Epigraph

Wings Promised. Cage Delivered.
graffiti on the old school wall

Introduction

The collection’s through-line is a slow double coming-of-age: each vignette marks how our hometown changes as we do.
What looks like the town’s slide from wholesome to hard-edged is really the widening of our own lens—from childhood naiveté, through restless adolescence, to adult accountability.
Politics, taxes, back-fence feuds—they were always there; we were simply spared or oblivious.

The “darkening” we register is our belated recognition that the place has never been pure, just complicated—sometimes cruel—yet capable of surprising grace.

Part 1: Light Under the Door

Barn’s raised in a weekend, doors unlatched even at night, double-feature at the drive-in, sermons fill the pews, bikes are parked without locks, farms outnumber shops, and a handshake closes any deal.
Pywood signs flap where glass once advertised summer sales.

Farmer’s Market

The portable radio by the power outlet goes on about weather reports and lost-dog notices, but the real station plays stall by stall.
The honey vendor stacks amber jars like stained-glass bricks, ladling samples onto plastic spoons while preaching pollination.
The craft-beer stand beside her hums yeast and citrus; bees and barley share the airwaves.
The pie lady slides apple-crumb wedges onto paper plates. Cinnamon steam rises, and for three breaths it is autumn though the calendar swears spring.
The mushroom seller—boots still muddy from dawn foraging—knows where fungi flourish and has baskets of chanterelles and shiitakes to prove it.
Two retirees rock in cedar chairs, selling scarves soft as cumulus and dyed in sunset gradients. Needles click, their gossip looping back to yarn at ten cents a skein.
The woodcarver coaxes pintail decoys from cedar blocks, pocketknife whittling like it knows choreography. A gust tips their bills skyward, as if ready for real wind.

The radio keeps a steady drone, but the market’s frequency lives in honey gloss, pastry steam, forest earth, lanolin, and cedar curl—a loop you can tune into simply by walking slowly enough.

Missing Manual

Wobbling on training wheels, my son asked if this is how I learned.
“Nah,” I said. “I just read the directions.”
We both laughed.
Grandpa’s directions were simpler: steer or kiss cement. Scraped knees, he claimed, outspoke any paragraph. He was right. Within a week, the pedals were part of my feet.

In Mr. B’s typing class, he threw tea towels over the keyboards so no one could cheat. Letters vanished; muscle memory typed without consulting the eyes.

I think about that each time I visit Grandma. Twin needles flick like synchronized swimmers while she chats about grocery prices and a cable-knit unfurls beneath her fingers.
She hasn’t glanced at a pattern since coffee was a dollar, letting hands remember what her mind no longer needs.
Grandma, too, lost the manual. It drifted to her toes, and it’s still there, tying her shoes.

Advice to Self

Morning sun seeps through the lace curtains, casting doily shadows on the floral wallpaper that’s outlived two paint trends and one marriage.
My fingers work the needles—click, click— steady as the pocket watch my husband kept beside his Sunday shoes.
Yarn the colour of creek water—blue rinsed with green—unspools across my lap, becoming a blanket that will know my grandson’s name before he can spell it.

On the mantel, a photograph of a girl in saddle shoes smiles like she’s still tasting her first stolen kiss under the willow by the school yard. I glare at her as needles keep their metronome.
I remember lunch boxes and white socks, the town not much bigger than today’s shopping mall.
I scold her, my younger self: choose better or end up here, with a shawl of years around our shoulders.
“In this town, your son’s heart will beat its first. Your man’s, his last. So move out of town!”
Laughter breaks the silence.
Too late; the prophecy is already spent.

The yarn slips; I catch the loop before it drops, see the half-grown blanket drape over imagined shoulders: a tiny face nestled in stitches that hold both river sorrow and willow shade.
Someday that boy will spread this cloth on a dorm-room bed or across the back seat of a first car.
Long after I’m dust beneath the old willow, the blanket will speak for me in syllables of soft wool.
It will whisper about the grandmother who loved him even before he had a name.

Double Struck

Out past the north fence stands an oak that looks sand-blasted—no bark, just pale muscle spiralled from root to crown.
Ask Grandpa and he’ll pour you a coffee-cup sermon about the night it was double-struck.
“First bolt ripped a zipper down the trunk. Second one finished the job, leaving the tree panting smoke.”

“Bolt, singular,” Grandma snorts, slamming the mixing bowl like a gavel. “The first—and only—hit your grandfather.”
Then she sets the record straight while he grins into his mug.
Summer storm rolling in, she was in the barn doorway yelling, “Get your hide inside—those clouds are loaded with lightning. You’re not much, but you’re all I’ve got.”

Grandpa, wheat-field sweat gluing his shirt to his spine, tilted his head at the sky as if it owed him an answer.
Lightning obliged. A clap loud enough to knock the swear out of a sailor blew off every stitch of his sodden clothes—buttons, straps, the works—and raced down to the oak behind him.
Grandpa swears a second bolt followed because two booms sound braver than one.

Grandma says the encore was him: a pink streak bare as truth itself, diving behind the milk cows, stuffing fistfuls of straw over nether once covered.
The barn filled with sap smoke, sweat, and the laughter of one stubborn, darling man.

The oak still stands, mute witness neither storyteller can edit.
Some afternoons, they lean on the fence and study its scar, each certain the gap in the tale is wide enough for the other to fit.

Flower Tour

Grandma bought passes to the Garden Walk—little cardboard badges shaped like tulips—and declared we’d spend Saturday “getting culture in our shoes.”
First stop: a lawn manicured to the shine of a close shave, ringed by planters big enough to gobble a toddler.
Bronze dragonflies bobbed on steel rods. A gazebo squatted at centre stage like a wedding cake nobody would cut.

I veered off the gravel path and knelt by a clump of wild roses pushing through the fence from the lot next door.
“These are the best,” I said, snapping a photo.
A visor-topped volunteer materialized beside me. “The tour is about landscape composition. Please stay on the path, and take in the whole design.”
Translation: eyes forward—ignore the scrappy blooms that sneaked in.

We obediently strolled the perimeter while Grandma recited plant Latin—Hydrangea macrophylla, hosta Sum and Substance.
A single breath of lilac drifted over the boxwood. I muttered, “Bet the gazebo steals every drop of sunlight those roses need.”
The words surprised me, like they’d slipped out without ID.

Grandma squeezed my arm, grin tilting. “Now you know,” she said.
The docent droned on, none the wiser, but Grandma and I stood there sharing a secret.
Sometimes the showpiece is the thief, and the stubborn bloom that grows anyway is what’s worth the ticket.

Through Bare Branches/Part 1: Light Under the Door/Chapter 6: Hearty Surprise

Throwing a surprise party for Great-Gram was a gamble—ninety years and a pacemaker. Still, she always said, “If a heart’s going to quit, let it be during applause.”
We draped the church basement with streamers, crouched behind the punch bowl, and yelled our lungs out when she shuffled in.
She didn’t clutch her chest; she clutched her purse. “Foolishness,” she barked, then took the microphone we hadn’t planned to hand over.
Between opening gifts, she issued historical corrections and marching orders:
“Edna, stop dyeing your hair; you’re fooling no one.”
“Linda, quit your job before it quits you.”
Anyone under forty was invisible—no room left in her outline for marginalia.

The last box came from Ava, a diminutive great-granddaughter who still says ‘pasghetti.’ Inside: a single lottery ticket curled like a tongue, tied with a shoelace ribbon.
Great-Gram snorted, scraping the thing with a butter knife, and uncovering every matching number a ticket can hold. The room inhaled hard enough to change weather patterns, then erupted.
Great-Gram tilted, stage-left, one hand to her brow—textbook Victorian swoon—and crumpled like a dropped curtain.
Paramedics thundered in, found a pulse steadier than ours, and rolled her out—waving like a pageant queen.

The next morning, she rang from the hospital lobby. “Tell the lawyer to set up college funds for the little ones. And get me real coffee—this place serves chicory left over from the Great War.”
We always figured she’d outlive the rest of us. Looks like she might bankroll us, too.

Through Bare Branches/Part 1: Light Under the Door/Chapter 7: Chairs

Sunday settles in a pot-roast haze, the table still cluttered. Dad’s chin drifts to his chest the way it does now that clocks seem to move faster on him than on the rest of us.
My daughters nudge each other, waiting to see which orbit he’ll choose when he comes back.
He stirs, head tilting like a radio dial finding the station.
“I’ll be right there,” he promises—none of us knows where “there” is, but the intent rings true.

Mom sees the danger first: his water glass making slow circles toward the edge. She slips in, lifts the slice of shoofly-pie (he likes the name, not the molasses),
and steadies the glass mid-wobble without spilling a diplomatic drop.
Dad blinks twice, spots the Windsor chair under him, and picks up the conversation he thinks we were having:
“All turned on a hand lathe,” he announces, patting the armrest. “Not a lick of electricity touched these hickory beauties.”

The girls exchange a glance across the gravy boat. Grandpa might lose the thread of lunchtime, but he can splice it to a decade-old woodworking tour with every spline intact.
Above us, the kitchen clock bumps forward; beside us, a man and his chairs stay perfectly on the mark.

Through Bare Branches/Part 1: Light Under the Door/Chapter 8: Your Tomato Plant

You handed me the seedling as a gentle nudge toward salad. “Grow this, maybe less bread and butter.”
Three weeks on, it’s shot up like a teenager: all elbows and ambition, leaves flirting with the track lighting.
No tomatoes yet, just a green vow that one day it will pay rent in fruit.

