It was in the breeze and moving like a river, the red scarf sinuous and slowly running away. Side to side it snaked, it should have been born a kite, running red and running away. It marched on forever like a balloon too far to see, so bright in the so blue sky, red and running away.

And I stood on the sovereign hill and watched it fly off freely, uncurling like a yo-yo string and spinning like a top, where brown leaves blew on little houses stacked on Boston’s outskirts, where neighborhoods had always been, a hundred years or more. The child it belonged to chased the scarf downhill, but it marched on forever, and higher than the peak.

He lost it, there it went. He chased it, it chased something else, red and snaking silently and slithering away. Day after day I walked that path, in rhythmic constitutional, its weekly length well trod from crown and past declivity. Cold and wet in autumn and wet and hot in summertime, I returned to it weekends, holidays and after hours, but this day something acyclic broke my serene cycle.

It leapt from his shoulders like an uncoiled spring, woolly and weightless and whipping. And he lost it. That is to say, he knew where it went; but he wouldn’t get it back.