In which I recall moonlit kisses

I watched him park his Dad’s Impala, open the door and heave a big gulp of courage before running around the car to open the door for the girl inside. She stepped out, runners first, clad in shorts despite the cool night air and an oversized Hyacks sweatshirt. She was tiny compared to his lanky frame. They were awkward and expectant. Breathless and nervous. I saw them both sneak a glance around, making sure that no adults or witnesses were around. They seemed comfortable with me just sitting at the red light across the street. Because he shyly snaked his arms around her waist, she reached up to lock her hands behind his neck and pull his mouth down to hers. They kissed, sweetly, under the street lamps on 8th Ave for just a few seconds. The light turned green.
I drove the rest of the way home with the window down. The night was dark and cool but perfumed with the scent of the cherry tree blossoms.
I drove unseeing.  I was transported, watching and remembering, holding a memory like a jewel in my hand, turning it over and over.  April nights in Tulsa more than ten years ago. Brian and I, slow dancing on the side of the road to an AM radio from his borrowed Chevy Blazer. Him wearing jeans and basketball shoes with a Nebraska Huskers t-shirt, me in my barely-dress-code skirt and flip flops, red hair to my waist and cherry lip gloss carefully applied. Surrounded by warm darkness with the stars like a cathedral above us, faint noises of cars driving past on a nearby road, our feet shuffling, our mouths tasting of coffee from Java Dave’s.  Bodies pressed tightly together, wringing love from every minute before curfew.
And then the kisses. Those just-turned-twenty-years-old new kisses that make your heart ache and your mind swirl and your knees weak.  Dancing slows until you are just clinging to one another, pressed against the side of the Blazer, weak with desire, hardly believing that you have been so lucky, so fortunate, so blessed as to have found one another already.
We were overcome with new love, filled with visions of what would be.  Somehow in those moments, both of us foresaw the two blonde babies sleeping between us in bed at night, the home filled with books and laughter and conversations, the sorrow, the hope, the joy and the expectancy, the life together - all present in both of us on a moonlit night in the backroads of Oklahoma.