In the worst of times, she tried hard to remember what it was like inside her girl body, its brown stringy hair and narrow hips; those long hot summers so quickly eased by chests of cola and soda packed in ice. You could plunge a hand deep into the icy cold slosh, pulling out most any flavor, surprise adding to that delight if such a thing were possible. The child Elsa would sit cross-legged on the old store floor and grab a bottle from the bottom of the chest, swishing it back and forth across the cold water and ice, drawing the bottle upward through the small currents just a fraction at a time. The woman Elsa would close her eyes and remember the sound as the bottle opener pried against the metal cap, the slow hiss that sent shivers right through you, the sound of the cap bouncing against the tile floor; then the cold that slid right down inside and, in that moment, made you insanely grateful to be alive.
An old couple had owned the one room place since the depression. They never wasted anything - not time, not money, not the cold kept safely hidden from the summer. When heat rose in layers from the street, the child Elsa would sit leaning against the old silver cooler, listening to the sound of Mrs. Arthur's heavy shoes across gray tile; she wondered if her own feet would ever make that sound. Elsa loved the old lady for the same reason she loved the silver cooler full of ice and soda in an insufferable summer. She tucked those solid sounds under her cotton shirt right along with the ice slivers slowly dripping comfort down the length of those years and her bare sun-browned belly.
The child Elsa saw time pass in the lengthening of her legs and vague uneasy stirrings that eventually made their way over the entire length of her. But there was something about those school year summers that made tense irrelevant, between the repeating years there was just enough space between skin and time to accommodate the next. Each summer Elsa would sit with her heels tucked up against the store's wooden porch steps, looking out over the flat landscape and the dry ground that reached for miles and miles, finally ending as a knife edge against the horizon. Before the drought and years of dust it was said the land had known green. Some said nothing was out there now but space and that dry empty kind of quiet, an uneasy sensation that the woman Elsa remembered in the worst of times. Each day the child Elsa would sit on those porch steps waiting for evening when the worst of the heat had rolled away from the earth and the sky had taken on glorious color. It was then that the melted contents of the ice chest were taken outside and drained into the ground. It was then you could catch the feel of promise -- the scent of sweet earth rising.