Things I like thinking about

I really like thinking about your house in Kentucky, the way the lanes and rows of houses stuck together, burning down sometimes just because. I liked that big muddy field by the road next to the church, and I loved that trailer park next to it where the kids would go to get high in shaky rooms. I like thinking about the vault gray skies of falls and winters with no snow, and the hard ground. The warm basement with the piano. I liked your house a lot.

I like thinking about all the summers in my house, in the cul-de-sac in front of the field. I like remembering how it felt to come home from Colorado, only gone for a week and a half, but feeling like everything had changed for the better. I like remembering the humidity every summer, how the heat and darkness swallowed our backyard. I like when you stood through the roof of my car and watched the valley when we drove home from the country. I like all the long fields and dirt driveways and big spaces. I like how we always played in the rain. I like remembering staying up all night that one summer, walking streets at night, with friends, sometimes alone, but always staring around, looking at each house, loving each place my eyes fell.

I like thinking about Kentucky a lot. Sometimes I like thinking about Ohio too. But only sometimes. I like to think about Kentucky, with all those kids I've grown up with, with all those places I've grown up with, with all those problems and all those issues and all that happiness I've grown up with. I like when my brother kicked off his side-mirror in a snow storm because it made him angry. I like the creek at the bottom of the field, covered in trash, but always flowing and pushing all that refuse down stream. I like dark nights on that deck that we got so late in my childhood. I like the drinks and the drugs and the friends and the cold.

But mostly, I like it in the past. So I can always visit.