In the desert there are four seasons: Summer, fall, winter and wind. I pull on my leather gloves and shove my hair up into my hat because I'm on a deadline. Gotta go out there and sift some more. Sifting sand. The little tune floats through my head. Down by the seashore with Marianne. But nothing could be further than the tropics.
Laurey comes running around the large Cottonwood tree that stands between our two houses. She's holding her long skirt up with one hand. In the other, she has a miniature hoe.
Laurey's got on a typical Laurey outfit. She looks like she just stepped off the pages of Little Women. Cute, but I am not in the mood for a kid. I'm mudding the living room walls. She spots me through the glass door, smiles and knocks as she lets herself in.
"Can I help mix?" she asks.
"We're sort of trying to go fast here. We don't have another hoe. Another big hoe."
"I can use my own hoe," she says, "I'm a fast mixer, ask my mom."
"Alright," I give. She's right. She is a hard worker. "Would you watch the cats?"
She guards the open front door from the kittens, wielding her Barbie hoe. I guide the blue wheelbarrow outside, across the gravel to the far side of the lot where the sifter is set up next to the sand pile. I park the wheelbarrow and pick up the shovel, just as the wind picks up.
It's April, and the wind out here on the mesa is angry that it's still cold enough to be winter. It whips at everything it can reach. It sands the skin on my cold face. Our sand pile has been reduced from its former pyramid into a playground crater that has to be scraped at in order to get a shovel-full.
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