I remember when we met in that park just outside of Harvard Square.
You were the quintessential flower girl in your paisley dress, with a flower in your beautiful long, loose hippie hair.

We weren’t in the peace and love mecca, Haight-Ashbury, Cali, but we might as well have been, as mystical and magical as that Cambridge, MA summer of love park was.

I felt the connection when you glanced at me with those irresistible sky-blue eyes. My beating heart told me that sunny day was going to be the beginning of our summer of love.

To me, you were as wondrously mysterious as a will-o’-the-wisp and like an ethereal goddess above all mortal women, who magically captured my heart, my love, and my life in a summer’s minute.

Though when summer was done, you moved back to your parents’ estate in Queens, New York, and I moved back to a small town in Vermont,

and you became an ex-hippie socialite, and I became a struggling writer doing menial jobs to support my craft, I knew I didn’t fit into your high-class caste.

And though the summer love cooled off in the chilling winds of fall,

and the ill-fated, amorous dream was awoken and buried in a cold reality,

that summer of love was the best summer of my life, the greatest of them all.

Bob Boyd