Sometimes it’s the rain that puts the work here to a halt. Here in the heat of it, in the humidity and storms, I know the truth—summer is almost gone. And this summer the storms have been plenty, no drought in sight. In turn the air has thickened and the days I finish working on the cabin’s deck, my clothes are soaked. I have to lay them out on the plywood floor to dry. The same as when I worked my brother’s watermelon fields as a teenager. Once you do something like that, spend days cutting melons and lifting them from the sand, handing them off down a row of workers the same as you, you the same as them, and then stacking those melons into a pyramid on the back of a truck, and carrying that truckload to the market, you believe you will always be able to do that kind of work. Went to the water authority to get a tank of water, this was over a month ago, and I talked to them about what I was doing, all the sweating I was doing, and they nodded because they work outside all the time digging, putting in, repairing pipe, and not just for a summer. The work they do is a way of life. Way—I keep thinking about that word ever since someone on the radio made a distinction between style and way as in, some people create with style, while for others, their art is simply a way of doing. Sometimes it’s the rain that puts the work here to a halt. Sometimes I get dizzy in the heat and have to slip inside for long breaks, something I didn’t have to do in those melon fields those years ago. And I wonder where the workers are, the ones I threw the melons too. I could talk on here about communication, how it’s best made in laughter, but there’s something, too, to handing off jubilees and crimson sweets, palming off the sand on the yellow-white bellies—throw and catch, call and response—but I don’t know where they are.