I parked it on the table beside the counter I pretend is a sun-room. Afternoon light ricochets off the toaster and convinces us both we live closer to the equator.
Today the ballpark closed its dome against record heat. I followed suit, retreating to the shaded porch with an iPad livestream and the potted prodigy for company.

Top of the second, our pitcher already sweating through his cap. Bottom of the third, my tomato plant wilted in solidarity
—leaves curling like disappointment, stem leaning as though it had bet the over.
By the seventh-inning stretch we’re both slumped: me in a deck chair, it in a terracotta corner, each wondering how promise can sag so fast in August air.

I gave it a long drink of water, whispered that the season isn’t over. There are still games left.
The plant didn’t perk up, but one tendril angled toward the house, remembering where the light was easy and hope never hinged on a scoreboard.

Through Bare Branches/Part 1: Light Under the Door/Chapter 9: Waves of Grain

The farm smelled of pig and Hereford manure—notes battling in every gust. Beyond the pens the wheat rolled in waves up to our chests.
To a platoon of cousins, those swells looked like the Pacific.
We dropped to hands and knees, submarine-style, parting stalks, popping up as periscopes, shouting bearings only we understood.
Hide-and-seek lasted until Grandpa’s cowbell clanged from the porch, summoning us to fried chicken, skillet greens, and lemonade that tasted mostly of tin.
We pelted toward the house, straw crumbs in our hair, grins bigger than our plates.

The call to feast vanished when Pa saw the trails we’d burrowed, knocking down amber grain that could not be thrashed, but—standing up—we could.
“Threshed,” my older brother whispered, because vocabulary is his favourite weapon.
A distinction, I point out, that doesn’t change much. Besides, back then, we knew no better.
The field looked like adventure, not income; wheat heads were just scenery until the combine came.

Years later I understand Pa’s tight jaw, the price of a bushel lost to play. Still, when late-summer winds ripple through tall grain, my shoulders twitch, remembering how it felt to be a submarine in an ocean of bread.

Through Bare Branches/Part 1: Light Under the Door/Chapter 10: Rescue Shelter

Two-faced January blinds me with sun on fresh snow while picking my pockets for heat. Wind slips through every zipper tooth.
It’s cold. Colder than a walk-in beer cooler. Cold enough, my breath puffs huddle for warmth. 
The dog shelter is stone and squatty like its sandstone cousins in the postal service, minus the pensions. 
The windows are foggy with the howls of hopefuls. The air inside smells of wet fur and whatever sadness smells like when it dries on linoleum.
Barks welcome. Howls beg attention. Whines plead a case for time served.
Then I see her—
shivering as if she, too, stepped in from January’s refrigerator. I kneel and offer an open palm to her ginger soul.
“Daisy’s ’er name,” the volunteer offers, clutching a clipboard of assurances. “It’s taken ’er time to trust again.”
Taut with doubt, Daisy leans in, nose cold enough to write her name on glass, and taps my fingertips once, twice
—and owns me.

Outside, snow squeaks like styrofoam rubbed together and I estimate the temperature by that squeal of ice crystals. 
As we walk, I promise warm hands and a soft bed. I tell her about the apartment thermostat, about blankets all her own, about night walks where summer smells like tomato vines.
She doesn’t look up. The leash is just geography. The walk, like any other. 
Forward is forward, moment is moment, and dogs don’t waste inventory on futures still in the box.
But I do. So I match her stride, let January steal whatever heat it wants, and keep my promises aloud until the wind carries them home.

Through Bare Branches/Part 1: Light Under the Door/Chapter 11: Imprint

I’ve run out of horizontal in this house. Every ledge already holds a row of ceramic dogs.
A terrier salt-shaker from a yard sale. A shepherd carved out of driftwood. A dozen mutts of mixed breed brought back from vacations I barely recall.
The newest—squat, Buddha-bellied Goldie—won’t sit still on the sill by the door. Each time the door shuts, the pup rocks like a bowling pin about to accept its fate.
When I lift the retriever figurine, a bolt of memory splits my skull: shelter floor, cedar chips, a ginger pup full of life. Full of bladder.
The howls faded with our exit—but linger in the circuitry.
One touch to the porcelain figurine and the film flickers to life, projecting a wagging shadow inside my eyelids.
I set the figurine back, slower now. The dogs sway, but they hold. The memory holds too, like a groove guiding water.

Memories are traffic lights. A red flash makes me brake, grab the hallway leash, and take the grey-muzzled Daisy out for her evening walk.
No space, no place, no area.
Nowhere to put them all.
Set on a shelf, they rock back and forth
and soon begin to fall.
Woof doggy-dog, woof doggy-dog. 
Woof, say woof, say woof.
I cannot change her true nature, nor is she mine to keep forever.

Through Bare Branches/Part 1: Light Under the Door/Chapter 12: Daisy Cave

Scraping wallpaper in the front parlour, I discovered the house had a wardrobe worthy of a vaudeville star.
Neutral beige hid psychedelic paisleys and beach party yellows of a mop top era. Under them, Victorian peacocks strutted over burgundy silk.
Each peel felt like undoing a button on someone else’s overcoat until the plaster stood there shivering, waiting to see who I’d ask it to be next.

I’m no muralist, only stubborn, so I carved a daisy into a dried paint roller with a pocketknife. Dip, roll, repeat—the hallway filled with blooms that looked almost intentional if you didn’t squint too hard.
Rolling out that crude border felt like casting shadows in Plato’s cave—copies of a flower flickering on plaster. 
Cheap trick, maybe, yet every stamp left a jagged petal the stencil hadn’t planned, like fingerprints the house and I exchanged.
Halfway down the staircase I paused, dizzy on latex and history.
By dusk the foyer was a field of crooked rows, petals veering off-course whenever the roller skipped. But place finally breathed at my pace.
House changing owner, owner changing house; neither of us flawless, both recognizable.

They’re copies, paint clones, but unique because they are mine—in a house that’s becoming mine as we transform one another.
Tomorrow—the dining room. Might be stripes, maybe stars. But whatever lands on those walls will carry the same crooked signature.

Through Bare Branches/Part 1: Light Under the Door/Chapter 13: Room Therapy

Every other Tuesday, right at twelve-oh-one, the house hands itself over to Liz.
She arrives in an apron as big as her mothe—faded checks, pockets full of clothespins and wisdom—and tunes the radio to a station that plays only saxophones and weather reports.
Liz starts in the kitchen and leave the runway counter clear for takeoff.
More than clean, she counsels chaos to calm. More than shine, the floors glow with serenity.
By the time for early tea, order is restored, dust and August heat be damned.
Blue Jays out back are voyeurs to her therapy, her seal that no dust or dishevelment may daunt.

Liz went silver years ago, her boys grown and flown, knees that complain on stairs. Yet she works the rooms as if tuning a piano. Tighten here, soften there, finding the note that stops the rattle.
She folds the apron, packs the calm, and leaves on the breeze she rode in, blue jays lifting after her.
Serenity isn’t an accident; it has an appointment, and Liz keeps it.

Through Bare Branches/Part 1: Light Under the Door/Chapter 14: Scent Home

A shoebox lives on the top closet shelf, taped seams yellowing, pen-sketched with MAIL—DO NOT TOSS.
Inside are letters my mother and grandmother wrote during freshman year, when long distance meant a stamp and patience.
The pages still carry their voices—Mom’s looping optimism about exams. Grandma’s recipe for pot-roast annotated with “TURN POT HALF-WAY, DON’T YOU FORGET.”

I can recite every line, like hymns, but the power is in the envelopes. I lift one, ease open a corner, and inhale.
First note: Ivory soap and the wind that whipped our backyard clothesline.
Second: the faint smoke of Gram’s wood-fired range mixed with the lavender she kept in dresser drawers.
One lungful and I’m on the cracked front walk, mailbox squeaking, dinner bell buried in the dusk. Thirty years dissolve faster than postage glue.

The letters tell me what they told me, but the air they trapped—the last breath they took before sealing—sends me home.

Through Bare Branches/Part 1: Light Under the Door/Chapter 15: Old Globe

Down a flight of library steps that creak with the threat of giving way, someday. Past the decommissioned card catalogue, still proud in its polished oak.
On a metal table, a classroom globe is propped in stationary orbit by its lacquered stand.
Its continents are the colour of tea stains. Its oceans have bled to the blue of forgotten ink.

Siam is still Siam, the Soviet Union looms like a single shadow, and an equator crack splits Brazil’s belly.
The sphere wobbles with a nudge, squeaks, then settles into slow rotation, as if waiting for a chalk-dusted teacher to steady the lesson.
Between oversize atlases and under a fur of dust, this orb spins stories in raised relief.
Here, there be tales of lost civilizations, daring explorations, mythical beasts and devoured fleets, hints of treasure in the overlap of printed hemispheres.
My fingertips make a tactile journey, climbing the Himalayas, sliding across the Sahara’s sanded paint.

The afternoon sun pokes a braille finger over pointy caps and painted trenches whose names change, but stories do not.
Upstairs, the world keeps editing itself—borders redrawn, spellings updated—but down here the names stay put, daring you to learn them by feel.
Spin once more, let the dust motes orbit like satellites, and listen: the old globe creaks out the only constant latitude it knows—adventure exists, even on shelves no one visits.

