The house is clean—sort of.
The family is away. The sky has
clouded over. A bowl of egg drop
soup. A glass of grape juice. The computer is on. What else to do? Find that right chord on YouTube. Lindsey Buckingham is as good as anyone
gets. Always good, but better with age,
now that he’s living on castaway dreams, like a shooting star in the night
caught only by a few eyes.
It’s probably as hard to know you’re as solid after fame as
you were when the world thought you were everything as it is to know you had
what it takes but never did much. Still,
I’d rather be like Allen Ginsberg than like Emily Dickenson—to know your words,
notes, lines meant something before entering the grave.
But it is what it is:
thousands, perhaps millions crafting messages in the middle of the
night.
There are things said right: the right line, the right
rhythm, the right stroke, the right holding back, the right letting go.
For the Lindsey Buckinghams in every medium, artists known and
unknown—may they always, forever, get under the skin, even if they have an
audience of one.
There is something profoundly life-sustaining about accepting sadness. I don't mean dwelling in it or seeking it out, but in simply recognizing it as an integral part of yourself and a natural result of loss or a discrepancy between the divine soul within and the often banal world without. Even when you're on the up-swing of fortune, I think it's healthy to touch base with sorrow through art. It reminds us how fragile we are. It softens the ego, makes us more human. Optimism has its place and overall it's probably healthier to have a positive outlook on life. But to me, the forced smiles of those that deny grief are incredibly frightening. If you feel like you have to see the silver lining behind every cloud that comes your way, you are not fully experiencing life. Below are two poems I wrote during the time I was losing my father to rare disease that attacked his vital organs. I didn't set out capture darkness and I was actually often happy during this period, but there was frequently a deep sense of loss that welled up when I sat down to write. I listened to Cold Play's Viva la Vida album then, and I think much of the albums dark, murky tones in songs like "42" surfaced through my words, especially in "Blue in a Baroque World":
Blue in a Baroque World Through some worm hole there is a cobblestone lane lined with oil lamps and pocked with rain.
Galaxies of light unfold in ripples spreading out in gathered darkness puddled at the bottom of a high hill The ragged man with the blue glow hears a violin in his soul cut a coarse chord that says I'm so damn tired of this. It isn't his loneliness though he knows as well as high halls and crystal chandeliers. He'd like to pound a harpsichord until it squeals like a pig. For some reason he can't explain he knows traces of God puddle in the mire at the bottom of the high hill where a long tide pushes in to fill the mud flats obsidian pocked by cold hard rain.
Hope! My granddaughter refuses to look in my casket at my pale, plastic flesh, after my soul has sucked out. She sits in the corner on the floor to the dismay of her mother, headphones on, tuned out from the horseshit they dream up to make me their vision. She is totally tuned in to a song like camphor, sees a steep hill where wind blows ferns between tall trees that seem to climb out of the sea churning below, green.
I first came across the the red cliff faces of Lukachukai while sitting in a dark, empty bar in El Paso, while reading "Poem for Jody" by Simon J. Ortiz. I was in a bad situation in my life, removed from home and family, and it so simply and gracefully stated a love for place that afterwards I knew I was going home to rural Utah. In trying to make it as a writer, I had become something I'm not--urban, cynical, and worst of all, excruciatingly shy. Something about Ortiz's poetry in general and "Poem for Jody" in particular were life-changing for me. What comes clear through his poetry is that for some, culture and self are inseparable. He states this beautifully in the following interview, which for years I had hanging in the entrance to my classroom: Why do you write? Because Indians always tell a story. The only way to continue is to tell a story and that's what Coyote says. The only way to continue is to tell a story and there is no other way. Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them--how they were born, how they came to this certain plaice, how they continued. I had no intention of becoming a wanna-be Native. I had my own culture, my own roots, my own stories and hymns of survival. But, I knew then that whoever I would become, if I ended up having any value to me at all, it was through, not in-spite of my small-town Mormon heritage. I didn't necessarily know what that would look like (and still don't), and at that point I certainly wasn't interested in becoming an active Mormon again. I just knew I no longer wanted to be internally at war with everything I was. (Prejudice, in all forms does that--rips a man from his soil in more ways than one. Half of you fights the stereotypes of the outside world and the other half believes them. You begin to loath part of who you are.) And yet, either by chance or by divine intention, I ended up marrying into the Navajo tribe, moving within easy eyesight of Lukachukai Mountains and embracing both my own Mormon Heritage and much of Navajo Culture. My personal story, and one that I fully believe, is that chance had nothing to do with it. I also don't believe my journey into Diné Bikéyah is over. There is one particular overlook on Canyon del Muerto (the north arm of Canyon de Chelly) that every time I visit I have a profound feeling "I've been here before." I can almost feel, almost see the circumstances, but a veil keeps it hidden, like when you hear a song, know you know it, but the lyrics and title won't surface. It is that strong. And it's not the entire view, but an ancient Hogan, crumbling near a farm where the canyon forks again. I can almost see who is there--not in a vision, but in feeling, a memory--like driving through an old neighborhood from your childhood. Marci's family has roots in the area, so perhaps in the preexistence I was given the privilege to know of Marci's family history live--perhaps so I would find her after losing my way. A memory crumb. I don't know. Such talk is crazy in a world of science. And yet I don't deny it. I can't. It is far too real, too living. I don't know how science and religion merge and probably never will. I don't deny science can clone a sheep--I'd have to be a fool--but I also know there are deeper currents, and that the physical world doesn't reveal the entire picture. I had thoughts similar to these as we made our way again through a landscape that is as much a part of me as Dry Creek.
The red cliff faces of the Lukachukai Mountains described in "Poem for Jody" by Simon J. Ortiz
The high pondersa covered Fort Defiance Plateau and the Chuska Mountains.
The grocery-trip to Gallup every other week was simply spectacular.
It was nineteen-ninety-something and I was working graveyand at a copy shop on Mesa Street in El Paso. It was well after midnight and I was reading Losing Battles by Eudora Welty and listinening to some classic rock station when I was absolutely astounded. I knew the voice well: Van Morrison. But the song was unfamiliar: "I'm Not Feeling It Anymore." Well, I felt it. After sleeping off my overnight shift, I hopped on a bus and headed to the mall to purchase Hymns to the Silence.
The album is a two CD-set and for the first year I listened primarily to disc one. Then something wonderful happened. It disappeared. I lost it, or perhaps it was stolen. Marci would say, ridiculing me, that "a bear at it." Anyway, it vanished. Although I still love the first disc, the heart and soul of the album is disc two, where Morrison focuses on his own poetry in the songs, "On Hyndford Street" and "Pagan Streams" and traditional hymns, like "Be Thou My Vision."
I thought it would be nice if I started posting hymns on Sunday along with scenes of the changing seasons at Dry Creek. I intended to photograph, research and write on Saturday, so that I could post early Sunday morning. As you can see, this week that didn't happen. Anyway, I hope you enjoy your Sunday Morning, even if it is realy Monday or Tuesday night.
About the Song
Commonly attributed to Dallan Forgaill, "Be Thou My Vision" is a common hymn around the world. The original text dates to the Sixth Century, but the song didn't evolve into it's present form until 1919. The poem was translated from old Irish to English in 1905 by Mary Elizabeth Byrne and versified in 1912 by Eleanor Hull. In 1919 it was put with the Irish folk song, "Slane" and published in the Irish Church Hymnal (wikipedia)
Dry Creek, March 15, 2014
Looking up through the oak & maple at the bottom of Dry Creek Canyon.
Every time I've planned to do a series of posts on one topic, I've failed. Perhaps this will be no different. I lose interest, get side-tracked and leave the story incomplete. But in this case, I hope not. The Rez is close to my heart and schedules and finances keep my old home at bay. Though this trip was way too quick--not more than a drive by--it meant a lot to me. It seems it should be recorded even if I'm no longer fully there, so I'll try to do it some sort of justice. I once wrote to say things magnificently. I got a few gems and threw away a lot of crap. Now, I write to say things adequately. It is enough to say, "I came, I saw, I thought, and here is my record." Just imagine the tapestry we'd leave behind if everyone had the need to record the journey of their days. Facebook, to some extent is just that. I hope future generations will have access to that cultural goldmine, but I doubt it.
These two rocks south of "Rock Point" together look like a cartoon whale to me.
I'm not sure if the community is named after one of these or a smaller rock north of "town".
