our father, Roger, who art in heaven,

The little girls in this photo couldn’t understand
why you moved them far from a town called Orange
to a lake called Folsom, pulling them away from

sidewalks begging for roller skates and bikes,
away from Disneyland, to a rural life of poison oak
and no sidewalks and taking the bus to school

and summer heat the likes of which we’d never felt.
But you and Mom taught us to waterski on that lake,
and we learned to avoid the poison oak, spending

hours walking in the state park across the road,
plopped on our bellies in spring grass, surrounded
by wildflowers—blue dicks, shooting stars and lofty

lupine, the artistic Indian paintbrush, and oh,
the poppies that bobbed their happy heads at us,
a different kind of orange, welcoming us home.

Thank you and love,
Jan and Donna

•••

In memory of Roger E. Haag
Aug. 2, 1930 – Oct. 8, 2004