Texas Travel

You cannot cross Texas in less than a week. For one thing, the state is wider than four Eastern states strung together, and longer from north to south than six Sundays. For another thing, the storms out there are so fierce they keep moving the border. I once took a train from New Orleans to San Francisco, and outside of Abilene we ran into a cyclone so fierce that it pushed the city limits to the east side of the Mississippi. To make matters worse, the winds turned the tracks around, so the engineer had to run the train in reverse all the way over the Sierras. Even with Wizard Water^© in the boiler to speed things up, we didn't reach Sacramento until the previous Friday. I was early for an appointment, with no good excuse.

My pocketwatch ran backwards for weeks after that, too. It didn't start ticking forward until I visited Boston. Even then it moved about one minute for every five of actual time. They say that time stands still in Boston, but the truth is it just mimics what's happening in Congress.

copyright ©2011 Laurie J. Anderson, all rights reserved.