Through Bare Branches/Part 1: Light Under the Door/Chapter 16: Mail Carrier

Before sunrise, you sort the mail by headlamp, a habit left from nights when one beam kept freighters off the reef.
When the lighthouse, decommissioned, went dark you traded foghorns for a postal van but kept the sea’s commandment: guide each traveller home, even if the traveller is only a letter looking for a lap.
First stop, the Miller Farm. Hens scatter around your boots while you tuck utility bills and a postcard from Paris into a bird-house mailbox carved to look like the house.
I picture you lingering to compliment them on the new coat of paint. I picture Mrs. Miller answering through the screen door, smile wide, rollers tighter.

Two miles on stands the Victorian at Harbour Rise. There you leave three lavender-scented envelopes, each addressed in handwriting that hints at loneliness.
I imagine you absentmindedly pat the mailbox, the way you once steadied a lantern in wind.

The shuttered cottage on Maple is host to spiderwebs and a rusted tricycle.
You leave a ribbon-tied package beside the door and imagine a father serving overseas.
The conflict is closer to home, but it doesn’t matter; every package deserves its own hope.

At County General you bypasses reception, slip through Emergency, and stack magazines on the free-reading cart—a life-line for those seeking solace in stories beyond their own.
The nurse nods. She’s learned your name the way sailors learn star positions.
Back in the van you eye the empty jump seat where the lighthouse logbook once rode and feel the old satisfaction: beacon lit, course set, cargo delivered.
No matter the weather. No matter the shore.

Through Bare Branches/Part 2: Names Written in Dust

Lilac floats lead the parade, farmers’ markets overflow, the beach bandshell plays nightly, “million-dollar” homes wink from Morton’s Hill, the Uptown Theatre sells out every Saturday, but the news has more about tariffs than ball scores.
Graffiti appears on school walls. Cars are abandoned in empty lots; stray pets roam downtown unclaimed.

Through Bare Branches/Part 2: Names Written in Dust/Chapter 17: Bumper Cars

The lilacs hit that over-sweet note this week—the signal of spring’s surrender to summer simmer. The carnival trailers will be unfolding metal ribs beside Memorial Field by Friday night.
We liberate our gym sneakers for a more pressing purpose and jog—laces slapping, tickets sweaty in our palms—to the bumper-cars.
The track throbs. The air tastes of ozone and spilled cola.

We know which cars are ours—yours, scuffed red; mine, chipped blue—because the faster we spot each other in the jam, the sooner the hunt begins.
First impact always comes by the far rail, a full-body jolt that rattles the steering column and rib cage.
Second hit is an ambush: you pretending to spin out, me charging, both of us timing the swerve so fibreglass bends to fibreglass. Brothers knowing where to lunge at each other.
The world outside the pavilion tunnels into bokeh—spinning bulbs, moths, somebody else’s pop song.
All I can see is your grin framed in that ridiculous rock-’em sock-’em red car and the unsaid agreement that no other target exists until the ride operator throws the master switch.

Beyond the rail our sisters are bookends beside Mum, pink cotton candy forming sticky clouds around their wrists. They roll their eyes, boredom performed for maximum effect, but I catch Mum smiling into the chaos, like she remembers a tilt-a-whirl deal of her own.
Lights flash. Power cuts. Cars heave to a halt, seemingly too heavy to have ever run at all.
We climb out, shins bruised, the scent of lilac drifting in from the field’s far edge. Same routine every year, yet somehow it feels like the first swing of summer—motion ours alone.

Through Bare Branches/Part 2: Names Written in Dust/Chapter 18: Wild Ride

The rattling chain lift draws the sky closer—the clinking climb and vomit plummet—and I swear I’ve done this a thousand times.
Same battered seat, same safety bar smudged with fingerprints of previous bravado. Still, the click-click climbs under my ribs into a grin I can’t outgrow.

Crest, pause, stomach mutiny. Then the track drops out from under reason and wind robs the sentence I was about to shout. Every banking curve ambushes me again, memory erases its warning just long enough for surprise to stay sharp.
Life is obliging in that way: same loops, fresh scream. Bills, heartbreaks, Tuesday alarms—each predictable as the steel curve beneath these wheels—yet each return feels like this time the turn will lead somewhere new.

The train hurtles into the camera flash as I throw my arms up like a volunteer.
The track pounds a rhythm I could drum in my sleep, but awake riding the python it still lifts the breath right out of me, proves repetition can be resurrection if you meet it with open palms.

Brakes bite, sunlight floods, and we wobble toward the exit.
I am already eyeing the queue for another go, convinced—if only for the length of the line—that the next ride will take a new path even even if it follows the same old rails.

Through Bare Branches/Part 2: Names Written in Dust/Chapter 19: Test the Sky

The fellow on the radio goes on about rain, telling numbers I picture circled on a map in bright colours.
I lean on the sill, listening to the prediction. Then I look for myself. Test the world—kick it, tap it, taste the dust. Grandpa would be proud.
Don’t swallow a single word just because it showed up in a lab coat. I touch the pot; the coffee tells me it is hot.
So when anybody goes on about ghosts, I demand they drag one into the light or shut the door.
Shut it, but keep the hinges loose. Truth wears new shoes every morning.

If tomorrow a white-coat swears dark chocolate heals the heart, I will break off a square and listen for the beat.
Believe what cracks against your own knuckles—then be ready to believe something newer when it hits harder.
New proof, new belief.

Through Bare Branches/Part 2: Names Written in Dust/Chapter 20: Brick by Brick

Most summer evenings the neighbourhood kids meet behind the school, where the chain-link backstop still leans.
Somebody hauls a scuffed Louisville Slugger. Someone else, a sawed-off broom to dust the plate.

I join them sometimes, though I’m half again their age. I like how the bat stings the palms when you catch the pitch wrong. How a fly ball whistles once it’s sailing.
You can read a shelf of books on baseball, but you won’t know a thing about hitting until that first sweet shock runs up your arms and into your grin.

After the final out we drift into the public library’s air-conditioning.
In the children’s corner two sisters argue over a Lego dinosaur’s tail.
A boy offers blue bricks for wings, and suddenly the dinosaur is a dragon. Everyone nods as if that were the idea all along.
Truth grows that way, brick by borrowed brick, each small hand locking the next in place.

Walking home, earbuds in, I shuffle a playlist—Merle Haggard, Miles Davis, a Brazilian singer whose Portuguese I barely catch.
The songs I skip teach me as much as the ones I keep. Why this melody, not that? In the rear-view mirror I glimpse what I’m still dragging.
And so the day stacks itself, from the crack of a bat to questions lurking in a playlist. Lessons lock together, and the dragon lifts.

Through Bare Branches/Part 2: Names Written in Dust/Chapter 21: Field Manual

At eight I wobbled around the farmyard while my brother steadied a scuffed Schwinn. The front wheel shook like a rabbit’s nose.
I circled the cottonwood, knees trembling. Then the bike straightened and I rode to the grain bin.
One bloody knee made for a steadier second try. Steer or kiss cement, Dad said. I pedalled past supper, proud of the small breeze I could make alone.

Grown and living just outside town, I let the sky choose my ride.
When clouds hang low, I lace up my boots and stride puddle to puddle. If the wind is strong enough to slam the mailbox shut, I take the pickup and let the heater hum to me. The weather calls the play, and I listen.

Work once sent me into the city, its loops of elevated highway, in the days before a boxed voice told which way to turn.
I pulled to the curb, spread a paper map across the dash, and followed the thin blue river with my thumb until it met the dot I needed.
Problems don’t need speeches; they need directions you can trace with a thumb.

That night, in the kitchenette of a rented room, I warmed yesterday’s chowder and tasted too much ocean. Too much salt. I cubed another potato into the pot, and worked the flavour back toward land.
A recipe, I decided, isn’t scripture; it’s a conversation.
The next morning, I gathered my pocket-carry. Keys, wallet, pocket watch.
I carry a Swiss Army knife, red as a cardinal on snow. A good idea should ride like that knife: folded until needed.

I came home for the weekend to a living room of cousins. We passed movie titles around like a bowl of popcorn until one landed that everyone could live inside two hours.
So my field manual settles into easy rules I carry the way my wallet holds bills. Do it to learn it. Let the weather guide the gear. Read before you drive. Fix the soup. Carry a tool that earns its space. And choose together when the choosing is shared.
Same lesson that keeps me upright. Steer, or kiss cement.

Through Bare Branches/Part 2: Names Written in Dust/Chapter 22: Guardrails

Leaving the hardware store, keys jangling, I spotted a wallet on the pavement—stuffed with cards and cash. I picked it up, thumbed the driver’s license—a name I recognized.
The street was empty; I could have slipped it into my coat.
But Dad’s voice surfaced on my shoulder. ​“Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.”
I turned back inside, asked the clerk for a phone, and fifteen minutes later Mary Alice hurried in, hair in curlers.
Panic turned to relief so quickly it looked like weather clearing.
She tried to tip me; I closed her fingers over the bill. Some things, I told her, are paid the moment you do them.

On the drive home I stopped at every light, every sign—Dad again: If the rule is good for strangers, it’s good for you.

That afternoon my neighbour leaned over the fence, eager to tell me why the couple across the street had been arguing until early hours. The story itched to jump the fence, but I shrugged, said I hoped they’d work it out, and bent back to my tomatoes.
Secrets, like seeds, belong where they’re planted.

For supper, I ladled stew at the shelter. A teen on court duty asked why I bothered. People need to eat, I said.
Motive is ballast; without it, even good deeds drift.

