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2011-05-10 - 8:50 p.m.

There's a creek that runs through our property. After the heavy rains a few days ago it's swollen up. Right at the bend, where the trees are thickest, right where it slows and widens then, gradually, gradually, moves south and speeds up, it's almost to my waist.

You work all day. I'm off during the summer for a few week, between classes and lesson plans and you come home, tired, making fun of me, calling me lazy, tell me to get a job, but you know that those hours where I'm walking the acres, cleaning the brush, planting and mowing and talking to our dogs, shift something in me. Relieve something.

And you know that those hours are just the hours I kill until you come back.

You come home and change. I wait for you in the kitchen, two glasses of lemonade on the counter. There is so much sun, so much light and openness and you walk in. Cut off shorts, paint on your t-shirt, your hair pull back and still, still it is like I have forgotten what you look like when you aren't there. Still it is a punch to the gut seeing you smile. Those lines that come to your eyes, the way you smirk, one side of your mouth slightly higher than the other, the way, still, your eyes find mine and I remember you. This is you and you are with me.

We go out back. Grill out. Laugh. You drink a little, tell me about your day. You play with my hair, your fingers moving strands, telling me that it's starting to really lighten up. I have never told you this but, in the summer, when we are outside and the sky is blue and the grass is as green as it will ever get and the honeysuckle you let me plant near the house is in bloom your eyes take on this golden tone, right around the iris, that I have tried putting down on canvas but miss. Repeatedly I miss the way they fleck and reflect and in the winter, in the winter when I get a snow day and can convince you the roads are too icy and I love you too much to let you drive in that miserable weather and we sleep in and wake up, late, under blankets and quilts and you sit on top of me, looking down at me, and the room is barely lit, just the soft gray glow coming through the curtains of the sun on the snow your eyes are dark and I lose track of what you're saying and then you laugh at me but it is all your fault.

We move from the grill, hand in hand, the smell of chicken and hot dogs and honeysuckle behind us. The sun has gone down and here, in your part of the country, where I have moved, where I have brought my honeysuckle and sweet tea and slow, southern drawl that women behind the counter at the grocery store laugh at but ask me to repeat this word or that word and where my kids mimic in class, here the humidity is less and you complain of the heat but I remind you of that summer in my part of the country. The summer you sweat walking from the apartment to the car and cussed, repeatedly, about the pressure, about how your hair took a life of it's on. This heat, this dry heat, is not so bad, we agree.

The sun has gone down and it is quiet. Frogs and crickets and the only light for acres is the soft glow of the stars coming out and the fireflies.


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