The House on Larkspur Road
The house on Larkspur Road wore its age like an old coat that no longer fit quite right but that nobody had the heart to throw away. The paint along the porch railing had given up its fight with the seasons years before I was born, curling back on itself in pale gray ribbons that I used to peel off with my thumbnail when I was supposed to be doing something else. My mother hated that habit. She said I was going to strip the whole house bare one flake at a time, and maybe she wasn't wrong, because by the time I was eight there were patches along the lower rail worn down to raw wood, smooth as bone from all my picking.
I was born in that house, in the back bedroom that faced the maple tree, and for the first decade of my life I understood the entire world to be contained within its walls and the quarter acre of grass that surrounded it. We were not poor in the way that made the news or filled out forms for other people's pity, but we were careful. Careful was the word my mother used. We were careful with the lights, careful with the heat in winter, careful about which brand of cereal we bought. I didn't know yet that careful was just a gentler word for something harder.
Mornings…