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By Root 512 0

to go home. Packing her things, saying good-bye to the little hut that had been her nest, she remembered a dream of the night before. She had been visited by a very old woman famous for making things beautiful. She’d swept into Kate’s drab abode and, just by thinking it, transformed each room into a bouquet of flowers. They were still rooms, but when she touched them, the walls turned into flowers. Kate had walked through her now very spacious, long, flower-walled house, a house that breathed perfume and freshness, toward the beach where she could see the Old One walking. She was wearing something that she said was made of vinyl, and therefore she could not walk directly in the sunlight, and she and her respectful assistant turned more toward the shadows as Kate approached them begging the old woman to stay. Kate felt a longing for her continued presence that she knew was aroused in people wherever the old woman went. Please stay, she cried, but the old woman was already telling the assistant about the next job she had on her schedule, the next drab abode that awaited her magic visit. So that is old age! Kate thought, waking. The ability to visit what is ugly and to transform into beauty anything you touch.

In the boat she told the dream to Armando, who smiled at her.

I did not know you were concerned about old age, he said.

I didn’t know it either, said Kate. But I guess I was.

She reminds me of my grandmother, said Lalika.

Her shaved head was purple where it appeared beneath her white crocheted cap. Her eyes were serene and clear.

There was a closeness among them, Missy, Kate, Rick, Lalika, Hugh, Armando, and Cosmi, that felt very ancient and very sweet. They were all considerably slimmer too.

For a long time the boat hummed along, skirting the jungle, and only after many hours did the inhabitants of villages begin to appear. Small clear-cut farms with a couple of scrawny mules and a dozen or so chickens or perhaps a goat. Thatched huts slightly larger than the ones they had left. It was like entering another world. Everything, after the opulence of the forest, seemed battered and sickly. The people, the women especially, looked shockingly oppressed, dejected, and malnourished as they dragged themselves about their hard-packed yards, so recently the lush floor of the rapidly disappearing Amazon forest. It seemed to Kate that every young woman they saw, above the age of thirteen, was pregnant. Near one of these farms the boat stopped for a woman dressed in clean but frayed and tattered clothes. They made room for her in the boat, but for the rest of the trip, two and a half hours or so, she kept herself away from them. It was as if she feared they would think her unfit to share the boat with them.

When they arrived safely at the outpost where a car awaited them Kate was relieved. Because they were hungry they stopped to eat at a restaurant that served rice and beans and fish, but no vegetables.

The farmer in her awoke. Surely people could grow some kind of greens here, she said to Armando. In all this heat and humidity. She was thinking especially of collards and kale, which did so well in the semitropical climate of the American South. And tomatoes, beans, and squash!

He shrugged, gratefully took his plate, and ate hungrily, as they all did, savoring their first nonretreat meal. There were small pebbles in the beans that almost cost Kate a tooth, but she carefully ate around them.

At the airport they exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses and hugged and kissed one another good-bye. This is the way people live now, thought Kate. If you’re lucky you get to spend intense weeks or months with people with whom you exchange the most intimate and vital information; then, you take off again, you are gone. She wondered if they would ever see one another again. She hoped so, but did not expect it to happen.

Yolo Woke

Yolo woke in Alma’s house thinking of Alma’s health. She must weigh two hundred pounds, at least, he thought. And her smoking and drinking is nonstop. He did not see how he could say this