Heifers, Rick James, and Grandmas & Grandpas

 As I headed towards the nowhere town of Dubois (say it like cowboys), the sloping hills of eastern Wyoming sprawled around me. Initially, they were exciting. They affirmed the adventure ahead. 

I’d been driving through them for a few hours, though. Now they seemed endless and desolate as the gas stations became fewer and dusk colored the horizon.

It was my first time driving cross-country alone. As exciting as it was, it was also intimidating. Every joker at every gas station was a potential creeper. Every desolate stretch of highway that lacked reception was a place to break down.

It was mid May, but in Wyoming, that doesn’t keep ice from falling from the sky and bouncing on your windshield. It contrasted with the sunny, green east from which I came. 

I tried to remind myself of all of the wool, down, and waterproof layers I had stuffed in my backpack, but worries about my preparedness still crept into my mind. 

Silly Southerner. You don’t belong out here. You’re going to freeze, get hypothermia, fail as a field instructor, get sent home, and resort to rereading Lord of the Rings and learning to knit all summer. 

“Yeah, I was going to spend the summer working at this camp in Wyoming,” I’ll say, “But I didn’t pack enough layers. I froze and almost lost my hands, they sent me home…”

“But hey, I just read about Tom Bombadil and his sweet yellow boots. He’s not in the LOTR movies, just the books, also, look at this scarf that I’m turning into a dishcloth…”

I’m not sure why I turn into a nerdy grandmother in my paranoid, over-the-top dialogues. And it’s not that I don’t adore Lord of the Rings, or that I hate the idea of learning how to knit. 

But I felt that this new job and this unfamiliar place were a part of my becoming, a rite of passage into my 20’s.

There’s nothing like being responsible for a group of 6 wonderful, wild, and struggling kids, living with them in a tent for 18 days at a time, and leading them on adventures in the Wyoming wilderness.

It was a hard job. I didn’t do it perfectly. My time was not my own, and there were always the kids who were sent there against their will. They sometimes channeled their struggles into spitting on me, threatening to throw me off a cliff, throwing rocks, fighting one another, and attempting to run away into the Shoshone National Forest. There was a night of sleeping on the ground next to a kid who threatened suicide. There was a kid who begged for Swedish fish for three hours straight. Let’s not forget the 18-year-old I had to routinely follow to the bathroom to make sure he’d washed his hands, the kids that screamed at each other because they couldn’t agree on what type of cheese to pack for the camping trip, or the girls that stayed up till 2 a.m. hissing foul words at one another. 

There were the times I had to go cry behind a bush so my campers wouldn’t see that they’d broken me a little, before I’d fully grown the thick skin and the eyes to see that like most everything in life, it wasn’t about me. It all came from a place of hurt. 

It was also one of the more rewarding experiences of my life, with games and laughter, weirdness and wildness, love and care, and rambunctiousness of the purest form. There were ropes and rocks, horses and mountain trails, marshmallows and fires, canoes and lake swims. There was doing the Makerana, building forts from sticks and logs, throwing hatchets, and doing Mad Libs. 

There was the girl that made me a bracelet, who cried when she had to go home and begged for me to be there for her next season. There were the boys who jumped into the freezing lake with me, the same ones who got so excited about learning to start fires with twigs and sap. There was the time a camper helped me write a song, and there were dance parties under the pavilion. There were camping trips to Yellowstone, the Tetons, and Sinks Canyon, horsepacking trips up Whiskey Mountain, and I’ll never forget my coworkers who became my dear friends.

I fell in love with the wildness of Wyoming, with its endless evergreens and sprawling mountains. It was a summer that grew me in so many ways.

The kids I was there for also stole my heart. They make it easy to give your all to them. Watching them grow is a blessing, and you forget that you haven’t showered in a couple of weeks.

Even as I drove towards Dubois with all of my self-doubt, I knew I had to do it. So I swallowed the worries and stared at the mountainous horizon.

I drove for a few more hours, eyeing my gps every so often. I’d been on this two-lane highway for some time. The gps said I had 72 miles till I exited. 

Time passed. The desolation grew. Every so often I’d pass another car, but the traffic had lessened. I hadn’t seen a gas station, much less a building, in quite some time. The only signs of life were the cows in distant fields. I’d lost reception a while ago, so I’d turned from Spotify to a fuzzy oldies station that somehow found its way through the nothingness. 

Something wasn’t right.

 I looked at my phone, eying the downloaded route. Still, 72 miles.

