1:
As I am walking home in Columbus: the taste of dirt, thick. Some smell in the air and suddenly it’s twenty-two, twenty-three years ago, and I’m playing in my neighbors’ yard–or my yard?–and this dirt, it smells strange. Foreign dirt, the smell coating my sinuses, rolling over my tongue (but no, I didn’t eat it). It’s Kentucky and I’m home again, and I’m young again, and I’m innocent. There’s grass forever, and it never rains.
2:
I am lying in my backyard on a beach towel–me, a little pudgy thing in pink plastic sunglasses. Our backyard is a forest because my parents don’t take the same pride in a neatly-clipped yard as some others do; we had a tree, I think, and two ancient T-shaped poles for hanging the wash. We had irises, deep purple and yellow, me too young to draw any parallels between them and myself. The grass is tall, but not so tall that my neighbors don’t see me and take the hint–I want to go swimming, but I can never ask for anything because my mama told me not to invite myself places.
3:
There’s a wild rosebush that grows on our fence. It’s tiny; it is my beloved. When the dogwood loses its blooms, they flood the yard and blanket the rosebush, a deluge of soft white-pink. This is the yard where I catch fireflies, it is the yard where I once was stung by a dead bee. I stepped on it.
4:
My mom likes to spread out the orange (brown? or was it black? it’s fuzzy here) comforter in the side yard and get a tan. Everything smells like baby oil–cloying. I flip over the blue bicycle and pretend that I’m Sleeping Beauty at the spinning wheel. The blue bicycle doesn’t work, and somehow in my mind I have wrapped it up into the death of my brother; it’s blue, and blue is for boys, and it doesn’t work and nobody has bothered to fix it, ergo, this is John’s bike. I have also decided that the room with the fake wood-print paneling, which is blue, is his room. This room is stifling in my memory; I remember playing records in here, but it seems airless.
5:
Do Jolly Ranchers come in long, flat sticks anymore? I drop my strawberry candy into a cup of 7-up; I don’t like 7-up, but at the softball diamond at the Baptist church, it’s what they have to drink. The lights are bright and the shadows near the building are dark; I’ve never been so unafraid since, so alive under the stars.
