A few years back, a fellow ceramics student at Casper College used to come and clean for me because he needed the money and I was damn sick of cleaning my own house. He was argumentative and cavalier with my stuff though, and on the day I found a couple of pieces of fossil oreodont jaw out in the dooryard where he had emptied the dustpan, I fired him and hired Dawn.
Dawn was a tattooed smartass of about 28, married with a young son and a husband who was an habitual petty criminal. They lived in Midwest Wyoming, an oil town that figured into the Teapot Dome oil scandal and that is now barely holding on in the face of the kind of oily, sulfurous neglect that rusts western towns where the pumpjacks outnumber the sober three to one. Dawn was coarse and untamed but conversely bright and funny. She seemed to have endless energy and she practiced yoga and exercised every morning to Jane Fonda’s workout tape. A dusty parade of kids and dogs tracked oilfield mud through her little house. She was the assistant at the preschool who taught swimming and bowling in summer to kids who would otherwise be bored into early crime or pregnancy. She liked to party though, and liked nothing better than to spark up a fatty with the roughneck oilfield and mining crowd she and her husband hung with. Join me below the fold.
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