Going Cuckoo.

Those flamingos, those mud-stirrers, those jokers. I expected to go there and find them gone, all of them, overnight. But they have left in dribs and drabs, the final few lingering like party guests who just won't go home. Bittereinders we say in Afrikaans.

Now we drive along a different road.
A mountainside on a farm. The gravel road meanders past ancient manor houses, horses, sawmills, trees all red and copper. The tractor drivers wave hello.
Robert Plant and Alison Krauss croon please read the letter that I wrote.
I wrote it in my sleep.
And these words from Edith Templeton I can't forget: He will awake, will read, will write lengthy letters, and will pace the avenues amidst the drifting leaves.
There's no time for that and I miss it. Fourteen hour work days, small snatches of sleep inky with Indian life. The neighbor's blasted cuckoo clock follows me even while I'm awake.

Our Cherokee adviser could have stepped from an old Edward Curtis photograph.

Except he wears jeans, a black jacket with a scarlet lining and blue tinted spectacles.
He stares at the horizon a lot and tells us stories about warriors weaving hummingbird feathers into the manes of their mustangs.
Hummingbird has speed.
He says: Even your money comes from trees.
He says: I heard it on the moccasin express.
He looks around and asks if we have questions. He turns to me with eyes wide and says: Cuckoo!

Glamorous it ain't.  At the front door of my friend last night, she says only half in jest: I'd invite you in... but you're too dirty!

There's a storm a-brewing with gale force winds and lashing rain.
 The extras are in purgatory...