Honey Nut Cheerios

She was a pastor's daughter and one of my first crushes.

I used to visit her every summer 

at my aunt's Christian camp in upstate NY

back when family and females held the same value.

Her younger brother and I would sleep in bunk beds

by night but she and I fed each other a year's worth of 

Honey Nut Cheerios on the same beds by day:

finger food...food for the burgeoning soul.

I don't remember when I stopped making the annual

trip - perhaps it was when family, like a toy at the 

bottom of a cereal box, became less substantial and

females thereby followed suit.

Nowadays, I prefer to keep things less nutty and

perhaps a little less sweet.  I dump my cheerios into a 

bowl: the milk dilutes and makes an echO as lOnely

as a wOlf hOwling at the desert mOOn.