Someday I’ll do an historical survey and in-depth analysis of lipstick color names and it will be an accurate reflection of our evolving culture. - Andrea Lewis

We came down from the trees, up from the grasslands, and into an SUV. We drove. We motored. We headed for that Texas horizon, flat as the flat-line on a heart monitor, straight to the brink of extinction, all the while pumping gas.

Joy can come alive like that, when random pieces of history and rhythm, pause and expectation, melody and lyric, suddenly rearrange themselves into a pattern that leaps up, back against the wall, and catches your heart.

The damp packed earth beneath the magnolias was our playground, but even when I was small I watched the middle distance, as if my destiny might arise from the grooved line where the mangroves met the sky. Sometimes a pelican would appear out of the haze, six horizontal feet of pterodactyl in an effortless glissade, cruising just above the treetops, riding down the long, drawn-out minutes of the morning.