Red rock, as a whole, is different in southern Utah than in northern Arizona. In Utah, high plateaus, still mostly intact are gouged by deep, winding canyons that cut through and shred the edges of massive tables of rock. In northern Arizona the plateaus, as a whole, have eroded away and left islands of rock.
There are, of course, lots of exceptions. Canyon de Chelly cuts deep into the still very intact Ft. Defiance Plateau. The Kiabab, though torn by the Grand Canyon is still there, cohesively major. And so my argument may here fall apart, but at least visually, there seems to be less canyons in Arizona and more lone stones.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Four Corners: El Capitan, Monument Valley, Church Rock, Rock Point, Round Rock, Red Mesa, Ship Rock, etc. Red Rock buttes and deep gray volcanic plugs rise out of broad valleys abruptly. Many of these in Navajo mythology are the monsters slain by the hero twins.
As we made our way south and east on US 191 and India Route 12 I was amazed to see again my old stone friends.
Close up of the tale of the "whale"
Rock Point?--I don't know.
My favorite rock on the Rez is what I assume to be Round Rock, a massive butte between the communities of Many Farms and Round Rock with a flying buttress arch on the west side and a deep red gouged vegetation-less skirt reminiscent of NASA pictures of Mars.
Round Rock?--I don't know
As the rock is more rectangular than round, I've never been sure if it is the rock for which the community is named. It does have a round eye of the needle hole through the arch on the north, but that isn't visible from "Round Rock". There is a much less impressive rock closer to Round Rock that is round, so that may be the rock for which the town is named. I once picked up a hitch-hiker and asked him, but he didn't know--or just as likely, wasn't willing to divulge that information. I understand that. The white man wants to claim everything and make a profit off it--especially after marginalizing a culture. Okay, even though we tried to exterminate you, we still would like your culture and your religion logged in our books. There have been far too many books written about the Rez by bilagáanas who spend a summer and interview a few elders without really taking the time to absorb the culture.
Personally, I feel the Navajo are quite capable of writing their own books, should they want to. And even after eight years living there and sixteen years of being married into the culture, I feel inadequate to be more than a travel writer when on the Rez. So, I will restrict myself to being a tourist and will let the Diné story be told by the Diné . It seems only reasonable.
I once
wanted to compile an anthology entitled Losers. Granta magazine beat me to it, which is
perfect—at least if I want to maintain status as a loser. I don’t necessarily, but I once did. Part of it was self-esteem issues to be sure,
but it was more than that. There is a
spiritual nature to losing that just isn’t found in the winning camp—a release,
an acceptance, a humility, perhaps even a willingness to hand things over to
God. In my faith, it is considered to be
the learning place in the pride-cycle.
We’re not necessarily encouraged to seek it out, and should avoid it if
at all possible, but it is recognized that sometimes only through great loss
can we gain the humility we need to grow.
There is an
idea close to losing, but not quite, which is redemption, the willingness to follow loss through until integrity
pulls the believer out the other side as redeemed. However, unlike some forms of loss, the
losing isn’t necessarily the result of one's actions—rather the loss is driven by
the imperfections of others, by the cruelty of humanity.
I don’t know
where my passion for social justice came from.
I haven’t lived the type of life where I’ve been effective in changing
anything around me, but still that has been my focus from early on.
I wrote my
first poem in ninth grade. I was bullied
a lot in school that year. We were
Mormon and had just moved into a heavily Baptist neighborhood in Dallas. I also
wasn’t very cool. Together, these made
me an easy target.
One day,
after receiving a particular humiliating verbal beating, I came home and wrote
the following:
Whose beast
are these who kill to cry,
Who drink
the blood of their brother’s sigh?
These, these
are His to keep,
Which he
loves, forgives,
And hopes to
keep.
I’m not a
100% sure what I meant, as it was an instinctive cry rather than a rational
discourse, but I do know it meets the criteria of what I call a redemption
song. A redemption song is written from
a place of injustice; it hands over survival to a supreme power outside the suppressed
people and maintains justice (not necessarily punishment) will eventually be
fulfilled.
There are
many such songs. Here I will mention
four: “Go Down Moses,” “Come, Come Ye
Saints,” “No Woman No Cry” and “Redemption Song.”
