The following is from my essay, "Unseen Desert"
We had been talking with each other for a while on the phone. Phones then were connected to the wall and you couldn't move around much with them. There was a small tiff over some irrelevancy, so we agreed to “meet each other halfway”.
"You start walking now,” she said, “and so will I. Where we meet will be halfway!"
We were connected by a grid of rural roads in the desert laid out on the white gravel that made up the valley floor. We hung up and I started walking. We lived within a mile of each other. I thought nothing of a mile-long walk in the 100º-plus summer heat. I was young and it was summer in the desert. And I was in love.
When I first spotted her, she was a small, ephemeral point in the distance. The spot materialized from nothing. Heat shimmered from the pavement as the desert's expanse swept up to the cool of the mountains to the south. As we neared each other, I watched her continue to emerge out of the dazzling, almost blinding white sand. Her image refracted like a mirage in the waves of heat.
Slowly, it became clear that the distant object had legs and had begun to take on color. She wore green pants and a black top, colors that would blend like camouflage with the surrounding desert, but which stood out vividly against the glaring white sand along the road. Eventually, her shape took on the outlines of the human form. The female form. Hips wider and round under a smaller waist and square shoulders, hair flowing down in curls around them. The next concrete materialization was her swaying walk, hands brushing thighs in time with the rise and fall of her body. Her arm reached up and she brushed the curls from her shoulder as her body undulated hypnotically from side to side, shimmering in the dense heat.
Everything about her materialized slowly, languorously, because that is the only word that can describe materialization like this in the desert. There was no sudden moment of recognition, no apparition from around a corner, no sudden impact of surprise. Instead, there was the steady dawning of her person, an awakening of her presence in mine. She grew steadily out of the shimmering light until she was there. It was as though we had been traveling together across leagues of time and space, but now we could hear the other’s voice and touch the other’s body. There was a sense of time passing that yielded substance.
We embraced and kissed deeply, the tiff on the phone, our reason for meeting, completely forgotten. I remember opening my eyes to look at her. Her eyes closed, head upturned, the graceful arc of her neck, long hair curling down her back with the sun reflected in each strand. Her chest expanded and contracted within my arms. She wrapped a leg around my knees and brought me still closer to her. The blinding white gravel crunched beneath our feet as the kiss lingered.
And a poem...
Forever
Yesterday who would have believed
that today I would know my way?
Yesterday, my life was not, for want of you.
Today my life is because of you.
Today my mind is clear
Today I can see the start.
Today you are here,
Today we begin together.
Tomorrow we will have the rest of time.
Tomorrow we will have forever.
KD 1/79
And another poem...
Love Gone By
It's so hard to forget the love
Stored up and tended for so long.
The love, the two of us.
The haunting memories.
Remembrances of the love,
The love of days gone by.
Days spent together,
In tenderness and love.
Memories return, coming back
As specters to haunt and mezmerize.
It's so hard to forget the love,
Love of such intensity and strength.
Burning, consuming love.
Still the memories return
Shrouded in misty lace.
The memories of love gone by.
KD 1/80
- Family Info
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Since I'm interested in genealogy (Here's my WikiTree page - I've uploaded my DNA GEDCOM and my genealogy can be traced back on my mom's side to the first years of the Current Era, roughly 10 AD, and on my dad's side to about 1600 AD), I just wanted to store some public info here for my own reference. This page does not list any last names and it should be quite difficult to find it if you're looking for information on the person featured here. I was fond of these two while DeeAnne and I were together for the very short period of time that we were. I hope I'm not interfering or causing anger. If I am, please just contact me at kent@duryee.net and let me know and I'll take the following links down immediately.
- Report 1
- Report 2
- James Elton - Find A Grave
- Patricia Mae - Find A Grave