Little Story 1

The guys at Morningstar were building adobe walls, making sun-dried
bricks set out on the mesa first. They were separating themselves from
politics, at least the sound of it, their shirtless torsos all one sweating effort
to make shelter. I stood and looked, not with them, a visitor. Someone had brought me across the mesa to see, and I did not know how I fit in. I didn’t.
The sun blared with not one leaf to give shelter. Now there are buildings and trees.
Now there are roads, wells, plots of irrigated soil. I think goat John got his
start at Morningstar. Then he moved to Buffalo and owned a milk van. He tootled
along those dirt roads and would come up my drive down in Seco every other week with fresh goat milk and cheese. He was tall and lanky, very much the business man. We bought as much as we had change and dollars for. Traded back his bottles. I learned to make cheesecake from his fresh cheese and goat ricotta, graham crackers crusts. Honey and cinnamon. The days were filled with surviving, driving, working in town and at home on my machine, sewing stuff for us and others. No father, no man. Just me and my son, our various roommates. A commune of sorts, women living together in a shady adobe rental on a plot of farmland beyond anybody’s means that I knew. We’d go out to dance now and then, babysitting each other’s kids or bringing them along. It was all going nowhere for me until I cleared my head with modern day therapy, brand new in that neck of the woods, well, slice of the valley. I set my emotional clock back to fourteen and started all over again.
It was Fermin’s house on El Salto Road when I found my center. Ricocheting from suicidal to conscious, the little needle on my odemeter hovered over “good-to-go” at last. I had set myself free from the need for a man. What a load to put down. Them guys is heavy!