Clint: In a Special Light

I took my weekly late-afternoon drive down to Clint. I could see the Clint water tower as I turned off the interstate from El Paso and went down into the Lower Valley. The cotton and alfalfa fields, the distant mountains in Mexico, the desert space—they began to work their late-afternoon chemistry on me. I passed farmhouses, lone cottonwoods, and canals. The farm-to-market road had a worn, comforting shine, like the skin of an elephant. At the park across from the Catholic church, I stopped beneath a row of elms and read for a while. I liked to do that: just sit in my car and read and drink coffee from the thermos on the front seat and now and then look out the window. Boys were throwing a ball around in the park. Roosters crowed in a nearby yard. The faint smell of barbecue was in the air.

I began my walk through the neighborhood. At the side of the churchyard a man filled plastic jugs from the church water fountain and put them into the back of his pickup. Across the street the old man and his wife were sitting, as usual, on their front porch in straight-back wooden chairs, watching the man fill the jugs to take to his home in a nearby colonia. The porch seemed to give them their daily life: shade in the morning, sun in the afternoon, the cars that drove slowly past, the sparrows in the tall churchyard trees. They nodded to me as I walked by. We were familiar sights to each other.

See the full article in the March 2008 issue.

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