Tideland

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On my first evening in the back country, I skipped down the porch steps of the farmhouse-leaving my father inside and the radio playing and my small suitcase decorated with neon flower stickers unpacked-and wandered toward the upside-down school bus I’d spied from an upstairs window. Flanked on either side by Johnsongrass taller than my head, I followed a narrow and crooked cattle trail, extending my arms straight out for a while so my palms could reach into the grass and brush against the sorghum.

"You bend so you don’t break," I whispered as the Johnsongrass slapped across my hands, half-singing the song my father had written about me: "You bend so you don’t break, you give and you give, but you can’t take, Jeliza-Rose, so I don’t know what to do for you.”

And I continued along the trail for some time-winding left, then right, then left again-until it ended at a grazing pasture sprinkled with foxtails and the last bluebonnets of late spring. A breeze shuffled through the humidity, and the sky was already dimming. But the low-growing bluebonnets were still radiant, so I carefully stepped over them while moving further into the pasture.

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