I am being driven ninety miles an hour from College Station to Austin on a twisted, two-lane highway. It's pitch black outside.
We drive, and we drive. Then we smell hay. I don't recognize it, but my travel companions tell me: hay.
They harvest memories from their baling childhoods. It makes me think of pine and cedar in northern Michigan:
how they smell in August at dusk and dawn when it is so cold, I need a sweater, and summer days are numbered
when every September brings me closer. I am lonely. I smell hay. I think of you.
Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One's Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly. Her work is forthcoming in Red Mountain Review and McSweeney's. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.
