Summer Primer

My mother inventing a puddle pours two delicate teaspoons worth of water onto dry desert sand panting with thirst. She explains how primer absorbed so quickly by wood means there is no need for paint of a lesser color lest paint be wasted thrown away. I will not look directly in her eyes but can sense my mother’s lingering glance ease knowingly back to the pale. And with the first drop of grey stone primer spilled on old-pipe silver garage flooring on a hot summer June day in Clear Lake, Texas, two plain pebbles from Albuquerque thrown by my three-year-old daughter eight years prior at an overhead Houston-Hobby bound aircraft crash in a puddle priming July.