Incongruous I

Holidays, among other things, never fail to remind me why small towns depress me. It is the terrible abundance of tennis shoes, of muss-haired mothers, and of bark-- and the bark colored brick-- and the brick colored sky-- one horrid mound of nondescriptness, of brown. I do not like this nondescriptness because from it I was birthed and from it I flee. Uncle D sells pottery and is very wealthy; he wears cordouroy shirts that smell vaguely of clay dust and mint. Small towns remind me what I ought to have been, and, worse, what I could still mend and become: arriving my tight-waxed blue Nissan into an Edgarsburg or Adamsville, stopping and living and dying there, wearing Carhartt rubber boots and drawling about pottery sales. Small towns remind me of how instead I am flushed and rather fidgety in my white JCrew cardigan, dead broke, rather fragile and classically pretty, my main gig being how I am semifluent in French and Shakespearean English. Uncle D speaks in dollars, and in dirt. B, my cousin, eyes me as though I am a corn sample. On the back porch when the stars prick out white against the clearness he looks at me and says, "I mean, I'd offer you a joint, but, I mean, you know--"