Assortment

Last Leg

 

 

(running on the salt flats, Salt Lake, Utah)

 

A little brown arm reaches across my chest and, in his sleep, he hugs me. It's him and me and Scruffy, too, with lots of pillows, sunk deep. The other two are wallowed in the next bed over.

We're tired.

But, we're almost there. So, so close, now.  

Grin!

 

 

Call Me Gypsy

 

 

Well, it fits! I even have hoop earrings along. Don't have a three-tiered skirt, but I do have a few summer dresses. I think they'll do.

Summers are for traveling, right? For packing up and heading out? They're for sleeping bags and coolers, maps and audio books. For camping in those cabins, once again. Summers are for afternoon rain-breezes fluffing blue paisley curtains and for a sunhat hook right where you need it. They're for wet-foot tracks in and out. (In and out, and in and out:)

 

 

They're for canvas bags cram-jammed full of books, and a camp light to read them by. They're for starts and stops, and the same line read over and over in your book, because the top-bunk boy likes to tell aloud about every line in his.

They're for wishing, wishing that you'd brought some kind of game for when the books and the boys have had enough of each other. Hmm.

And finally, they're for falling head-long into deepest sleep, breaths drawn long on harvest wind.

This.

Gypsy Mama?

Summers are for this! 

 

 

 

9,500

 

 

I can't really say what, exactly, it was that came over us. Maybe it was that we'd tried for and hour and a half the year before to find it, but never could. Maybe it was that we could see that speck-size lookout tower from the mountain road, and could hear it calling, again. Maybe it was that it was now July, and the snow had finally melted enough to make getting there an actual possibility. Maybe it was that I have forever-memories of being a little girl climbing, with long dark hair whipping and feet standing on the summit and looking so far, far down from way there like that, and knowing that I did it. I did that.

Yes. It was simply time to go.

 

 

We did it. They did it, scooted right to the top, those kids of ours. And there we were captured, by nature, by art, by architecture, from where we stood to as far as we could see.

Also?

We were captured by the snow. Some of us were. Some of our heads were, it looks like. (They say it's all in your head.) Well, it was all on their heads, anyway, hot and sweaty as they were.

Wait.

 

Oh, dear.

Um...People?

Uh...

Did I mention that the air's a leetle thin at 9,500?