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,

searched 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.

Here we finally found family

in stories of the ancients

eating acorns and blackberries,

roasting squirrel and jackrabbit,

spearing bison and deer,

living in camps 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.