THE KITTY TRAIL

"Ride on the Kitty Trail, Daddy?" asked 3-year-old Jacob as I arrived at our farm house on the bluff from my office at the Charles E. Still Osteopathic Hospital in Jefferson City on a gorgeous Indian summer evening.

I had just been informed that my OMT clinic would be closed as part of a hospital merger despite the practice paying for both itself and my salary after just two years. And Mary was due in December.

So I loaded up our Isuzu Trooper with a jogging stroller, a black and tan coon hound, and a little blond boy about to lose his nursing monopoly, and hit the MKT rail-to-trail along the big muddy river for the last time. As was our wonts, Jacob was soon asleep, Cunie off in the woods, and I wandering through the day's events, settling on a help wanted ad I'd come across: Assistant Professor, West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine

Missouri

No matter how humble your source

trickling from Rocky springs to confluence at Three Forks

or how generous your mouth

still feeding St. Louis long after the French first feasted,

it is neither heritage nor inheritance that define your course

but instead prairie swells side-bending your spine

and plains rains engorging your veins.

An undercut bank capsizes a cottonwood

only to sediment downstream

to be tiled by seedlings.

A kingfisher hovers and dives

scattering gar fry into your murky depths

to commence their immense descent back to sea.

A line of skunks ascend at dawn

bluffing bi-footed bobkittens back into their den

and away from ever oncoming high beams.

What begins as a downhill race

is diverted by circumstance and chance,

muddles, meanders,

and eventually marches

to the rhythm of lives nourished

and the drums of gravity

incessantly rolling you home.