Hiking at Bee Rock

When I step beyond the fence the moss on the trees facing me says I move south, where I will find the waterfall in which she washed her hair when we were nineteen and I didn’t know a girl that young or that old would do such a thing, her hair coiled like fern fronds down her back, the white shirt stuck to her back, the concave ridge of her spine falling to the part of her I did not know yet, the part she said was sewn back extra tight when the doctor put in a couple extra stitches, he told her, after she’d given birth to her first. She wants me to meet her, but how do you meet a toddler, would I shake her tiny hand, all baby-buttery and cold and smelling like spit, is that what happens when you turn