Walking home, I stopping to prop up Mrs. Kramer’s tipped recycling bin. Glass against glass clinked a small thank-you in the dark.

The same unglamorous thread stitched the day together. See the guardrails and stay between them. Do the job because it needs doing.
Shoulder talk won’t make headlines, but it keeps the lanes clear and the lights green for whoever is coming along next.

Through Bare Branches/Part 2: Names Written in Dust/Chapter 23: Fair Weight

In the checkout line a man edges past a woman with winter in her hair, and the whole aisle tilts: even the lettuce leans.
One small shove, and the balance is off.
The checker stares at him. The woman stares at her shoes, silence doing the scolding.
Red-eared, the man backs his cart to the end of the queue. The aisle levels again, like a boat settling after a wave.

That’s what I want everywhere—the weight of fairness in every pocket. A door held open, a wage paid square, a sentence that fits the crime. Tickets priced so an ordinary hand can reach the window.
Nothing lofty. Just sense, clear as a sky before planting. Enough ballast to keep the world from listing.

So I choose where I can: supper that won’t waste, words that won’t bruise, music gentle enough for a neighbour’s midnight.
Each choice another coin on the scale, nudging the day back to level. Then I stop and listen—waiting for the faint click that tells me, for this moment at least, the balance holds.

Through Bare Branches/Part 2: Names Written in Dust/Chapter 24: Bright Lines

I shot out of bed before the alarm and pulled on my lime-green T-shirt with magenta stripes—my “high-visibility” top for the Community-League try-outs.
You glanced over your mug. “Going for subtle, I see.”
“Subtle’s for people who haven’t had coffee yet,” I said, and you laughed.
The laugh did the trick; I walked to the park already feeling allowed to be exactly myself.

Try-outs were the usual circus: dew on the grass, kids buzzing, parents circling like drones.
Two dads pulled me aside and hinted that the league “could really use a little extra support”—cash folded in their hands.
“Keep it,” I said. “Let’s see whose kid can find an open teammate. That’s the only currency we take.”
By noon the roster ran on hustle, not wallets.
After practice we voted on fast food. Tacos won; even the pizza die-hards trooped to the taquería—being heard softens a loss.

Sunday I Zoomed with my cousin who coaches in a Jordan refugee camp. Their pitch is sand and bottle caps, but the drills are the same.
We traded practice plans and scheduled a video scrimmage. “Same field,” she said, “different corners.” Exactly.

Monday the local board floated a dress code strict enough to outlaw half my closet. I drafted a petition and told the team we’d deliver it in uniform—bright colours, clear voices.
I laid out the reasons in plain English. People have to be able to show who they are. Rules only work if everyone can see the chalk lines. And the field, whether it’s grass in our park or sand in Jordan, belongs to all of us.
The kids missed most of the politics, but they knew the game: move the ball, back each other, respect the chalk. We all run on the same fragile ground—and the match is better when every colour’s in play.

Through Bare Branches/Part 2: Names Written in Dust/Chapter 25: Potluck

On the first Saturday of every month the community hall is host to pot-luck night. Neighbours arrive with bowls swaddled in tea towels, crock-pots cradled like infants.
I set down my grandmother’s cornbread—iron-skillet, coarse cornmeal, a drop of honey—the heirloom women in my family pass along instead of jewellery.

The tables bloom with María’s green-chile pozole, Mr. Ahmed’s lamb with cardamom, Kristin’s Swedish cinnamon knots.
No dish cancels out another; they make each other fuller, wider, like colours on the same quilt. Different is not wrong, the room keeps saying. Different is supper.

Tesfaye, across from me, ladles shiro—Ethiopian chickpeas and berbere. The first bite is strange. The second, intriguing. The third, essential.
“Spices travel,” he grins, and my happy, burning mouth agrees. New music plays on the palate. I listen until I can hum along.
As we stack chairs, Tesfaye tells me he’s still learning the neighbourhood: trash-day codes, radio volume, the way honking means hello in Addis but is insulting here.
Driving home I stop on a station that plays West African high-life—guitars like chimes. Two months ago I’d have spun the dial. Tonight I stay, letting my ears retune.

A week later, in the city for a ball game, I take in the tour at the tower beside the stadium. Up here the highway is a ribbon, traffic lights are sequins.
Street-level again, I meet potholes, taped pleas, a busker’s guitar case with three coins. Both views are true; neither is whole.

So when a new neighbour asks to park her moving van across my drive overnight, I wave her in and offer help, remembering the roof view and potluck table, how context slides the scales of right and wrong.
Balance clinks into place, like a spoon laid down after the last bite. Many flavours—one broad, table if we slide the chairs close.

Through Bare Branches/Part 2: Names Written in Dust/Chapter 26: The Picnic

I drove back to Azure Bay the week before the town picnic. We’ve met in Victory Park the first Saturday of August for as long as anyone remembers.
You can measure a year in how soon the oil-drum grills come out of storage.
Uncle Chuck always claims the easternmost pit. Mrs. Alvarez, the dessert table under the sugar maple. Mum says if the picnic ever vanished, the town would drift.

On Main Street the light turned green, but every car stayed put for an ambulance wailing past.
Nobody honked; nobody tried to sneak through. Rules like that are roadbed—ignore them and the whole highway buckles.
I watched the red lights fade and felt a sober gratitude: somebody out there was borrowing our right-of-way to keep breathing.

That afternoon I met Olivia Barnes, the new mayor. She wants to replace the wooden swings with steel and widen the path for cyclists.
Walt, a man who has maintained the park grounds I was in short pants, shook his head.
“Hurry slowly,” he told her. “Even a goldfish dies if you drop it straight into cold water.” Pilot one swing set first, see how the kids and metal get along.

Back at the house I scorched Mum’s fried chicken by swapping yogurt for buttermilk. She said nothing, but handed me the grease-blotched recipe card. “Guidelines,” she said, “are the wisdom of mistakes already made.” The second batch came out picnic-gold.

Mid-afternoon word spread that outsiders had sprayed rival colours under the highway. A handful of us hauled soapy water, brushed on our own bright blue, and signed the margin: Victory Park Belongs to Everybody.
By dusk the mayor was tasting my redeemed chicken, Walt pushed a grandson on the wooden swing, and the band offered a final song. Change in teaspoons, tradition in heaping cups—each respecting the other’s step.

I filled a plate, sat against the maple, and understood why we keep coming here, year after year. To see who we are, measure who we’re becoming, and promise—quietly, with food, music, and one repainted wall—to guard the space where all can stand.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples

Rents rise sharply while mill shifts shorten, door flyers push recall petitions, shelves empty with runs on canned goods, doorbell cameras are suddenly everywhere, neighbourly chat tightens into passing nods, sirens replace church bells.
The town paper stops online comments after the editors receive threats.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 27: Gallery

Polished concrete, white walls, wine that tastes like budget holy water—the gallery hums around me as I hover beside a canvas that looks like a riot froze mid-shout.
Splatters, knife strokes, fingerprints: every mark a breadcrumb back to nights I’d rather misplace. In this mausoleum for color, I’m the only one wearing paint-splattered jeans.

Stiletto clicks announce Jade Rainer, a critic with a reputation sharp enough to pop balloons at thirty paces. She plants herself in front of the canvas, head tilted, lips pursed.
“A beautiful wound,” she says. “Loss everywhere, but intimate—your loss.” Conversation around us hiccups.
My pulse thumps. I’ve never spoken of my sister, the keys I tossed her, the curve she never made.
“I was aiming for something universal,” I mumble.
“You reached universal by way of personal,” Jade replies, voice suddenly gentle. “The ashes still have your fingerprints.”

The room ripples—whispers, a cough, the chime of someone’s bracelet. Relief drifts in: strangers have mapped the scar; I can stop pretending it isn’t there.
Jade steps back. Verdict delivered. I exhale, the floor firms under my shoes, and realize the painting has finished its second job—first to speak what I couldn’t, now to stitch me to a crowd that feels like kin.
Lights brighten a notch; cameras wink. I stay where I am, neither ghost nor spectacle, simply visible. Another survivor stepping out of the frame I built for hiding.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 28: Bookstored

The eviction notice was a pale slip on the door—rent tripled, the address already promised to a burrito chain and three glass façades.
Word got around. By Saturday the regulars arrived like actors answering a final call.
Mr Hollis, jacket shiny at the elbows, buried himself in Dickens—mouthing passages he’d memorized.
Kayla drifted among the poetry shelves, hunting a line tough enough to apologize for Thursday’s voicemail. Retired-teacher
Mrs Barker stacked first editions of novels she once assigned but never read, each spine a private confession.

The aisles sagged, yet Marian—owner, curator, lone crew—laughed while she re-shelved strays, the sound of deck chairs scraped on a sinking deck simply for the pleasure of order.
Near closing Mrs Barker offered an envelope sealed in red wax. “Bake sale, quilt raffle—people wanted to help,” she said.
Marian’s nod managed thank-you and please don’t pity me in the same small gesture.

Only Marian knew what lay under the loose plank in Philosophy: a leather journal by the town’s long-dead gossip columnist, packed with back-alley saints and jukebox prophets.
Local-history gold—enough, if auctioned, to pay the rent and install new lighting besides.
She had read it. Truth has teeth; some legends sparkle only because the darker footnotes stay buried.
Better to let the shop vanish than stage a public autopsy.

