my child, remember
when you spent these breezy summer days
longing for laziness, unscheduled hours
stretching before your friends like endless steamy sidewalks,
the whoosh of freedom blowing through their bicycle hair

while yours grew matted with camp mud and string,
shaded in supervised tree forts, sweaty with games
you learned canoeing and cave stories,
caught up on the memes in September

because I had to work, and mourn
as you now work, and wait
the seed helicopters spinning
for both of us