layla y los colque by fence. grass still trying to grow.

Watering the grass along the fence where mint is growing, the mint smell rises up as the water hits the leaves. I could be enjoying this or going insane, the two sometime being hard to tell apart. Adela is on the other side of the fence watering too. Elena, the old lady who lives behind, is out in a bathing suit watering. The snow is almost melted out off Cerro Piltriquitron. I visualize for a moment a time-lapse film of the last 3 weeks. The grass seeds in the yard sprouting and slowly rising. The long arcs of the sun and moon beginning over Piltri and dropping behind the Andes. The first 7 days of continuous rain. How would it sound to speed all that up? Time-lapses are always visual only. Later the heat and the dust. Insects rising from the ground. The cottonwood seeds blowing from the Alamos. Cut to inside the house, no furniture except a single borrowed mattress. Sitting against the wall writing and drinking wine at night. Listening to headphones. Then the bringing in of mattresses, shower curtains, lawn chairs, a tiny love-seat for Layla. The taking of clothes to the laundry. Another period of rain, then sun again. Then the girls coming. The Colque kids gathering by the fence to meet them. Later the stokes and the screaming. The first dinners. The first fights. The waking up at night. The cuss words in Spanish and English. The orgasms. I wish we could watch all of this over again and study it. What are we doing right and/or wrong? Of course you can’t see subtext in a time-lapse film. You can’t see backstory. You can’t see back into our childhoods which is where the shit always starts. But seeing this film is watching Layla’s backstory. If we could watch it over somehow would it all turn out the same? Or is this a form of watching it all again here, just passing the hose over little things in the yard? Fennel. Dandelion. Clover. There’s a little puff of dirt that rises where the stream hits each new patch of dry ground. Can self-consciousness be construed as a virtue? Adela has watched everyone else move here. She’s been out here watering for 40 years. “Everywhere else the seed is growing,” I say across the fence. “But under the roof it doesn’t grow para nada.” She looks down beside the mint where there are patches of raw black soil. The seed just won’t take there. She nods. Then we both turn back to our hoses.