It’s seven o clock and I’m straining noodles in my new kitchen.

Outside, kids are laughing, screaming, shrieking with glee.

They make cannonballs into still pool water, shattering brief moments of stillness with their splashes.

I go to put music on and realize I don’t want any.

I love these sounds.

Writers, has it ever happened that you become someone you’ve written of?

Maybe not wholly. Maybe only for a moment.

At night the sun sets like a blood orange in the sky, bleeding red and rusty over the blue. She watches it out her kitchen window while she washes her dishes, or full heads of lettuce, red leaf and dirty.

Tonight I strained noodles, listened to the kids laugh and later, put the dishes in the sink and walked barefooted out onto my balcony.

Squatting ripped seams into these old jeans, I cradled miniature roses in my palms and pulled them gently from their temporary pots. Separated root from soil. Transplanted. Settled them into a new home in the sun.

The roses are finally planted and she stands back to see them, symmetrical and soldier like, positioned in perfect proportion to each other. She is satisfied, despite her dirt encrusted body. Weeks pass and each evening, she slams out the screen door to see her plants. It surprises her, the degree to which the roses continue to please her, and not because they are so perfectly arranged, but because she’s put so much into their planting. Most likely, had someone else done the digging, wrestling, lugging and sweating it took to get the plants from their individual pots into the soil, they wouldn’t be so lovely. As it is, she waters them daily and watches them with care. They bloom beautifully for weeks on end, changing the timbre of their yellow, from pale to red rimmed.

Maybe that she was part of me. All along.

The sun’s bright and these dark glasses, smudged.

Truckers honk at my bare legs stretched out like pale and slimy seals, sunning themselves seaside.

We drive through the early evening, watching with our progress, the sun waddle into the west and disappear.

The day began endless hours ago, miles behind us on the flat flax color of Nebraskan cornfields. Over the acrid coffee of the Ogallala jiffy mart.

My head ached with the bluntness of the light there. The parched stillness of the air.

The sun sits directly above us and begins, around midday to bear into our skin despite the tinted car windows and layers of steel.

Hours later, I look at my arms, my shoulders, my hands, and realize they’ve been colored unequal by long hours in the driver’s seat. Now, with one side of me singed red and blistered from resting on the plastic window ledge, and the other arm still white and shaded by the car roof and wheel, I stop for sunscreen. Pause to purchase protection that’s too little, too late.

The heat persists and we drive on through it, reaching Colorado with the sunset. Without our noticing, everything changes and when next I think to define what I see, I realize it’s all mountains and little corn.

Soon the difference is impossibly missed and we’re bobbing up and over mountainous green. This place is basic, but bowl-over beautiful. Like skin. The earth’s skin. Taught and brown. Blue veined. Varicose where it runs off and twists down hillsides in spiny purple lines.

The colors move with our car wheels, changing into coral colored mesas and dunes.

We reach the canyons. Drive passed vacant road stands and wind blown Winnebagos.

The Navaho land.

Dead dog on the roadside. Coyotes strung up like flags.

I am angry. How can they? I ask. How can they trash the most beautiful… it’s theirs, after all.

The earth’s skin.

What makes this earth so familiar to us? The fact that it is us, I suppose. Even if we lose connection and slip into man made masochistism and rage. Even when we splurge and purge until there’s little left to hold onto. To get back to.

The long lines of cars, pushing themselves in congested droves through the gateways of each national park. And once there, putting themselves behind camera lenses, camcorders. Distancing and disconnecting. Protecting.

The earth’s skin. The fear of our own.

It’s difficult to comprehend how we humans have the capacity to hold the knowledge of such expansive beauty inside these small, fallible frames. I would not want to live here I say aloud, thinking the land might break me if I tried. Thinking I might shatter like an opera singer’s water glass if I walked out my door each day to face such splendor.

This is a sentiment I’ll repeat over and again until the canyons become junked car bodies and California and I’m freed from the burden of beauty carried by grand canyons and rocky mountain roads.

The burden of beauty. The sun, the sky and the loss of time as it changes, makes clear it’s own illusion. Own invisibility over invisible borders.

Iowa.

Somewhere outside Council Bluffs I start to really see. To look out the window and not at the road.

Not at the road and not at my own reflection in the rearview mirror.

I see that raspberries line the guardrail. That trees stand in shady diagonals on far off hillsides.

The sun’s bright and these dark glasses, smudged. Truckers honk at my bare legs stretched out on the dash like pale and greasy seals, sunning themselves seaside.

White windmills line the hilltops. Skeletal steel arms cutting wide swaths across blue sky.

Oil leases available, call 1-800 Dry Hole

Sunflowers line the dividing lane

These roads are like grey rivers that cars move over as vehicular water bugs or whisked up leaves and twigs.

And if the roads resemble rivers, the corn is oceanic, rolling and dipping in waves. Settling over the landscape like a thick blanket, like a rolled out rug of yellow tipped green and gold.