Excerpt of I Just Came Here to Dance by Susan Mary Malone

"When you dance,

the whole Universe dances."

--Rumi

Prologue

Some folks said I went crazy that summer. Well, it was an awful hot season—enough to drive a sane woman to drink. Texas scorchers get blamed for all sorts of bizarre behavior.

The rest of the world never knew heat like ours—spiking temperatures stirred into buckets of humidity and baked to a sultry beige. Makeup melted down women’s faces in globs, and meticulously curled hair sagged like Mama’s countless attempts at creating soufflé. Worse though, that coupling of heat and humidity caused Favonius to tease away the last life-saving atom of oxygen from right in front of one’s face. Our summers got immortalized in those cartoons depicting Hell—where caricatures wanted water real bad and the Devil dangled moist droplets inches from parted lips.

The concept of creating personal Hell on Earth hadn’t crossed my consciousness at that point, but I did believe a land caused its people to act a certain way. I learned that by noticing the differences in communities from Abilene to Omaha. The wide flat spaces of the western part of our state caused folks to be open and friendly, never knowing when they’d see other living humans again. When the land became more green and rolling as it moved east toward the towns, everyone grew more guarded. The meeting of those plains with the impenetrable Cross Timbers and scrubby bluffs around Sociable made people plain mean, I always thought. Too much changing terrain in one area. But whoever said, "People are people" sure hadn’t spent much time in Texas. We got the market cornered on lunatics.