23

A new day. A new life continues.

"Do you believe in magic?"

I was just waking up.  I was on my cot outside the van/truck when I heard Xena singing quietly in my ear. 

"Do you believe in magic?"  She sang over and over.  Till I opened my eyes and looked at her in the dim morning light.  I hadn't put up the tarp over the side of the van when I went to bed, it had been totally clear for the past week, with no forecast for rain.  Xena of course slept inside the van/truck.

I looked at her.  She was sitting next to the sliding van door and staring intently at me. 

"Do you believe in magic, in a young girl's heart?"  She stopped and looked questioningly at me.  I could only dimly see her stare.

"Magic?"

"Yes, do you believe in magic in a young girl's heart."

"Only if the music is groovy, as it always is with you," I was catching on to the game.  The song had been playing all week long on a fm station on the computer. 

"Mrs. Hepplewhite said there was magic in my family," Xena whispered to me.  I didnt' know any Hepplewhite, but then I've only known Xena since last fall. 

"Who was Mrs. Hepplewhite?"  It was hard to get Xena to start at the beginning of anything and I didn't have much hope finding out who Hepplewhite might be.  But I asked anyway.

For an answer Xena started to sing the whole song.  I didn't interrupt her.  She had a marvelous voice now and then, and then again she could be totally off tune.  Now she sounded just like a singer on the computer.
I stayed still, not wanting to interrupt her, hoping that eventually she'd tell me why she was singing this particular song before dawn.

"Old lady Hepplewhite thought she could be a mid-wife but no one used her if they had a choice since she never washed her hands or her self and smelled like all them cats she kept in her shack.  It wasn't even a house, just a shack with a littler shack out the back.  A little hand pump in corner she used for a kitchen and a wood burning franklin for cooking and heat.  Nope, she was a mess, but we didn't have much better.  Nope, she was always trying to drum up business in health care and gossip and matters of the heart.  We tried to keep clean but it wasn't easy in the winter with the ice.  You know how cold it got up in hills."

I did and nodded so.

"Well, do you believe in magic?"  She asked again and this time kept still and waited for my answer.  I suppose this had something to do with the movie we saw last week at the drive-in. 

"I don't know," I honestly said.  "Maybe, but I've never seen it first hand."

I waited.

Xena waited me out.

"Have you seen it?"

Xena sighed so loud that it reminded me of a girl I knew once who had asthma so bad she wheezed throughout the days.  Xena was good at sighing.  A lot of the girls back home sighed at the drop of a hat.  I think that they must of practiced sighing when they gathered together as they often did.

"Of course, so have you, so has everone, they just too stupid to recognize it."  Sometimes Xena would talk hill talk, especially when she thought that I wasn't paying attention.  Other times she could talk as fine as the actors on the radio or computer.

"Get up and we'll have some of that good coffer you always make," she said and went back into the van.  I suppose to get ready for the day.  Whatever that took.  But she did that every morning and I was getting used to it.  It must be a woman thing, as the girls back home used to say.