this is a re-post from March 2010, but now it's part 4 in this series.

Joanna Newsom - "Good Intentions Paving Company"

    It was still too cold to take in the outdoor car cover, the aluminum housing covered in a clear tarp, so the two of them sat in the car, in the cool evening as it rained in March. With March you take your chances. Sometimes you find yourself sweltering in the sunshine in a winter coat and boots, other times a spring coat will feel like you're wearing a plastic bag when the wind kicks up and around a corner. But that night the night was warm, a few degrees above freezing, and it was raining. They sat in the car, with the seats tilted back, and smoked and listened to the rain clapping softly on the tarp. The orange streetlight cast a swath on the road and silhouetted the smoke as it rose to the roof of the car. They had been doing this sort of thing since they were sixteen, the kinetic magic of those first few times being enough to sustain these past ten years. They would talk more openly than with anyone in their lives, listen to the radio and add up the parking tickets and imagine how they could steal that much money to pay them off. They used to make love in these times, in the car, and they used to laugh about who was the boy and who was the girl. Now they cast loaded snickers, breathed smoke up to the ceiling with a smile, knowing everything and knowing nothing.
    "Can you roll down the window?"
    "I don't know, can I?" while rolling down the window.
    They had reached that precarious point where there was a list of necessary answers to any given thing, and they had to play out these little scripts every time one would come up. That tipping point where you can either hold those moments close like warm hot chocolate or dump them out like dishwater. And as with anything balanced ever so delicately, be it the pencil at the edge of a desk, or a book left open with a page in the air, it takes merely a breath, even a sigh, to move it.
    "I think I'll get married."
    "To me?"
    another snicker, "No, silly."
    The smoke wound out the window and out from under the tarp, and fought against the rain as it wound right up to outer space.

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