The afternoon we reached the highway, the sun or something else had heated the pavement sufficiently to feel tacky under our feet. The entrance ramp had been repaired a few years earlier, so the road still felt cleaner and newer than the city streets it emerged from. Those repairs were completed prior to all the turmoil, fixed up just in time to lose its function.
The soles of our shoes made smacking sounds as we walked on the hot surface of the entrance ramp, up the incline to the raised highway. It wasn’t too steep, but the stickiness of the surface, coupled with gravity, seemed to add resistance, as if the materiality of the town itself wanted to hold onto us, prevent escape. I was panting more than I wanted to admit, but I didn’t try to hide it. Shame, like a lot of things, had become frivolous.
“It’d be nice if it rained a little,” Evelyn said.
“I’m not sure I want anything falling down on us right now,” I panted.
“To cool us off. This humidity needs to break,” she said, as if it were two years ago.
“You confident it won’t be fire and brimstone?”
"You need to grow up, kiddo,” she said.
Haley spoke up: “There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound.”
“What?” I asked. Evelyn looked amused.
“It’s poem. My mom had a book of poetry I used to read when I was little. I don’t know why I remember that one.”
“What is it?” Evelyn asked.
“I think it’s from World War I. It’s about how shitty people are, I guess. I think I just liked the sound of it.”
“A lot of poetry is about how shitty people are, if you think about it,” Evelyn said.
“Really?” I asked. “I think about nature when I think about poetry.”
“Sure, I guess, but why do you think people need to write about nature. They can just look at it.”
“To make a record, maybe. To remember how a flower or whatever made you feel,” I said, ready to drop the rain conversation already.
“I think that’s right,” Evelyn said.
Haley piped up, apparently not letting the rain conversation drop: “Poetry makes me think of music.”
“Me too,” Evelyn replied, while I walked a little quicker.