The first cold morning of fall caught us all off guard, frost on the rental hall’s windows.
I drove Rosario there in my truck, the heater barely keeping up. She held a crumpled piece of paper with the Pledge of Allegiance on it.
Earlier that week, she asked me to take her up in the crop duster. She wanted to see the country that was about to say yes to her.
From six hundred feet, the gravel roads looked like stitches. The cornfields were patchwork quilts. She pointed at the dirt track leading to her trailer and said, 'From up here, there are no borders.'
After the ceremony, someone left a can of paint labeled 'touch-ups' on the folding table. She touched it, smiled, said it suited her.
I kept her scarf in my glovebox for years after she moved to the city. Smelled like dust and Avon, the way she always did.
She writes me letters still. American flag stamp, every time. I smile, thinking of that rented hall, the frost melting, and a woman claiming a place she already belonged to.