I'd find myself staring at pecan trees whenever I ran across them, lost not in thinking about her, but in feeling the things I had felt about her, about myself when I was with her, about how good life was, about how beautiful the leaves were on the ground at her feet.

I didn't exactly "grow up" after that, I guess, but I grew to be different (like we all do) and I moved on (like the lucky ones get to) and now I am where I am, and my life is what it is; and if I have some moments in an orchard to become lost in when I need to remember the times when I could truly forget about the world, instead of a new sitcom or the bottom of a bottle, then I count myself among the truly lucky...to have known such a girl, and to have walked with her under the pecan trees, when I was young.