At six she rang the brass bell, thanked everyone, and slid the deadbolt.
Outside, rain started the instant she stepped onto the sidewalk. She smiled at the timing.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 29: Cash Stacks

On Sunday night the dining table becomes a mountain range of paper. Utilities, mortgage, the recurring sins of streaming services. I wonder whether the sorting gene is inherited.
I sort my bills into piles and wonder whether that’s genetic. My father used to pay creditors in cash by folding money into envelopes labelled with a carpenter’s pencil: Gas, Phone, Rainy Day. The envelopes lived in a cedar cigar box.
In February, when the furnace gulped dollar bills, the “Rainy Day” flap thinned to rice paper. Summer lawn-mowing fattened it up again.
Given the toll it took on him seeing the weight of needs and wants, we abandoned that system.

I was the spreadsheet kid, fifteen and sure formulas could cure ulcers.
“Numbers in, numbers out,” I would tell him in what might have been an infantilizing tone.
He was too busy to notice, eyes on those envelopes the way a farmer studies the sky, guessing which cloud would break first.

Tonight I call him, Bluetooth speaker humming hold music while I download late statements.
“Is this what you and Mom would do?” (I ask because I never saw them act out any payment schedule.)
“She took care of it,” he says. Then adds, after a pause, “deciding which bills to pay and which could mellow a month.”
“Beer and cigarettes—always had room for those, but not so much dental insurance.”

Silence settles; then his tone drops to ground level. “There’s an envelope you don’t label. It fills itself with what you meant to do better.”
I flip through my stacks and feel the invisible one he just slid across the line: Regret, payment due ongoing.
I take a blank envelope, write Dad across the front, and tuck in a plane ticket—numbers out, something better coming in.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 30: The Doorbell

In Grandma’s house the doorbell was more conductor than appliance. One bright ding and the whole living room snapped to attention.
She could be mid–soap opera, mid–pie crust, mid–rosary—ding meant abandon post, commence reconnaissance.
First move: the covert peek. She’d nudge the lace curtain a thumb’s width, convinced her silhouette was invisible, while scanning for UPS uniforms, church ladies, or surprise relatives.
“Answer to me,” the chime seemed to command. And she did, smoothing her dress as if the Queen herself waited on the stoop.

Mickey, her mutt, loved the ritual. He’d detonate into barks, claws scrabbling for traction on the linoleum, eager to prove that a rescue mix could hold the line.
Grandpa joined at a lower frequency—muttering “Lord save us” as he patted the cardigan pocket for his lone defence—a penknife.
For him, the bell was a barrier, a point of demarcation. For Grandma, the bell is an invitation, a point of contact. But neither took kindly to a heavy knock.

One afternoon the bell stayed silent. A knock like a gavel rattled the frame. Two soldiers stood outside, hats in hand. That’s how they learned my uncle wouldn’t be stepping through any doorway again.
Since then, every chime feels like lungs filling before a sentence whose words you can’t predict. It could be “package for you,” could be “terrible accident.”
Grandma still peeks, Mickey still performs, Grandpa still sighs, and the house holds its breath, suspended between dread and welcome until the door swings wide and the visitor earns a name.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 31: Suspicion

“Come celebrate Frank’s 50th,” the invitation read. The driveway obliges: paper lanterns, a cooler sweating on the porch, Sinatra leaking from a Bluetooth speaker.
What stops me is the arch over the door—
not prefab foil from a gift shop, this is hand-tied halo of green and cream, colours of belief in a body of doubt,
—resting against the entrance archway like stuck-up bits too tall when the truck went under a bridge.

From the sidewalk you’d swear the wire script says HAPPY 50! NEVER THOUGHT YOU’D MAKE IT! Step closer and the message tilts:
HE DID IT.
HE WILL AGAIN.

Inside, the house buzzes with cake logistics and weather talk. Marie—Frank’s wife, tonight’s curator of fun—glides among guests, laughter polished to a shine.
You wouldn’t know she spent time in the minivan beforehand. Forehead on the steering wheel, bracing herself.
Frank works the room, replaying golf shots, never noticing his name hanging overhead. Looking up has never been his gift.

I pass Marie a bowl of fruit salad. Her eyes meet mine long enough to confirm she won’t take the banner down.
Let it offer its warning in whipped-cream colours.
Guests duck beneath the arch, reading only what they’re ready to read: milestone, not omen.
Lanterns wilt as the night cools, but the handmade arch holds till dawn—proof that doubt can be festive if you dress it up and let it mingle with the confetti.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 32: Ears to Hear

Tuesday night at Mariner’s Rest, the air smelled of fryer grease and floor varnish.
Nick—combat-veteran eyes, news-junkie shrug—nursed a single malt while I worked on a pilsner that tasted like better days and told a joke about a farmer with a talking cow.
Nick’s laugh hit the ceiling fan and rained back down. The bartender slapped the bar so hard the pretzel bowl bounced.

Fast-forward to Saturday afternoon, to a funeral home foyer with a carpet thick as the word “plush.”
Mr Thompson stood beside his wife’s closed casket, floating in that numb space widowers occupy.
The room needed air, so I offered the same farmer-and-cow routine, soft voice, respectful pacing.
When the punchline hit, the room went as dead as Mrs Thompson. Even the radiator quit humming.
I mumbled condolences and retreated to the cookie table.

Two nights later my cousin Maria dropped by—the one who once convinced me raw jalapeños were candy. For nostalgia’s sake I fried grasshoppers like our grandmother did: salt, lime, quick sizzle.
I offered the plate; Maria recoiled as if it were broken glass “How can you still eat those things?”
Same kitchen, same smell of citrus and oil, different appetite.

After she left, I sat in the glow of the bistro sign across the street, replaying the three scenes.
Same words, same crunch, wildly different echoes.
A joke, snack, even a truth behaves like a radio signal: you need the receiver tuned, antenna up, static down—or nothing gets through.
I ate the last grasshopper, tasting lime and context. Truth needs ears wrapped around an open mind.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 33: Faith Unkept

The rocker in the front room still carries the shine of Grandpa’s planer, though the denim of three generations has worn twin valleys into the oak seat.
Most afternoons my uncle parks there, knees pumping just enough to keep the floorboards talking—hopeful for the mailman, prepared for a grim visitor who doesn’t knock.
Two summers ago he sold his pickup and flew overseas to a healer who claimed faith could rethread muscle like a loom fixes a frayed rug.
He came home parade-ground straight, words tumbling out of him in tidy rows as if the librarian of the universe had finally stamped his card.

But certainty, it seems, has a half-life. A couple months later the rocker was back to its slow tide: creak-forward, sigh-back, the mail slot clinking at 11:15 with nothing but grocery flyers.
His shoulders slumped around whatever puzzle he still couldn’t solve.
Dad stands from the doorway, rubbing sawdust memories between thumb and forefinger.
He once said, “Leave belief to your uncle.” Now Dad shakes his head, listening to the rocker preach its quieter gospel: some questions outlast posture, and a good chair keeps better time than many a cure.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 34: Prescient Creature

My sister keeps a shelf of toy prophets: a Mason jar full of fortune cookies, tarot cards still in shrink-wrap.
My favourite is the Magic 8-Ball I’ve been consulting since homework asked bigger questions than I did.
Tip it and the blue triangle swims up from the ink like a submarine with opinions.
REPLY HAZY—TRY AGAIN. Most days that mercy was enough.

Yesterday the coin-size portal was clouded; answers like graffiti in the fog.
I pictured the oracle trapped down there in perpetual midnight, coughing up wisdom for anyone with a yes-or-no panic. It deserved daylight.

I emptied the glitter from my sister’s largest snow globe, funnelled in fresh water, and freed the 8-Ball’s tiny decider. It plopped into its new, crystal-clear pond.
For the first time I could read all twenty verdicts at once: OUTLOOK GOOD, DON’T COUNT ON IT, ASK AGAIN …
Nineteen rejections for every promise. The cost of knowledge, paid in options lost. Magic, I realized, lived in the mystery.

I set the globe on my sister’s dresser beside the snow-stranded Santas, face turned inward like a monk who has said enough for one day.
I didn’t shake for permission. Some magic you leave resting, grateful for the secrets it keeps.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 35: Smart Box

It’s 1:17. Your smartphone didn’t ding, so you aren’t checking messages when you pick it up again.
What you’re doing is more desperate. You are checking on the self-worth you buried in the box.
Your phone sits face-down on the coffee table, unlit. You keep an eye on it instead of trusting your heart, entrusting it with the task of reminding you that you exist.
That you matter.

If the screen glows, you’re wanted. If it stays black, you’re drifting above the city, a ghost in sweatpants.
It’s easier to let algorithms decide whether you’re having a good day or should crawl back under the covers.
It’s easier than looking in the mirror and asking the hard questions. Because what if your heart doesn’t have the answers you want to hear?

You put the phone down, backside up like a turtle, and the room expands—but it’s short-lived.
The silence of the room, of your life, presses in on you, and you reach for the device again.
Lifeline or leash, same weight wrapped up in a sleek casing.

Maybe tomorrow you’ll leave the phone alone. Maybe tomorrow, you’ll look for validation in a friend’s laughter. Or get lost in a story that cannot be scrolled.
But tonight the glass is a dark pond and your face floats on it, waiting for ripples.
Tonight, with your silent phone and restless heart, you wonder if you’ll ever learn to trust it again.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 36: Referred Pain

You keep an elastic band on your wrist like other people wear watches.
But whenever silence starts tugging at the stitches, snap—sharp sting, tiny proof you’re still rented to this body.
You snap the band to feel something, anything, in the void of affection for being another mouth to feed, another dream unfulfilled.
Cheaper than therapy, you say, easier than asking why another plate at the table once felt like charity.

