Kicking Up Dust.

I L I K E D the firm feel of the Adirondack chairs on her back porch. Always did, from the very first time the group of us hung out there, after hours, smoking, drinking, daring the rain to return.

It was just her and me today, tonight.

I watched my old beagle run playful circles around her giggling 2-year old daughter in the yard, both of them stumbling a bit, undaunted. She perched the boom box in the kitchen window, Bebel Gilberto playing, the smooth beat all South America and smoke and sex… a christening.

I don’t usually listen to this kinda stuff she said, flopping easily into the other chair. But now that she heard it, it made her feel happy, she said, like wanting to move and wanting to stay perfectly still at the same time. I smiled broadly, dared the lightest touch of her hand, then took another sip off my heavy glass of Jack Daniels and ice, looking away.

I took a great long inhale: The whiskey, the jasmine in the breeze, the cinnamon of her suddenly so much closer than yesterday. Sometimes things change, I nodded to myself, because they’re supposed to. Stars go nova thousands of light years away which somehow causes tides that pull people to the other coast of the country for reasons they are only beginning to understand.

My dog and her daughter frolicked. Crows took over her stately maple in a bloodless twilight coup. I followed the line of the yard’s redwood fence with my eyes as it fell away with the slope of the yard, into the darkness behind the garage. I thought of the sinuous line of her naked back, just six impossible hours ago, in her bed, the rest of her mystery hidden under the sheet. I had watched her then, while she slept, both of us groggy from the orgasms and the lightning bolts of discovery.

D I A L telephones, I blurted.

What?, she said, almost spitting her beer.

Dial telephones, busy signals, VHS tapes, you know, that kinda stuff, I said. All those things from my youth that I don’t know for sure you even know about, or if you’ve ever even heard of, I told her, leaning forward, the glass balanced on my knee. My kids don’t, I said, immediately regretting it.

She looked at me for just a second, quickly turning away, covered her mouth with one hand, and held her eyes tight shut for a long minute.

Breathing deeply, concentrating, another pull off her Budweiser, finally opening her eyes again.

Look at them, she laughed through misty eyes.

My dog was on her back, rolling in the grass. Her daughter, ecstatic, laying right next to the beagle, imitating her, grass stained and wiggling carefree.

Look at her, she said. When she’s 12 or 16 or 20, all the things she’ll wake up knowing how to do, things you or I have never seen or even heard of, things that haven’t even been invented yet.

She turned to look at me, smiled. Life is always going to be like that, she said.

She put her hand over mine, on the arm of the Adirondack chair.

She said, I don’t give a fuck about your dial tones or her… inventions. I want to just… be. Be with…

A long pause.

Be with this moment, now. I heard it even though she never said it.

So we sat a few more minutes, the branches of that giant tree now framed black against the last oranges and purples of the Oregon sky. Crows flew off to go wherever crows go at night. I closed my eyes, felt her get up, touching my shoulder going by, heard her picking up her daughter.

Time to get you to bed, little miss, she cooed, touching their noses in a kiss as she gathered her up.

She passed me to go into the house, as I imagined her and I on a dirt road we just joined, walking backwards slowly, trying to understand where to go at the fork by studying the dust we’d kicked up behind us.

It was a moment of pregnant silence until I realized she was holding the back door open. Waiting. Frightened. Expectant. Fluttering.

Smiling.