I can see much more.

I can see much more of the universe here in this beige suburb.  Black gum trees and dogwoods and kudzu have been mostly cleared except around the perimeter.  The town is still a ways off and over the highways that stretch and cross over each other to form a crossroad.  There’s a train track that runs behind the houses across the street, and occasionally I hear a string of freight cars pass.  Sometimes a plane sails far overhead, low enough to see wings and all.  Mostly, though, there are just these beige model homes and dollar green cars stacked neatly in driveways.  

Therefore, I can see much more of the universe at night.  Neither red nor orange neon impedes the darkness.  No hawkers break the silence with salacious propositions, as I might have heard walking along Iberville.  There is nothing to distract the universe from itself.  The beige seems almost a sign of reverence or of obeisance or of deference.  

Mars is low and spinning and casting off light like a single buzzing bulb on an old-fashioned sign that otherwise burned itself out long ago.

Don't ask.

"How are you?" is a greeting, not a question. People, in general, don't intend for you to spend time detailing your complaints or quandries when they ask you how you are. The response should be brief and pithy and preferably accompanied by a broad smile and a pert wave. I'm quite good at this. In fact, I often have myself convinced of the sincerity of my standard response to the standard American "how are you" greeting - FAAANTASTIC! AND YOU?

That's why I hate it when someone asks me how I am and they display genuine concern. The faintest glimmer of compassion in another person's eyes triggers some automatic, irreversible, unfathomably quick self-assessment that ends in tears. And suddenly I'm faced with the possibility that I'm not FAAANTASTIC!

I smiled at the white-haired doctor today. Dr. Smith. I had on sparkly green beaded bangles and a faux-diamond necklace and mascara, and if you had asked me insincerely and dispassionately how I felt I would have replied without a thought - FAAANTASTIC! YOU?

Dr. Smith asked several questions that doctors ask upon a patient's first visit. I haven't been to a doctor in a couple of years. Not since my insurance ran out after Fain was born. Now I have insurance again, and I felt a complete check-up was in order. And I felt that it was important to list any strange symptoms that I've had since the last time I saw a doctor - another Dr. Smith, but this one an African-American woman with braids and large hoop earrings. And I felt that it was equally important to be entirely honest in my answers as he cannot help me if he doesn't know what's wrong with me - if anything is wrong with me at all, which is a matter of some debate and subjectivity.

"Emotionally," he said with a kind smile, "How are you?"

"Oh," I laughed a little, "You know, sometimes I feel a little depressed. I guess sometimes I have problems with...anxiety...Nothing serious...I have a great sense of humor and that's how I deal..."

And at that point I burst into tears. I felt like a real jackass. And it occurred to me that I have a problem and I don't know what it is.

I guess that's all.

On the farm.

After several seasons of pining for a pumpkin farm, I stumbled onto one Sunday while driving through the country. In fact, it was the pumpkin farm that I first visited when I was in Kindergarten, with Ms. Wooten and her daughter Danielle and a couple of other kids from my class. Ms. Wooten had a colossal burgundy Cadillac sort of car with a small black and white t.v. that plugged into the cigarette lighter. I remember being particularly impressed with that.

The woman watching over the pumpkin farm this weekend looked familiar to me. She was on the generous side of middle-age with a gray, bobbed haircut covered by a tan fisherman's hat. She was a healthy, farm weight, and she wore jeans and a barn jacket and a canvas apron and leather boots. I would describe her as farm sophisticate. Her grandchildren would not call her "ma." They would have a more modern name for her.

I told her that I had visited a pumpkin farm when I was in Kindergarten and mentioned the name of the school that I had attended. She replied that the school had been visiting that farm for years and still did. (That's quite a lot of years - at least, 25.)

