Free Friday

How to describe the distance I walked for those six days. How I reached inside. What exactly transpired, meeting women who could tune the entire orchestra or craft a snake wrapped around a boy's ankles standing on a precipice, sweating. How to tell that one scholar had dyed a portion of her wispy hair electric blue and that another joined me in the farthest room in the library (always open) and that before she began writing, she laid out her utensils including a chocolate colored fan folded on the flat table. I typed with two fingers on the pad of an iPad inherited from my college bound daughter, evoking sixteen brothers and sisters as if they had just, after 59 years, been handed to me anew as a whole to hold up to the light. Desert light which under my green umbrella on the path brought less unsettling glint to gradually reveal the most frightening parts.

Home now, I walk through the house shirtless and with knowledge. Recalling how on free Friday we paused only long enough to push our plastic trays through the food line, chattering at long tables before scattering back to our "other" chairs in still, cool rooms or at picnic tables in the heat but with a remarkable view. And then there were the switchbacks to the top of the mesa, looking down and over the paths through yellow flowers and past that thatched shade pavilion, the trail alongside Agape and the Art Center, past the clean, blue bottomless pool, women driving golf cars and others headed straightaway to another hour of fiction and essay, the next act of their play, or poem of a confident boat slamming up against a wave. I sing now to the one muse with her bottle of bourbon and another in an apron painted with bandita women scooping out cream puffs and pesto, pretzels and cheese for the social hour at 2:30pm.

The Pedernal, so patient, as we photographed her shoulders, skirt of lake around her ankles on the ground below her. Stars falling and mosquitoes biting, leaving the itch on our skin coming home.