Remember the green skirt girl

I wrote this back in 2007 on a sick day, and it seems appropriate for today:

remember the green skirt girl...
and everywhere be tender of the grass

She looks up from the page and over her shoulder out the window at a noise. Not startled or alarmed. Just wondering. The blinds lid the weeping window's eye but the rain is over. Clear thin tracks and lowered gray brows beyond are all that remain. The girls are out with a flock of their friends under the carport tossing a hackey-sack and discussing lipgloss. The sound had been the particular grainy slap the beans inside make when it hits the steel uprights, and the teasing laughter that had followed that miss.

Turning back and shifting on the couch to ease the neck-crick, she looks down again. Where were we?

remember the green skirt girl...
and everywhere be tender of the grass

The guys thunder in the front door, soaked to the bone and dripping mud and bravado. They'd been out playing football with their buddies and somewhere there's a patch of lawn that is being beaten into this spring's battlefield. At her comment about the mess they're making they laugh and step back onto the doormat. Arrangements are made to go out again, and then back to the page for just a flicker.

It's not making any sense. The words lie on the page in their ordered ranks and come readily to her beck and call, but for some reason once they get to their destination they are blunted. Maybe they're just tired from the journey from page to eye, or maybe the cacophony of complaints from the rest of the body are drowning out the sense. She closes her eyes. Maybe if she just thinks about a line at a time it'll work.

remember the green skirt girl...
and everywhere be tender of the grass

The girls chatter and squelch their way off to the basketball court, and now the computer fans chanting their one-note koans are the only sound. A sniffle and a sneeze curl the body momentarily, but then they are gone almost like they were tossed into the wastebasket with the tissue. The motions are automatic now from many repetitions. She hardly notices anymore.

There is work that should be done. The test scripts are done running - the excuse for lying idle is gone. The dryer is done and is waiting to have this mouthful of it's daily meal of jeans and socks taken out. It would be easy to just pull the covers up over the head and let them wait. A half-hearted negotiation with her sense of duty later she gets up and deals with the laundry.

The words still ring in her head. "Do the girls have a green skirt?" she wonders aloud as she chases that last fractious sock around in the dryer's drum.