And, sure enough, there was the big white farmhouse, just to the right and across a meadow where several horses and a donkey grazed on damp grass. And there were the rows and rows of pumpkins, not in a field, as I would have hoped, but arranged neatly by size and price. One row contained pumpkins so mammoth that I could never imagine the man big enough to carry them away. I could live in one like Peter's wife. Miniature pumpkins, small enough to palm, were stacked on wooden shelves that leaned against the deep red barn. And then, of course, there were rows that fell between the two extremes. Perfect orange gourds. Platonic ideals of pumpkins. The stalks were still wet and mushy from the fields.

I had to keep a careful watch over Fain because he has already discovered the joys of pumpkin-chunking. He picked up one tiny pumpkin in his own tiny hand, turned it over to examine it, smiled up at me, and threw it as far as he could. You might be surprised by how far that is.

Aside from the pumpkins, the farm was a small menagerie, designed to educate local elementary school children on farm life. Just like back in the old days. There were white goats poking their heads through the wire gate that enclosed them. Dirty, gray sheep meandered about a pasture behind the red barn, side-stepping several brown cows that chewed cud and stared from beneath a shady pecan tree. There were two gray-and-white rabbits in two separate pens, and neither flinched when Fain reached for them. They must see dozens of sticky-fingered curtain-climbers every day of the week. Four or five rooster, large and the color of burnished copper, iridescent almost, strutted and pecked and cock-a-doodled in another pen. Fain recognized the sound right away, though it is nothing like my poor imitation, and he began to call back to them. How clever. He's already fluent in a foreign tongue. And there was a dark, smoke-colored pig, not squeaky-pink the way that I imagine pigs to be. It shuffled under gray-gold straw, snuffing and squealing. Fain liked him the best.

And as much as he enjoyed himself, as true as it may be that the farm was like heaven for him on this raw, wet, gray day filled with mooing and cawing and squealing and whinnying, it was even better for me.

Fire.

I had an image last night. ( I hate to say vision because it sounds so Cassandra. This was a picture, just a short, short, short film, or a Polaroid that develops and just as quickly vanishes into a dun chemical chaos.)

I was thinking about the Big Bang - everything in existence, or the potential of everything in existence, rushing from one infintesimal pinpoint out into infinite expansion.

And it occured to me that the sun is not unique. (Of course, you all knew this, but I only just realized it.) The sun is not a flat yellow round sticker clinging to a blue Colorform sky board. It has no triangles afixed around its circumference.

It occured to me that all of the light in the known universe is derived from happenstance flames, dashing towards the outer reaches of everything. The sun, all of the stars, are made of burning debris. They are cosmic leaf piles, red and gold and copper cast-offs. They are trash can fires, toppling through the dark, and we huddle around them, glad to have come by them, as if we had just hopped off a train from Des Moines with a red bandana bag thrown over our shoulders on an icy February morning. Or, as in deVaca's account of his adventures in pre-colonial Texas, they are the bonfires of helpful natives, carefully arranged to provide warmth and safety as we move closer and closer to our destination.

Cotton and morning glories.

There are a multitude of fields here - peanut, tobacco, corn, soybean, and cotton. Each is distinctive.

The dusty peanut crops lie close to the ground, as if they have ears pressed to the dirt, listening for a distant train. The corn crops are frazzled and yellow-brown, their scraggly leaves stick out like unwashed collars and sleeves. They are a legion of gaunt, ill-dressed hobos.

I can't see a soybean field without remembering the summer before Kent died, our senior year, the night of graduation, drinking cheap beer and tequila under a deep blue universe. There was no where to go in our small town, so we sat on the edge of a soybean field, listening to a classic rock station on the Toyota's radio.

I can't see a tobacco field without imagining my grandmother as a young girl, caught in a rain storm, suddenly realizing her need for a bra. I can see her freckles and her red hair and her adolescence as if I'd been there myself. I can see her, hiding her sudden exposure, behind a broad, golden leaf the size of a Balinese fan.

I never noticed cotton fields before this year, though they must have always been there. The plants are knee-high and swollen with white pulp, pushing out of the green. Along the edges of the fields, interspersed with the green and white, amethyst morning glories wind their way upward. Pale yellow butterflies move over the flowers like rain.