8. PIPE

The late summer moon is brilliant! It hovers up there in the Idaho night sky, so massive and crisp edged. It’s like someone took a giant biscuit cutter to the dough of our existence. The eternities, so packed with light it blinds us to details, lay exposed in a glorious circle against the indigo sky. Beautiful, sparkling August sky, sealing in the heat of the dry Idaho air, aromatic with the scent of someone’s freshly mown hay; silent against the padding of our flip flops as we walk the road out toward Tucker’s farm. The further we get from town, the deeper the darkness, and the brighter the shimmer of the swirl of stars that peek out at us. 

We are rebel souls, our hips have grown into curves that swing when we walk. Sleeping out on the lawn at Aunt Becky’s house in Ucon, Idaho, we have waited until the last light goes out in the house, then we slip from our sleeping bags and tiptoe through the grass to the road, whispering as we move through the quiet night. When we get half way up the road to Tucker’s the air changes. Dry heat gives way to sudden soft coolness. The pipes that stretch across the fields have filled with water. They belch as they spew. Cool streams of water shoot across dark fields, like fly balls hit into deep center field. The pressured streams shatter the dry air, leaving shards of moisture that cling to the hairs on our forearms. The contrast makes me shudder, but I think it divine. It takes a little moisture released from rigid pipes to remind this Pennsylvania girl that she is far from home. Home, where the flora is so thick that there is never, even when there has not been rain for weeks, a dry day.