Searching

He was searching, searching as his fingers touched the steel strings of his guitar. I liked to see how he wound them up tight. The sun was bright, warm and blew through my hair like the wind. I stood under the tall tree and watched him remove his sunglasses. His eyes were barely opened but I knew he was watching me and then he came over to where I was standing. That's when he told me he was searching, searching and so I asked him what it was he was searching for.

He never did tell me exactly, just that he always knew he would spend most of his life doing that searching. There was a sparkle in his voice in the way he said the word, the searching word that just climbed right into my soul. It climbed in there like a cat crawls into your lap and settles there soft and real like I could almost touch it. It was then I had no choice but to tell him I was going to be a searcher too. I was going to be searching, searching for something I wasn't even sure I might ever be able to find but that wasn't the point.

Then we both sat on the ground under the green green tree so as to stay out of the relentless sun. For a second I saw him look over to his guitar he had left on the porch next to the swing where my daddy sits and thinks sometimes with his pipe. We sat on the ground there right among the knotty roots of the tree that twisted all around our legs as we crossed them. He looked right at me, smiled and put his sunglasses back on. Right then I felt the chills run up the back of my neck and down my arms. Then I knew one of those unknowns I would be searching for was sitting right beside me.