High summer, suddenly

Sometime in the recent past, I was sitting at the picnic table at the girlfarm, laughing my ass off with the other girls who inhabit the farm. The sun had slid down behind the ridge, we had plates piled with grilled meats and big glasses of wine and bubbly water and some frozen peachy thing.
The air was thick with the scent of fir, of cedar, of big bunches of mountain daisies. There were sleeping dogs, horses munching on evening hay, and the click and swirl of sprinklers, too.
Our names: Peach, Daisy, Verah, Marva, Marcy, and Nell. I'm Marva. She's the trashy one who swears all the time. Marcy is the teenage girl from down the road who longs to learn about horses but I think she longs even more to belong someplace. So now Marcy has a place to belong to. We all try to make sure she really knows it, without letting on that we know she needs to know it. We wink at her, tell her slightly off-color jokes, invite her to share our chocolate.
We are all learning something important this summer on the farm--each of us has her own special lesson to master on the path to personal power. We screw up. We break stuff. Stuff breaks on us. We get tired, we get totally excited, we retreat to walk, to read, to get out of the fray. I'd never imagined myself in such a place, with such people, ducking out to slip on some heels and be the local acupuncturist. Or seeing myself in Marcy, and wanting so much to show her how it is here on the other side, where everything is so amazing, and it will never be quite this way again. Not for us, and not for the farm.