That summer we pretended
we were orphans,
two sisters torn apart
by misfortune,
reunited by happenstance
with only Earth
to parent us.
Hair matted thick from days
of hill country winds
and no one to make us bathe,
we decided on a movie star archaeologist,
Indiana Jones, as our role model.
A dusty middle-aged man,
Indiana lived freedoms
bold enough to mythologize,
reckless enough to mute
our fears of becoming women.
Like him, we quested the sublime,
raided pecan trees for robin eggs,
jammed sticks under fallen limbs
anxious to find
where rattlesnakes hide.
We discovered God
in what confounded us,
like a rusted tractor
broken apart by a live oak,
a parable of Nature
always winning in the end.
We scoured parched ground
for evidence of ancestry
near a waterless aquifer
that split and angled the land
into uselessness.
There scattered among cypress and madrone,
we found spear points
the length of our hands,
evidence of Paleo-Indians
some 15,000 years before
our first breaths.
We nurtured
stories of ancient relatives
eating acorns and blackberries,
roasting squirrel and jackrabbit,
spearing bison and deer,
living in tents too small to keep secrets,
with children who belonged to everyone
until old enough to roam free —
moving where they wanted,
discarding what they no longer needed,
but never each other.
