It was my first real job.  Two years invested in secretarial school – long stretches of shorthand, typing our fingers into devotion, poised hours walking around with a book on our heads. Every month they took us to lunch – best dresses cleaned and pressed, hat pinned to styled hair, gloves starched white.  We used the correct silverware, made small talk between polite nibbles, placed our gloves discreetly on the lap below the napkin.  Nothing there prepared me for my boss – a balding man in a tatty brown suit.  That first morning, he told me his wife was from Texas, liked that he wore his cowboy hat and boots to bed, made him say giddy up at just the right moment, leaned his clammy bulk over me, pulled open one of the desk units, and said he would have to get into my drawers now and then.  I went home for lunch, called the office and said I wasn’t coming back, then took a job at a fast food restaurant.  Nobody mentioned my drawers, and the only hat I had to wear was made of paper.  

Spent with gardening
Boots shed    feet propped to porch rail
She digs the sunset