Dear Vince Guaraldi

You, and your two companions
who I only know as “trio”,
soften my heart every year,
on the strength of that one piano line
playing below the children’s chorus
from a simple world drawn in clear lines.
Back there, Charlie Brown and Lucy are ice skating
and tasting snowflakes.
This makes it easier to breathe, here where I live now,
the same way construction paper trees
masking-taped to classroom windows calms me,
this comforting sameness across the years.
I’m almost certain I could peer through that classroom window
and see myself, at 5, carefully gluing colored circles,
counting 1,2,3,4,5 as I pressed each link together,
concentrating, building a paper chain to the future.