Washed Away

If I thought anything about the rain that afternoon we left our new house it was that it might turn to snow by nighttime. Robert drove me through Fordyce and showed me that, like Williamsburg, it was a little town. The high school football field sat right in the middle of everything, only a block away from Main Street, which was lined with a few stores and banks, a restaurant or two. We drove past downtown and back toward the highway, past the drive-in theater and the trailer park sitting beside it. I wondered what it was like to sit on your porch and see all those actors so large on the screen, almost looking down on you, but not be able to hear what they were saying. Fordyce, like the valley where his parents lived, wasn’t what I had dreamed of when I married and came to America with Robert forty years ago, but at least it was a town, and I thought that it would be enough, for a little while, anyway.