Years of turning jokes into bayonets have left you quick on the draw, deadly at parties, untouched on the ride home.
Quick to quip but not connect, you grew to bend words into swords.
So when the inner child taps the aquarium glass of your dreams, begging you to drop the façade, you channel your father’s frosty power, reach for the only inheritance that fit, and snap the kid a good one.

To stop you from gnawing at wounds no one else can see, I would talk with the child inside to explain why I’m placing a dog cone around your head.
To keep you from licking the wounds no one else can see.
Inside the plastic funnel your voice ricochets back to your own ears.
All that’s left is to hear the kid out, let the ache bark itself hoarse.
And then cut the cone off when the band’s no longer needed, when your words come back shaped like bridges instead of blades.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 37: Welcome Mat

The doormat isn’t much—coir bristles worn thin, the word WELCOME faded to a mumble—yet keeps a ledger.
Red clay from yesterday’s trail. Specks of craft-table glitter. A grey smear from the hospital car park.
Every heel prints a headline the mat reads without comment.

I reach the step at dusk, still bristling from a meeting gone sideways. The mat offers no sermon, only friction. One boot plants, pivots, lets the grit surrender.
A grain of glitter clings to the toe. I let it ride inside—nieces outrank executives.

Morning drags me out again. Earbuds already arguing politics, take-out coffee pinched between two fingers, phone vibrating in my coat.
Overnight rain has spattered the pavement the colour of bad news.

Halfway to the car I glance back at the small, silent archive.
From the mud and wipes of hellos and goodbyes, my doormat knows what I bring in and what muck I carry back to make the world a little better or a little bitter.
Whatever the world receives from me today will depend on what stayed under that faded word and what scraped free as I walked away.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 38: Finding Home

Saturday, early December. The hardware store hums its fluorescent hymn while my grandson and I thread through bins of screws high as his shoulders, picking out tarp clips for the shed.
Halfway to Plumbing he tugs my sleeve.
“Grandpa, that lady—she looks lost.”
Five aisles over a woman drifts past drill bits, her fingertips grazing hardware as if texture might answer a question words can’t reach. SALE strobes spark across her damp eyes.
“She’s just shopping,” I tell him, but the boy keeps watching.

We spot her again near Paint, then at Lumber, never pausing to claim an item, always moving.
“She’s not fixing anything, Grandpa. She’s looking for something that isn’t on the shelves.”
A moment later she vanishes behind stacked plywood.

I kneel for roofing nails. The knees complain; the nails look identical.
A tap lands on my shoulder and I jerk up straighter than I have in years. It’s her—coat mis-buttoned.
“Could you help me pick a gift? For my son. Something that says I care.”
Toolbox, too blunt. Picture frame, too hollow. Work gloves, too ordinary. She settles on a coil of paracord—strong, flexible, good for holding things together.
At the till she thanks me as if I’d guided her through fog.

Snowflakes spin under parking-lot lights. “Think she found what she needed?” my grandson asks, forehead to the glass.
“Maybe,” I say, though in the mirror I still see her shadow in the aisles looking for something to give a son who never found his way home.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 39: V-Tach

A nurse unhooks my IV and suggests a slow lap of the ward. I manage maybe ten steps before Jupiter drops onto my chest, its gravity driving me against the hand-rail.
My heart doesn’t pound. It flutters, frantic and useless, like a sparrow trapped in a chimney.
The monitor shrieks. Jagged peaks tear across the screen.

“V-tach,” the nurse says, slamming the code button.
A gurney. Another face with a widow’s peak. Older. Snow falling on a widow’s peak, I think and know it’s nonsense even as I say it.
The gel pads feel cool on my chest.
“Small shock. On three.”

A blinding punctuation mark. My vision flares, then clears. The sparrow folds its wings; Jupiter rolls off.
While they check leads and log new numbers, I lay still thinking how little that panicked bird understood about its fragile cage.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 40: Flight of Silence

The air rings with train car squeal. An ad jingles. Someone’s tinny earbuds leak 90s music.
Everywhere in the cavern, noise stacks to the ceiling.
Then a hush glides in, thin as a gull’s wing, beneath the fluorescent tubes.

It isn’t absence. Silence flits like a rare bird, as solid as the static of an unreachable radio station. 
Voices stall, playlists pause, newspapers lose their rustle. And for three breaths the carriage floats.

A woman clutching a grocery tote meets the eyes of a man in paint-spattered boots. Neither knows the other, but both feel the cool draft of that passing wing.
Around them the commuters stand stunned, as if gravity stepped out for a smoke.

At College Station, the doors sigh open and silence slips away. Noise enters, embarrassed at its absence.
The shopper and the painter keep the quiet inside—proof that even underground, something can fly.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 41: Fickle Candle

St. Aurelia’s doesn’t care for new ideas. Paint peels where the council voted down fresh colours, and the draft wandering the nave could recite Scripture.

The Paschal candle is meant to burn like doctrine: steady, unquestioning.
Last Tuesday its flame began to stammer, throwing jittery silhouettes across plaster saints.
Parishioners shifted on the pews, whispers slid beneath the vaulted hush.

Father O’Neill—eighty-three and on a first-name basis with wax—rose from the confessional, struck a match, and performed a quiet transplant: trimmed the wick, reset the brass collar, and whispered a plea for cooperation.
The flame straightened long enough for the Gospel, then resumed its jittery semaphore.

Toward vespers the wind came up, rattling stained glass like dice in a cup.
Storm clouds rolled the daylight clean off the map.
Power blinked, failed, took the organ with it.
The nave went ink-dark—except for that jumpy candle, suddenly all backbone, throwing a cone of gold wide enough for every face.

People exhaled as one; the priest stared as if he’d been handed proof that doubt and duty can share a wick.
When the lights lurched back, he tapped the brass stand and pronounced, “Not every miracle stands still.”
Parishioners filed out into the rain, carrying bits of that unsteady courage home in cupped hands.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 42: Coyotes in the Distance

We’re ringed around the camp-fire after the hike. I drop a weak joke but everyone laughs anyway; the flames jump.
Even the coyotes beyond the trees stop howling. They know your pack is out tonight.

Across the glow you tug your jacket close and slip into yourself, the way you do when an old memory taps your shoulder.
You wish your father had let you warm by his side, but he had nothing left over after your mother.
You took the cold to mean you’re not good enough, not worthy—find another flame for emotional warmth.
So now, any time someone says your name, you brace for the invoice—What do they need? What will it cost?
Fear tells you that you’re not good enough to be wanted for yourself.

I roll a cedar round onto the coals and shift over.
You hesitate, then scoot closer. Heat lifts through the cuffs of your jeans.
Behind us the coyotes find their voices again, but they’re a long way off.
Stay as long as you like. This fire keeps no ledger. It burns because it can.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 43: Skid-Mark Stories

Cart wheels stamp rubber signatures the buffing machine never erases.
The night manager ticks the checklist anyway—clean enough for the morning rush. Not for inspection.

Flickering fluorescents reveal more than they hide: mop water drying to a milky film, fingerprints on every cooler handle, a bag of jalapeños abandoned between rival brands of orange juice.
Someone couldn’t be bothered to walk back to Produce.
What else do we set down and forget?

I picture this little store inhaling a day’s worth of coins, then exhaling every customer, leaving shelves belly-full and aisles empty of thieving feet. 
Nothing moving but the midnight trucks, beep-beep easing into the dock until the bump of tires ends with a hiss.
Inside, the skid-mark stories wait for tomorrow’s lights.

Through Bare Branches/Part 3: Voices in the Maples/Chapter 44: Emerg_ncy

Fluorescents fizz above coughs and restless shoes; too many bodies for too few chairs. The linoleum feels sticky though someone mopped at dawn.
Only one intake window is open and snow has started again—of course.
Welcome to Emerg.

The far doors bang open and Dr. Schneider strides in, clipboard under one arm, coat pocket crammed with lemon lollipops.
“One lets you cut through lines,” she’s happy to say. “The other keeps the truth sweet.”

The triage nurse waves her over.
“Semi lost it on High Hill—multiple.”
High Hill earns its name: steep, short, and today iced over. The radio a dispatcher confirms: A trucker, self-medicating with cough syrup, slid down the icy slope.
His tractor-trailer gathered commuters like a croupier raking in house winnings.

The good doctor pats her pocket, counting candies: flu in chair three, fracture in five, two detoxers asleep against the wall—now convoy of metal of metal and snow-stung skin.

Above the ambulance bay a wonky circuit leaves EMERG_NCY to blink against the whiteout. Close enough, winter will buy a vowel.
Inside, gloves snap to wrists. Vents take one last calm breath. Then the doors fly wide, and the day’s real spelling begins.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn

School-board meetings break down into shouting matches, boycott lists are taped to shop windows, dinner tables split down ballot lines, drones patrol festival crowds, church rows thin by half, and pawnshops jam with wedding rings.
Corner stores install iron bars.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 45: Ugly Trees

The walls are a forest painted into being by a woman with a palette full of bruises.
She paints trees twisted by time, gnarled by storms. Crooked branches, tattered leaves. Bark charred or burdened by snow.
Yet people file in to chapel. They stand, hands clasped behind backs, reading rings and fissures the way you’d read scripture.

