Cream dripping,

 I regret my choice. 

Walking through the field of overgrown baseball grass, I am afraid I am going to get a tick stuck to one of my ankles and if I do I don’t have a lighter to burn my skin. That’s how you get ticks off, you take a sparkwheel and hold it close to the skin. I used to think it would be the scraping of a credit card like with a wooden splinter. You can’t do that though cause the legs will stay in, and you’ll get sick. That’s what my mother always said anyways. 

The grass and her walking in front of me remind me of Geneva. The unused land on Sanborn Road where my father grew before they tore down the house with broken floors, holes on the second story so gaping that you could fall through to the kitchen and living room. There was a barn next to the house. That’s where my father’s pony named Little Joe had lived. The pony was his oldest sister’s but he traded her his motorbike, so now it was his, renamed to Little Joe. I know there were other animals but the only two I can remember are Little Joe and his father’s horse, Comanche. A black stallion. Named after the people of the plains who loved their horses. My father’s father, he says he is one of them. Says you can see it in his nose. He’s wrong, and I don’t know if you would call him bigotted or blind for that. 

My favorite story about the barn is the one of my father’s father waking up one fateful morning to the sound of the rooster. Convinced he could fly just like the bird, he jumped off the red roof with a mattress tied to his stomach to test this theory and got a tree branch lodged in his arm. He had this pipe dream, to be able to fly. He had bought a small aviation airplane by magazine that crashed in the field behind the house. My father’s mother was not a rallier of this dream. Bobby loves to call Bob “an idiot”.

The landlord jacked the prices and they were forced to move out. The house and barn, torn down. No one wanted it. Years past and they bought the land back, as a fiscal “Fuck You.” Steady it sits now, in silent reminiscence, acres of overgrown grass.

Everytime, I talk to the family, someone new I never knew is dying. Bobby had fifteen siblings. They had children who were my fathers cousins, who had children who I don’t know what they are in relation to me. I think when there’s that many someone is bound to be sick. My father tells me Cousin Dean is on a ventilator now, over the phone, in the hospital. I think it’s  from making all that meth in the tiny tin trailer. I think that would cause anyone trouble with breathing when they grow older. Slowly beginning to look like a prune. I stay silent and do not dare think my thoughts aloud, it does not seem like the appropriate time to bring up such thoughts. Instead, I ask if he’s been to visit. He says no and that he’s not going to, “We don’t talk to them.” Making me believe he’s from the beliefs of that similar to a distant uncle who wouldn’t let the Asian woman his son was dating into their home. Shouting from the porch with a gun that “He didn’t fight in Vietnam for this!” He has cut the bad parts of our family out like an apple with bruises that you still want to eat. My father believes that family outlasts all. Bobby says, my father only does the irrational things for us. Bobby’s stutter is beginning as she talks on the phone now. My Nana is slipping and it’s causing my father to act irrationally these days.

It’s unnatural, my hatred of the people but love for the land. I don’t think I started out hating the people but over the course the love was gnawed away. I do think about if I had been more during my time there. More idle. I’m old now living somewhere else. Though the life I am living in Boston doesn’t feel like much of a life to be lived these days either.

I miss home. 

The old biker gangs that go roaring down the strip and comparing the wornness of their seats’ leather to that of their faces. How ‘If  I was to steal one of the twenty in the parking lot, which would I choose?’ The family shop, Madison Donuts, with its swinging screen door and the way Aunt Billy-Maire makes them dense. The sound of cheap flip flops snaking the cement. 

The sound of one-hundred year old cicadas and timed-sprinklers as I walked a mile to the school yard and back in the summertime. My palms are filled with fluid; the secretions of my sweat. They cause my clarinet case to keep escaping my young hands grasping at her handle. The humidity, so thick my hair and back would dampen walking down the drive. The sound of the cicada is the vocalization of the humidity.

The afternoons I would spend watching random men wade in tall galoshes, trying to catch a fish in the Cuyahoga. I would sit there on the heat ridden slabs of old fallen industrial rock and watch them, while keeping an eye out for blue cranes.  

I miss the small towns and how much the small things mattered for months to its citizens. 

The wind here is different, in the way it tastes and smells. There it’s similar to that of gasoline. There the people truly don’t care what they look like.

There, there is never a disturbance in missing out.