Go Down Moses
("Go Down Moses" by Louis Armstrong)
“Go Down
Moses,” first published in 1872 by the Jubilee Singers, is a traditional African-American
spiritual based on Exodus 7:26. The song
lyrics are as follows:
When Israel was in Egypt's land: Let my people
go,
Oppress'd so hard they could not stand, Let my
People go.
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt's land,
Tell old Pharaoh,
Let my people go.
An earlier version, which expresses a righteous indignation similar to
when Christ enters the temple to turn over the tables of the money changers, proceeds
as follows:
The Lord, by Moses, to Pharaoh said: Oh! let my
people go.
If not, I'll smite your first-born dead—Oh! let
my people go.
Oh! go down, Moses,
Away down to Egypt's land,
And tell King Pharaoh
To let my people go.
Embedded in the song, like all redemption songs, is the affirmation, I am and I will carry on. You may
chain me, you may beat me, you may even kill me, but through the power of my
God, I will be free.
Come, Come Ye Saints
("Come, Come Ye Saints" by members of the New York Dolls)
The redemption song I was raised on was “Come, Come Ye Saints,” a
Mormon hymn written in 1846 by William Clayton.
Originally titled “All Is Well,” it was composed at Locust Creek as the
Mormons were fleeing Nauvoo, Illinois, a shining city the Mormons had built
after fleeing persecution in Missouri.
In 1844 Nauvoo had a population of 12,000, rivaling the size of Chicago.
On October 27, 1838 Missouri Governor Liburn Boggs issued Missouri Executive
Order 44, also known as the Extermination Order in which Boggs officially declared,
“the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven
from the State if necessary for the public peace—their outrages are beyond all
description.”
What history has verified, and what Mormons have always known, is that
tensions rose primarily due to the growing electoral and economic power of the Mormon
community. The scene to a great extent
was repeated in Nauvoo.
This is the background of the hymn that includes the following lyrics:
And should we die before our journey’s though,
Happy day! All is well!
We then are free from toil and sorrow, too:
With the just we shall dwell!
But if our lives are spared again
To see the Saints their rest obtain,
Oh, how we’ll make this chorus swell—
All is well! All is well!
("Come, Come Ye Saints" by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir)
No Woman No Cry
The next two redemption songs were made popular by Bob Marley. “No Woman No Cry” is often assumed to be his
composition, but its origins are not certain.
The credits were given to a friend of Marley’s, Vincent Ford, but it’s
unclear whether Ford wrote the song or whether Marley simply credited it to
him. Either way, the royalties received
by Ford ensured the survival of a soup kitchen in Trenchtown, a ghetto of
Kingston, Jamaica, which Ford ran.
Like “Go Down Moses” and “Come, Come Ye Saints,” “No Woman No Cry” is a song of community
coming together for survival:
Said—said—said I remember when we used to sit
In the government yard in Trenchtown, yeah!
And then Georgie would make the fire lights,
I seh, logwood burnin’ through the nights, yeah!
Then we would cook cornmeal porridge, say,
Of which I’ll share with you, yeah!
My feet is my only carriage
And so I’ve got to push on through.
Oh, while I’m gone,
Everything’s gonna be all right!
Everything’s gonna be all right!
Redemption Song
And finally, we come to Marley’s “Redemption Song” which provides the
perfect label for songs of community, struggle and redemption. Marley wrote the
song sometime around 1979 after having been diagnosed with cancer. It was inspired by a speech given by Marcus
Garvey in Nova Scotia in October 1937 and published in Black Magazine.
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look?
Ooh!
Some say it’s just a part of it:
We’ve got to fulfil de book.
Won’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom?—
’Cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs
For the oppressed everywhere; may they have the courage to stand up and
declare I AM!
& for those who make it to the Promised
Land; may they not forget their roots and what they stand for..
