• It has been many a year since I have seen that beautiful girl. The farmer's daughter with the long, chestnut hair that fell all about her shoulders so carelessly when she would dance in his fields for me and only me. She told me she danced for herself, but I read it in her hazel eyes that she truely dance for my pleasure.

    It was just in her nature to take me in. I had seen her so many times in the days before I came into my own; the days before I was turely a man. She was always with her father, her head bowed and hair back as she moved with him through the streets of our little village. Only twice before this summer had our eyes met across a crowd of people, over the shoulders of the people we knew so well. I was amazed at the seriousness of her manner, of the elfin charm of her beauty; some would talk that her mother was truely a fay that had seduced her father and left him with that beautiful babe, though we all knew that her mother had really run away with a stable-hand from the farm one dreary eve. Her past only made her more intriguing to me. It gave explination to her strange and wild airs. For I knew that no man would truely be able to tame her; she had that look to her overly fair face and hazel eyes. I knew that she would never truely be mine, but I was happy to hold her whilst I could.

    Hold her I did, too, in that summer long ago.

    The season was just beginning to turn; the sun was just getting a brighter shade of blue to it, and the stars shone more brilliantly at night. The grass under barefeet no longer pricked and hurt, but was soft and pliant and giving. So in those days I was often found in fields, though I knew work had to be done back at the house. I needed to wander in those days, to let it pass through me lest I go mad with the want of it. And through these wanderings I came upon her, that farmer's hazel eyed daughter, while she was lying in one of her father's fields. The wheat was just high enough in that season to hide her almost completely as she lay there, arms outstretched wide as if to embrace the whole of the azure sky.

    She said not a word to me as I hailed her; she just sat up and motioned that I lay with her. Instantly I knew the joys I would have in that summer as I sat with her and she took me into her arms. We sat there for a long while; 'til the stars came out and the moon was high in the sky we sat there, speaking barely a word. Oh, and when she spoke it was as the soft trickling of a brook in Spring. She told me that in my arms she found a comfort she could never hope to find in any other man's; and I knew this to be true. She would never find another man such as I to love her. I say this not out of conceit, but because it is the truth. She loved no other but me, though I could not tame her, nor make her stay.

    It went like this for many a month, as the season passed and the grass underfoot began to harden again. The days became not so terribly hot, but pleasant and cool. These were the days that I loved the most dear to be with her, to stare deep into her mysterious hazel eyes and speak my true odes of love to her; to feel the soft press of her rose- petal lips against my sun hardened ones. She contented me so that I was near blinded with my love for her, and forget her untameable spirit. In those days I vowed that she would be my wife, and I spoke often to her about it.

    Always she would frown prettily and not say a word, but instead hush me with her feathery soft fingers and her delicate little lips.

    Almost religiously I asked that she stay and be mine until Death parted our souls, always to the same end. Though despondant I was, I was not a man to hurt or force a woman to bend to my will. She could sense my sadness, though, and tried in every womanly way she knew to make me forget for a short time about the pain I would later know when she was gone.

    It was almost Autumn when she did come to me, finally, one day at my home. I noticed how unusual it was that she come to me here, and knew what must be coming, and saw the things with her: a cloak draped over the lithe body that I had loved so in those months, a satchel heavily laden with belongings, a stick for walking. I saw these things and the tears on her fair cheeks, and I, a grown man now, wept myself. Never had I know such greif as I knew now at losing her.

    As she came into my life, so she went. I loved her once more, though not a word was spoken between us, and she left before I could tell her all the things more that I had on my heart.

    She went away to the west, the way the winds blow in our town in the Autumn, and never have I seen her again.

    Now, when I am a much older man and in the very prime of my years, I think of her time and again and shed a silent tear. Though I have children of my own, and they are now nearly ready to have children to call theirs, there is still that part of me that is the young man who knows nothing but love for that woman that he could not have. And I smile at her memory more often then do I weep, because she loved me the only way she knew how and it was wild, and free, and clean as the rains of Spring.

    She is mine as she is no one else's, with her hazel eyes and her hair of deep chestnut. And she will always dance in the fields of my memory for me and only me.