Leona came riding up on a Sunday morning while most everyone was in church, churning up a cloud of dust under her horse’s hooves. A still Sunday, hot too. And her black horse just standing there outside underneath the cherry tree, hardly even breathing heavy.

At first I thought maybe she was a ghost, but she was too pretty to be dead.

She was almost exactly the way I remembered her, all those years ago, only those memories seem somehow eclipsed by one: the image of her back as she rode away on that same black horse, down a road I never could walk myself.

But there she was, under the cherry tree while the rest of the town was in church, looking pretty as a picture in her long red skirts.

I was fixing Mr. Ames’ roof the day Leona came riding in on her black horse. Not a ghost, no, but almost. An apparition from a time I thought was long past. I could feel those dormant, longings come bubbling up in my heart like hot lava.

I looked at her there, under the cherry tree, and I was seventeen again.