As Mourning Doves Persist

Mississippi river.  A clothesline. Dry arroyo. Parents travel highways away from, down roads named for cowboys, paying tolls. Cadillacs appear on the horizon buried nose down in the ground sporting tiny fins like Martian antenna. We, three innocent bystanders, just tykes in the back seat playing “I spy”, count license plates from all the States. These the snake routes of uprooting, mistakes not really errors just changes on the dance floor as one young mother outgrows her once matched husband, escaping hometown and that mandatory thrust of high school graduation and other milestones, whole generations of expectations. This, instead, the Route 66 of unanticipated divorce. Separately, together, they move toward larger politics, new partners' scents. Prince Albert tobacco and dark lit corner tables for whiskey neat, or the shimmy of a new posture in go-go boots with different promise, shaking martinis in a silver bullet. Train of refer madness to ...

Second grade, we lived on  Cindy Street , cul-de-sac where I rehearsed my confusing life with the usual quilt of friends, freckled, all white, and carrying board games like clubhouse passwords from front yard to back. Risk and Chutes and Ladders.  Cootie catchers. We sucked honeysuckle sap like rare elixir from the bush at the bottom of the street where the school bus stopped for us weekday mornings.  There too at the end of our street was with a pond, muddy with pollywogs mimicking our own growth on squat legs. If you turned right at that corner and kept going there was an coveted destination two blocks farther, a house where three playmates mirrored my own sibling trinity of two girls and a boy and the most exotic mother in the entire neighborhood. This woman with yellow hair was bewitching, had a husband of her own, of course, but she bought holiday gifts for a select share of kids in her periphery, presents that surely unsettled our own mothers...