She paints craggy trunks and knotted roots, struggling against wind and winter.
Against fire, blight, bulldozers.
She paints resilience, but that word feels tidy compared to what’s on the canvas.
What she’s really done is make armour look tender—inviting us to admire the places where life welded itself back together.

She paints character in knot and gnarl so that we may see beauty in survival, not perfection. 
That we may see in ourselves what is not pretty, not young, but enduring.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 46: Sarah at Seven

Sarah turned seven on a Saturday stitched with streamers and butter-cream.
Two balloons sailed up—emerald and sapphire—her cheeks puffed, laughter looping like ribbon.
She drew breath for the third.
There was no third.

Choking, wheezing, arms flapping around the room.
Sarah seizing, parents pleading, throwing phone numbers across the patio. 

We stood frozen: best friends, cousins, kids from the neighbourhood.
We wanted to help (we wanted to watch). Watching was our mistake.

By the time the sirens streaked red across the driveway, the music was off and the party favours had become evidence.
Sarah stays seven forever.
In every replay my mind refuses to pan away from those two balloons, bobbing with every burst-open door.
The sirens are silent, but the accident still peers through every eye that witnessed it.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 47: Entre Amis

He talks past the reek of bleach and cafeteria meatloaf, trying to put them at ease as if they were on the gurney. 
They trade memories and uneasy laughs between moments of silence. The currency of desperation.

When he thinks the moment is steady enough, he tells them.
It isn’t cancer. It’s that virus skulking in the shadows, lethal to the few who think themselves untouchable.

The husband stands there, caught between waves hitting him with the truth he took for hidden.
Their friend exhales a razor-thin whisper: “She could have it, too.”

The wife’s eyes widen, the chill of confusion creeping in like the hospital’s over-achieving air conditioner. 
Her expression shifts from disgust to dread.
She stutters for clarification, even as realization sucks life from the room faster than that slipping from their friend’s grasp. 

No one hears the heart monitor anymore. Its lonely beep has been swallowed by what wasn’t said sooner.
Orderlies arrive, release the brakes, wheel the gurney toward Imaging.
The gap he leaves behind feels like negative space on an X-ray—everything important showing up in what’s missing.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 48: When to Let Go

Hank came home from yesterday’s check-up with a cardiologist’s card in his pocket and a prescription he pretended not to see.
This morning he’s in the yard, bent over an old push mower like bad news never happened.
“Mowers don’t die,” he says, pulling the cord once, twice.
“Replace the plug, clean the carb, sharpen the blade—they’ll run forever if you don’t quit on ’em.”

The engine coughs and spits oil, but won’t catch.
Only the green cowling is original. Everything else has been bolted on over the years. The patchwork groans under its own weight.

Hank squats, peers at the frame as if the machine just questioned his craft.
After a long breath he straightens, rubs the ache in his chest, and rolls the mower toward the scrap heap behind the shed.

“Machines live as long as we need them to,” he tells a lineup of red riding mowers waiting their tune-ups.
“Knowing when to stop patching … ” His voice thins like loose change in a pocket. “That’s the hard fix.”

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 49: Moving On

Three guys in red shirts and cargo pants pull up in a moving van, here to fill the house with hollow space.
Furniture goes first—the couch tattooed with last year’s merlot, the coffee table dinged where her wineglass landed when voices grew too loud.
They bubble-wrap the lamp she said threw accusatory light, and stack boxes marked “Living-room,” “Kitchen,” “Bed,” as if the categories still held.
Smiley-face cardboard boxes swallow the worn and the worn out. The rooms are stripped of memory.
What the manifest omits is the shouting, swearing, shunning, wine-bottle-filled recycle bin, police in the living room.
But what they’ll remove most won’t be taken in their swollen van.
It’s her moving out. And me moving on.

By noon the rooms echo.
One mover hands me a form: “Sign to confirm empty.” I almost laugh—empty’s a spectrum—but I sign.
They drive away, taillights winking, van fat with furniture and phantom noise.
I stand in the doorway listening to the hush she wanted. Installation complete.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 50: Last Parade

June zipped itself into blue jeans and fired up the backyard grill.
My kids wore their weekend faces.
Mum, sunhat flapping, waved flags to Dad, in the cab of Engine 4, honorary driver for a day because nobody had the heart to say no.

“No” was already drifting through the crowd, mixed with the scent of charcoal and freshly-mowed grass. It lurked in budget spreadsheets and liability premiums.
Today, though, the siren whooped, and Dad eased the tomato-red truck onto Maple Street.
The procession unfurled behind it like a picnic blanket: banners snapping, balloons nodding to every breeze.

The school band marched a tune, their brass rolling through like a freight train.
In its wake sweat-sticky kids, laughter bright as bells, launched themselves off curbs after a clown who flung taffy beneath a sandwich board that declared: THE END IS NEAR.

As the final float rolled past—a flatbed with a choir and twinkling lights—none knew we’d just applauded our last parade. Next summer was earmarked for roadwork and online fireworks.
The floats turned the corner and the route returned to being a street—a leaf detached from its branch, unaware of the change of season.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/ Chapter 51: Daily Trek

The daily trek commences not by turning over engines but by tossing clocks that stir the burg from its stupor, pushing half-made people toward toothpaste and horrors in the mirror.

In a condo by the water, a woman wrestles into her peacoat without letting go of her black patent purse. 
The collar settles against her silver hair, pinned in a bun for years, and she moves with the grace of all those years.

Across the boulevard a young man blasts from a brownstone, toast gripped in his teeth, fumbling for keys, tie whipping in the crosswind.

A woman emerges from the market to wait at the corner bus stop. She holds an umbrella whose metal ribs have as much meat as the chops she purchased. 
She gazes without focus, checking her to-do list off the side of the approaching bus.

Farther on, a girl on a lavender bike and her father pedal furiously, pink streamers flying from her handgrips. 
His Franken-cycle, pieced from parts of other bikes, still lives.
Their laughter skims the traffic, but those in metal cages never notice.

Horns jab, engines grumble, calendars fill. Everyone is late for something no one will remember tomorrow.
In each rear-view mirror a pasture flickers—the farm we left behind, and somehow still haven’t reached.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 52: More Than One Way

When my sister announced her June wedding on the other coast the family group-chat lit up with discount airfare links and seating charts.
I texted: “I’ll drive” A dozen replies blinked back—too slow, too lonely, too much trouble.
Maybe. But every “must” and “only” makes me itch, so I dropped a road atlas onto the passenger seat and pointed the hatchback west.

Billboard wisdom jabbed the windshield. Best Coffee. Best Way to Lose Weight.
I set the dial on a low-watt AM, stories surfacing and sinking in static.

Halfway across I stopped at a café bright with neon pie slices.
A couple of regulars laughed over my farmer with a talking cow joke. One to keep for the right occasion.

Near the coast, I crashed on my college roommate’s couch. He edits trailers and showed me two versions of the same rom-com. One, slapstick bliss; the other, wistful heartbreak.
“All in the edit,” he said, scrubbing the timeline.
A hand-painted sign outside a hardware store read MAKE SOMETHING STRANGE TODAY. I pulled over, bought a few spray cans, and turned the car door into a sunset stitched with turquoise rivers and one sideways comet.
The motel manager watched, arms folded. When I was done he walked over, thumbed a corner of the still-wet sky, and nodded as if it made sense.
By the time I crossed the last bridge, the car looked like it had burst through its own dream.

At the reception my aunt asked why I’d wasted four extra days on the road.
I pointed to the comet streaking along the driver’s door. “Had to find this colour,” I said.
She squinted, touched the paint, failed to name it, and smiled anyway.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 53: First Light

I slip from my wife’s soft snores, swing out of the feather bed, and land in boots as worn as my splintered bones.
Three pats along the wall and the hiding switch finally clicks.

My hat and coat, having weathered more storms than their maker intended, are reluctant to replace the warmth of slumber—or guard against the breeze carrying crows in the first light over the horizon.

The barn door and I groan as one, opening to a world of braying, bleating, clucking reminders. The air is half hay, half manure, all obligation.
So I move from stall to stall, boots sucking mud, while the red sky decides whether to keep its warning.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 54: Bus Stop

Morning frost nips through thin socks while I wait on the cracked slab that passes for a shelter. Cars pass in smeared lines; I track none of them, counting minutes instead of models.

At my feet a dandelion has pushed a defiant yellow fist through its asphalt ceiling.
It wobbles in the exhaust breeze, stubborn as a teenager with a curfew.
I admire its grit, wishing for that kind of fight to bloom within me, to fight the weight of indifference.

The Number 4 to the waterfront heaves around the corner, diesel cough echoing off shop fronts.
The curb shudders. One tire kisses the bloom, folding it flat before I finish blinking.

Doors hiss open. Heat and the smell of damp vinyl spill out. I climb aboard and claim a window seat already fogged with other people’s sighs.
I press a fingertip to the glass and ask the pane—ask myself—whether pushing through to bloom is still brave if the world rolls over you the moment you do.
The bus offers no answer, just the lurch of gears and forward motion.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 55: Doing Solitary

There was a time when I thought I was something special, waving my arms like a maestro, certain the world took its cues from me.
Then the hearing blew—sudden as a fuse. Now I’m stuck in a box, a silo of stillness, grimacing at the irony of deafening silence.
“You’ll figure it out,” I mumble in words that tumble like shells with all the pow blown out. The courtyard beneath my feet feels more than my ears.

