Beginning In The Middle

As soon as you think you have something figured, you lose it again.  There was a time we had a time when it was easy to hear it and it was because I was moving as fast as my mind, never stayed in any place more than three days and that was in Boulder.  Before that, we had camped out in the Rockies on Arapahoe Bay, the coldest night of sleep yet, after coming from Texas too, record heat all day, and there was a drought and all the grass was dead, the bottom halves of tree leaves would turn brown, fall off in the middle of August.  We passed a car accident on the other side of the highway.  A car was on fire and another car was wrapped around the front grill of a tractor-trailer.  A woman was screaming into her cell phone and another was directing traffic, we drove passed it with the windows down still, we had been trying to avoid air conditioning out of some idea that it would be better for the car, maybe it was for Ganesha, a sacrifice of comfort as it were—that lasted til about noon, when we were thoroughly drenched, Red shirtless, me with my shirt rolled up and skirt hiked up, covering the necessaries with the yards of fabric gathered down the middle, my right foot parched up on the window sill, and we realized that it was hotter in the wind, than in the hot ass fucking car.  At the next rest stop, we closed the windows, filled our camel paks with warm water from a ground pump and waited for the temperature of the car to level off.