I rip romaine lettuce off the head, rinse it under an high faucet above an old fashioned sink and listen to Eric Carmen's "All by Myself." Outdated?--I know. Emotional saccharine?--I know. All but forgotten--I know. Sort of like the movie, Jonathan Livingston Seagull or the Niel Diamond sound track, for that matter. But as I argued on the panel at the Beyond Post Modernism symposium at SMU, the job of the artist is to identify the real in unlikely places--the sentimental that works simply as sentimental and yet as so much more. If post-modernism is about juxtaposition, irony, deconstruction and refabrication, then beyond-post-modernism is about fusion, synthesis, bringing together high-art and pop-art without the outside sarcasm. No more intrusive narrator needed to justify black velvet Elvis paintings in a collection of Matisse and Picasso, but neither is the pure third-person-limited voice needed, where the author is all but transparent and the story takes center stage. Rather, text--fluid like the mind--flows between points of view, from objective to subjective, from external to internal--narrative, expository and persuasive all grafted together to bring forth a new, original fruit, like the voice in the head of a man standing at a sink, rinsing romaine lettuce, listening to Eric Carmen while simultaneously narrating his life and arguing for a more inclusive, organic art. It can work.
By the time I cross out of the kitchen and across the small, glossy wood-floored living room to the gold, arched door leading out to the balcony, I am on stage with Eminem and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir backing me up as I expound my philosophy before thousands of screaming fans through a rhetoric that combines the raw energy of Ginsberg with the eloquence of Emerson.
Door swings inward. I step out onto the small cement cantilever to pick cherry tomatoes from a potted plant under a small cheese-cloth umbrella I constructed from the front fork of a bicycle, two wooden dowels, and, of course, cheese cloth. It protects the plant well from the intense noon-time sun, but is useless in the wind. I know a summer afternoon monsoon wind could send it flying high over Mesa Street in bits and pieces in seconds, and so I usually remove the umbrella as soon as I get home from UTEP, as the sun is on the other side of the building by then. Today I have failed, and it is pure luck that my tomato umbrella is there.
I bend down to unwind the wire that holds it fast to the pot, when I hear giggling followed by, "Hey, Professor Brown what are you doing?"
I stand up and look towards the neighboring balcony. I jump.
"Monica, get down from there."
"Don't be silly."
"No, I mean it. It's not safe."
Monica sits on the corner of the black wrought iron railing five floors above Mesa Street in a short, lacy, white summer dress, her bare feet swinging slightly back and fourth past the hairy legs of the boy who is standing on the patio with his arms around her delicate waist, hopefully keeping her from plunging to her death.
"Who's your dad?" he says, referring to me."
"My creative writing teacher and neighbor," she says with emphasis as she sways further back over Mesa street, long, black hair flowing in the wind.
I run to the rail, ready to grab her arm. Dumb-ass boy doesn't even tense up, but just lets her cantilever out into the dry, west-Texas atmosphere.
In another story tension leading to tragedy might build here, but perhaps there is enough of that in the world already. She just giggles, "you were worried, weren't you?" She puts her arms around her friend and pulls herself in. "Jake, why don't you worry about me like Professor Brown does?"
Jake doesn't know what to say. For some stupid reason, I instinctively reach out to rescue him too. "Age," I say. "You don't really comprehend death on a cellular level until you're at least twenty-five. That part of the brain just isn't there yet."
She sways back over Mesa Street. "Sweet, sweet death come take me!" Jake again does nothing, and I decide I can't take this and head inside.
"How was that for poetry, how was it?" She calls to my back.
I pause at the door and think, dangerous, erotic, perfect. Instead, I quote Yeats:
That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees --Those dying generations--at their song, the salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas...
Inside, I finish my salad for the permaculture meeting in Mesilla and look forward to Mike Bantam's stories of dumpster diving. The crazy old man lives totally off previously used products, even food. I picture him pulling out his schedule of when the grocery stores discard their old milk and smile.
By Alice Walker's standards, I'm no writer. I believe I read an essay where she damns Tillie Olsen for claiming in the preface of I Stand Here Ironing that she (Tillie, herself) was unable to write when younger because she was too busy being a wife and mother. Alice says that's complete hogwash by a lazy, undediticated (and therefor undeserving) writer. Alice then goes on to tell how she (Alice, herself, quite the martyr for her art), raised babies all day and then wrote all night. Now, I'm almost sure what I claim here is true and I'd verify it, if it weren't raining and if the books needed were not in the shed, which is crammed floor to ceiling with junk. In other words, I could cite sources if I weren't so lazy. So, even though I once had an enormous crush on Alice Walker and rushed from Dallas to Austin and screamed at my diabetic carmate, "No--damn it!-- I can't stop to get you food right now, you'll just have to die or we'll miss Alice!"--even with that passion, I must side with Tillie here. Sometimes I'm just too stinking tired to write. Life crowds in, takes over. And unlike Alice, I'm okay with that. Sexy as those dreadlocks are, it would have never worked out. It's 9:24 and already I'm up way past my bedtime. So, I probably won't get this posted before the end of February, which is sad, because I need all the views I can get. (Last Saturday I jumped up thrilled at the number of views I'd received and my son broke into laughter--"Dad, I can get more hits on facebook by posting 'huh, what?") So, anyway, here's the second post on our trip across the Navajo Nation.