Then, I see something as ordinary as it is at first meaningless: leaves dragged by a stubborn breeze. 
There’s this maple, scratching the concrete with brittle fingers, resisting the wind’s insistence on pushing its way to elsewhere. 
They don’t know each other, but they’re caught up together in the same struggle for victory.
It’s a language I grasp in silence, able to listen because I cannot hear. Turns out silence has its own subtitles.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 56: Have You Seen Me?

Day seventeen without my brother. His school-photo smile—too neat, too nervous—looks out from every lamppost I can reach.

On the pole outside Jinni’s Liquor, a row of kitten flyers hangs beside him.
A man tears off a phone-number tab, tucks it in his pocket, and never glances at the kid in the tie.
Forgetting, I’ve learned, is better for business.

I keep walking. At each coffee shop, I press fresh tape over yesterday’s rain-curl and drop a pin on my phone.
By dusk the screen glitters with dots: corners, doorways, bus shelters.
Zoomed out, the dots sketch the outline of a long-legged creature. I call it Vapour—brother of Sucrose, whose constellation marks every bakery in town.

Vapour crosses Main, steps over the river, and ends where the factory vents breathe steam into the night air.
I stand there, palms burning from the tape dispenser, watching the cloud rise and thin—waiting for the lost to walk out of the mist.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 57: Chatty Candle

Out on this straight-line prairie the only traffic is wind and the swipe of highway headlights.
Each pass throws a wink through the kitchen window, flirting with the single candle she’s coaxed to life.

The flame guides her from the large-bowl wash basin to the hand-hewn bed, where
the quilt smells of must despite the dry heat, and outweighs all the birds coerced of their down.
Pillow quills crackle under her ear, which she pictures as spiders, taking comfort in having another living thing on her planet.

One last look at the empty room and she blows out the chatty light.
Silence settles like dust beneath the mountain of broken promises.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 58: Fender Martyr

Our parish budget runs mostly on pot-luck casseroles, so when the finance committee finally leased a forest-green minivan—shine so bright you could check your collar for crumbs in the paint—we parked it beside the rectory like a trophy.
Father Jim lasted eight hours. Early next morning he fetched a putty knife from the boiler room, marched into the lot and carved a palm-length scar across the front bumper.
Better, he said, to get it over with.

That Sunday he preached with folded hands.
“Perfection is a burden. Think of a scuffed shoe. A smooth surface invites pride; a scratch invites service.”

The congregation nodded at the tidy lesson while their own cars sat outside, spotless under warranty.
Scratches make good sermon props; body shops still send invoices.
Until we find the middle lane, dear pastor, I’ll park far enough away that your next illustration doesn’t come out of my deductible.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 59: Polar Swing

The day the last blue shard breaks off the ice shelf, the polar bear will need a seat.
Don’t be surprised if he pads down your cul-de-sac at dusk, sniffs the rusted chains, and settles onto the swing that once pumped your kids toward the clouds.
Metal will groan; he’ll sway a little, remembering drift.

By then the trees will be tinder, one spark from turning the coast into a column of smoke.
When the air tastes of ash, remember the bear rocking in your yard—no wind, no North, only the back-and-forth of a body displaced.

We’ll shut windows, tape the seams, and blame each other through filtered vents.
Inside our own fog, we’ll learn how loud loneliness can be.
Outside, the swing will slow, chains stiff with rust.
The children will be grown, the bear will have wandered on, looking for another empty seat in a world that keeps rearranging its furniture.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 60: Intruder

Keep your beams high on Old North Road tonight. I nearly clipped something that was no shadow.
It came barreling from behind the Quick-Mart, where half the security bulbs are out. Head low, shoulders like rolling luggage, it owned the pavement

Black on black; impossible to see until it filled the headlights. I thought it was a stranger, but the stranger wore fur.
Trash bags lay torn open, snack wrappers skating down the gutter. Supper for a wanderer.
Ease off the throttle if you’re out that way. What I almost hit was a bear, heavier than my hatchback.

Call it an intruder if you want, but remember: we set the table.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 61: Shop of Pawns

The guitars that once dangled like hit singles are gone. In their place hang bicycles too small for yesterday’s riders and, worst of all, racks of baby clothes—tiny sleeves folded out of somebody’s Plan A.

Mid-morning a woman edges to the counter, eyes flicking for exits. She sets down a shoebox; inside, a porcelain doll with lashes glued shut.
“One more,” she whispers.
I shake my head. The shelves already sag.
Her lips tremble; she unclasps a locket whose chain glimmers with memories she can’t afford.
I nod. The register chimes, too much like a bell for last rites.

Fred barrels in, cheeks blotched, slamming a broken wristwatch.
“Fix it!”
“Fred, we pawn—we don’t repair.”
He leaves without the watch, fear ticking louder than the clock on the wall.

Then chaos: a teenage boy shoving a mountain bike through doors built for walkers.
Tires jam; the frame clatters. I know that face, freckle by the eye.
Dad, I—”
Guilt outruns him down the street.

I stare at the pawn ticket in my hand—need traded for hope, hope tagged for someone else’s need and realize the wheel has rolled over my own front step.

Through Bare Branches/Part 4: Moon Over the Barn/Chapter 62: Restoration

The For-Sale sign went up beside the hydrangeas, but the house kept sighing like it hoped I’d change my mind.
I patched plaster, righted the porch rail, even repainted the door the same sea-green it wore the day we first unlocked it—back when our knees didn’t pop.
Only the dining-room chandelier remained: six ribs of dark oak, heavy enough to drink the light. Buyers want glass and sparkle now, so I drove to Archie’s with measurements and optimism.

At the end-of-aisle display, three crystal cylinders floated on wire. The tag promised: FEATHERWEIGHT—installs in ten minutes.
I swiped the card and hurried home.

The box hissed open, spilling crystal, screws no bigger than eyelashes, and instructions folded like origami. Shards covered the floor before I’d untied the first twist-tie.
The oak fixture watched from the corner.

Back at Archie’s, the hardware greeter leaned in close.
“Take another: use what you need and return the rest, refunds are guaranteed.”
I pictured another evening hunting crystals the way toddlers chase fireflies, so I re-hung the oak beast and flipped the breaker.
The room filled with the amber glow that once wrapped holiday dinners and late-night puzzles. Not bright, but honest.
I pulled the For-Sale sign out of the soil, left a rectangle of absence in the grass.
Maybe houses shape us first, and only later let us know who we were meant to be.

Through Bare Branches/Part 5: Lay of the Land

Waterfront
West to east: boardwalk, marina and boat club, Farmer’s Market, waterfront condos, sandy beach, Memorial Field, waterfront homes, Lighthouse,
Downtown
Just north of the waterfront is downtown: Water Street, cafés, pubs, police, post office, town hall, courthouse, Art Gallery, Azure Bay Players theatre, Victory Park.
The aptly named Water Street is a long block from the sandy shore of the waterfront. Here the cafés, pubs, police, post office, town hall, and courthouse wear a Victorian façade with a 60s vibe. The waterfront is home to an art gallery and the county live-stage theatre. On one end is Victory Park, with its bandshell by the beach. On the other end is Memorial Field, where the school plays football and the annual carnival sets up.
Uptown
Main Street, library/museum, uptown movie theatre, bookstore, recreation centre, Archie’s, Bayview Park, Hills Hospital, Shopping Mall, Thorgood Castle, Rail Station to The City
Residential
School campus, home, Morton’s Hill, Whispers Nature Park
Home, the house of my youth, is in the economy side of the residential district, although we did not think of ourselves as poor at the time. We were sandwiched between the school campus and Morton’s Hill, both on elevation from us, although the former offer a promise that with it and hard work (or a little luck) we might one day reside on the latter. Morton’s Hill was an annual pilgrimage to see the holiday lights before home again to open presents. This was at a time when “million . dollar . homes” was said with full stops.
Rural
Azure Bay Golf Course, Lake Tarboosh, Lilac Lake, grandparents’ farm, County Fairgrounds,
The farm, a small concern of cattle and wheat, played a bit part in fusing the romantic with pragmatic. It’s one thing to round-up baby chicks who’ve found a loop hole in the fence. Quite another to get the smell of singed tail feathers out of ones nostrils before dinner.
The farm was the earthy spirit of my dad’s parents. They would eventually sell it and move beside us in the west residential district, in the shadow of the school bus barn. Until then, visiting grandma and grandpa was all sweaty chores, live chickens, and cornbread out your ears. Their farm was rural to us, past Lilac Lake toward the County Fairgrounds. If you went west instead, it would take you past the golf course toward Lake Tarboosh, which I recall mostly for tadpoles and water deep as black.
County
Rolling Hills, Surrounding farmland, Arts Park, County Airport.

Through Bare Branches/Small Town Static

Parades at noon, porch-lights at dusk. We mistook that glow for paradise—never noticing the pawn slips beneath the counter or grudges simmering over back fences.
Through Bare Branches gathers sixty-two snapshots, each a different angle on the same hometown—from sandlot awe to tax-bill reality.
What seems like the town’s slow darkening is really our eyesight sharpening; the politics, half-truth headlines, and quiet cruelties were always there.
Yet so were moments of kindness.

Plainspoken, wry, and still in love with the place it exposes, Through Bare Branches asks: How do you keep belonging to a hometown changing as you do?
These pages are less about nostalgia; more about recognition.
Because when the leaves fall, we see the streets more clearly; home, as it was all along.