dreams in a snowless winter

We’re in a camper, a small one, with a wood stove going, talking about where we’ll go but remembering that we would have to go find our dish towel, which was lazing outside somewhere, and bring it upstairs to the apartment first. And then suddenly I’m laying on my stomach in the frosty grass in the middle of the night, taking pictures of the Milky Way that’s rising out of an adobe house at the end of the road, and a few houses down behind me two very old women, sisters named Plenary and Ruidad, are fist-fighting and shouting in their yard, a very large yard where they have neatly laid out all the dresses they have ever owned since 1820. They are expanding, and I feel the fabric creep up my toes and along the bottom of my foot. By the time it reaches my ankle, I wake up.