Petrified dunes & red bluffs east of U.S. 160 & Indian Route 59
Okay, perhaps I'm not quite over Alice yet. Just now, I was thinking about how to explain that one of my favorite parts of the reservation (U.S. 160 from the turn-off to Indian Route 59 to Red Mesa) is geographically speaking the least eventful area along the route when a poem by Alice Walker came to mind that says it perfectly:
"But think about the time
you saw the moon
over that small canyon
that you liked much better
than the grand one--and how surprised you were
that the moonlight was green
and you still had
one good eye
to see it with."
And that is what I often find with landscapes--the subtle haunts me more than the grand. This area is almost a wide valley edged by a low, red mesa to the north and a low, gray mesa to the south. I say almost because it's not that uniform but broken by small swells and shallow canyon washes. Still, picture the Mississippi drained dry and that's about what it is. Low, petrified dunes piled up long, long ago, then frozen by time, march across a wide valley edged by low bluffs.
It has a subtlety to it--a slow unwinding letting go. "Let It Grow" by Eric Clapton is perhaps the musical equivalent. These things astound me: gentle contours, a winding wash, rippled stone, time, distance, God, love.
Cottonwood Lane at Dry Creek: I wish my cottonwood would someday equal those in this story, but unfortuantely, one by one they are dying, and I'm not sure why.
Mica lives down a long gravel lane edged with cottonwoods on
one edge that run alongside a long, narrow ditch with slow moving water. The valley is low and wide with chalky-white
powdery soil. The wind is flat and the
sun is a blade.
Now, if you’re thinking, this is another coming of age
story, you’re wrong. Mica is only five
with a thick body, almost fat, but not quite, and a large head. She has thick black hair and big black
eyes. Picture Dora the explorer in flesh
and blood and you will see what I see. Rather,
this is a sustainable living story, a glimpse of soil, place and community,
life as it should be.
My wife and I walk down that lane hand in hand around
ten. The water runs slow and the sun
reflects intense off the surface water covered with cottonwood scum. I notice this as we near Mica’s house and the
ditch enters a corrugated metal pipe that runs under the driveway. There is a paper cup with Coke printed on it
half-sank in the water and caught against the grate that keeps the cottonwood
leaves from clogging the pipe in the fall.
When we arrive, Mica is on an old yellow swing-set with
faded purple flowers. It is rusted and
leans, and as the swing rises with Mica’s pink flip-flopped feet outstretched,
it’s back legs jump off the ground.
Then, as the swing goes back, the front legs jump.
Marci worries that it might tip over and yells, “Be careful.” Wanting to practice my Spanish, I translate
for Mica who knows English better than most whites her age, "¡Ten cuidado!"
Mica just laughs and kicks her feet higher.
In another story tension leading to tragedy might build
here, but perhaps there is enough of that in the world already. So, Marci simply reaches and gently grabs and
releases the chain on one side again and again until the swing slows.
However, as she grabs only one chain, the swing begins to
swing at angle towards the bar. I panic
and rush to save this sweet little girl from my wife who I happen to know
failed college physics. So did I, but
that is another story that has nothing to do with sustainable living—quite the
opposite actually.
But Marci is not the idiot I sometimes think she is. She simply uses her other hand to straighten the
swing by gently pushing on Mica’s chubby bare leg.
And as Mica comes to a stop, Marci glares at me: “And what are you doing?”
“Um….um, coming to rescue an innocent child from my incompetent
wife.”
“That’s what I thought!”
Mica sees the tension and a mischievous smile as wide as this dusty valley spreads across her face.
“What?” I say in a false exasperated tone. And at that point Mica begins to laugh so uncontrollably hard, we join in.
