We’d walk to the driveway next door
to wait on chilly mornings, be dropped
off there on getting-hot afternoons,

the hulking orange school bus creaking
to a hard stop, Mrs. Capps with her
iron-muscled forearm cranking

the big handle that opened the door—
not a very tall woman, but not someone
you’d want to mess with, she having

seen more of her share of every manner
of kid clambering on and off her bus.
And it was her bus, make no mistake,

that took us to and from Eureka Union
Elementary School, we rural kids
plunked down amid oak trees

and poison oak next to a big lake
where some of us learned to swim
and others to fish and still others

to skim over the deep blue on fat skis.
But school was a serious matter,
Mrs. Capps the first gatekeeper

to our early educations, wearing her
perennially arched eyebrows that
I still see some six decades

after I rode behind her, as I follow
the 21st century version of her bus
through a subdivision where many

of my schoolmates once lived.
I park a respectful distance behind,
trying to discern the profile of the one

driving, knowing full well that
Mrs. Capps is long gone to that bus barn
in heaven, but still.

She drove us and drove us and drove us
day after blessed day, and I bet none
of us ungrateful kids ever thought

to bring her a valentine or a cookie
or even thank her. I certainly didn’t.
Until now.