Adios

As I may have mentioned before, this here log cabin—the house I grew up in; the one my dad and grand dad built back in the '70s when I was just a sliver of a pine cone inside my parents' tinder box—was bulldozed recently to make room for a mansion-y type thing. Vacation home for the owner of the San Diego Padres I think? I could be wrong, I don't follow sports. Anyhoo, I'm not sad about it. It's sad to say goodbye to your roots, but I did that a long time ago. What's nice is to think about the place and all the happy, wild days I had running around barefoot in the middle-of-nowhere mountains.

-Shot the plate-glass window out of the green house with a BB gun during an ill-fated target practice and got in the kind of trouble you still remember 24 years later.

-Climbed on the roof regularly to sit atop the chimney and feel free.

-Fell in the creek countless times—never drowned.

-Crept around in the pastures eating bugs and examining plant life.

-Woke up early on the first day of summer—smelled the green grass smell; heard the crop duster flying overhead spraying mosquitos—and knew instinctively that everything desirable was already around me in abundance.