New Gold City

There are October mornings in The Woodlands when the watery Mid-Atlantic sky still burns with a white-hot sun even though summer is long gone. Clouds explode in smoking bursts, stilled just slightly by the strange heat of the autumn stratosphere. Crows and pigeons bob on the wind, but The Woodland’s Gap store advertises sales, and the weekend street fills up with SUVs and Audi station wagons stuffed with families on the way to football and soccer games. Waitresses go one more button down on their blouses and bend just a bit more across tables. During the week divorcee mothers tow their small children in new red wagons down to parks, take off their shoes, wonder if they should feel happy to be free from marriage, put the little ones down for their naps, yearn for a tryst with the renter next door who sits reading on his porch, drinking a daiquiri in the sun. The youngest of the divorcees are usually the most feral. They roam the streets all day in Grand Cherokees, Escalades, Naviga