What? I eyed the screen to see that the icon that represented my Subaru wasn’t moving forward, even though I was going full speed ahead. It was just frozen.

I tried to refresh it. The screen went grey. “Take a left,” said the robot lady. Worry filled my chest. The left she’d told me to take was a dirt path that seemed to go into the hills. 

Surely this isn’t it?

I turned off, stupidly wondering if the directions would be made clearer, bouncing to the rhythm of the potholes as my stomach churned with nervousness. 

No. This is so stupid. 

Oddly enough, the radio lost its static. Super Freak by Rick James came through as the hills got bigger. A black heifer strolled in front of my car, giving me a judgemental stare as though to ask, “Girl, whatchu doin’ out here?”

Rick James started singing.

That girl is pretty wild now.

The girl's a super freak.

I stopped the car in wake of the cow and busted out laughing.

I hated to admit it. “I am so lost,” I said aloud, to myself and God.

Of course. My first solo trip and I get lost in the middle of nowhere. Made sense. Sounded like something I’d do. I couldn’t help but sit there and laugh at myself for a few minutes as I waited for the cow to move. 

We just stared at each other, the cow and I. I finally honked and she reluctantly strolled away, as if rolling her eyes.

“What do I even do now?” I asked God. I felt this assurance of His presence and the warmth of my own laughter, but I also felt a knot in my chest as I saw the sun inching towards dusk. 

I fiddled with the gps. I thought the route to Dubois had been downloaded, but it was useless as the screen remained blank.

Great.

I could keep going west, but I had no idea where it would lead. For all I knew, I had passed the exit. I figured the best option would be to backtrack. I had no idea where the exit was, but at least the nearest town of Rawlins was a few hours east.

Either way, the sun was setting. I didn’t love traveling in the middle of nowhere in the dark. It didn’t help that I had no idea where I was.

“It would be really cool if I get some directions from someone,” I said to God as I got back on the highway. There were no cars in sight. I saw a deserted rest stop. I stopped, looking for someone or something that might give me a clue, but the windows of the building were black and the door was locked. 

I kept going. I didn’t feel panicked anymore as I accepted the possibility of parking on the side of the road for the evening, or driving the long way back to Rawlins. 

It was nearly dark when I saw the next rest stop. There was an RV parked in the lot. I pulled in a few feet away from it. Should I ask them where I am? They were the only people I’d seen in a while.

 Maybe they weren’t creepers? I looked through to see an old man in a baseball cap in the front seat. A pretty grey-haired lady sat beside him. They reminded me of my grandparents who go on adventures with their pull-behind. That felt assuring.

I grabbed my atlas and walked towards their door. The man looked at me, puzzled, as he rolled the window down. “Can I help you, miss?”

“Yes, sir. I am very lost. Can you show me where I am on my atlas?”

He chuckled like my grandpa would. “Yeah. Where are you headed?”

“Dubois.” He laughed at me. “Hmmmm. Dubois is hardly a town.”

“So I’ve heard.”

He explained where I was on Highway 287. I’d needed to get onto 26, but I’d missed that exit by about an hour or so. I was probably zoning out to a Gillian Welch song, I thought, rolling my eyes. He made a dot with his pen a couple inches away from the exit. “We’re about right here.” He explained that I needed to head towards Lander to get to Dubois.

“What’s a little girl like you doing out here by yourself?” asked his wife, sounding just like my grandma.

“I’m headed to my summer job. What are ya’ll doing out here?” 

They were from Denver. They were heading to Riverton, WY to meet their grandchild. 

“Aw! Well,” I said, feeling the need to hit the road. “Thank you so much. You two were an answer to my prayer.” 

The road to Lander was long, stretching through more nothingness. I started to see snow on the ground and the road grew icy. 

When I got to Lander, I knew I was about an hour from Dubois. Relief washed over me. It was the first time I was ever happy to see the golden arches of McDonald’s or the green and orange of a 7-Eleven. They reminded me that I wasn’t lost in the middle of nowhere. I stopped at a gas station to use the bathroom.

A pretty girl about my age was mopping the floor. “I like your cowgirl boots,” I told her. “Thank you!” she smiled. “Where you headed?” she asked me. “Dubois,” I said. She laughed. “Ronny, this girl’s going to Dubois!!!!” She hollered as though I’d said I was going to Atlantis.

Ronny, a large, dark haired fellow in western wear looked up from behind the counter. “Shoot. Haven’t heard anyone say they were going to Dubois in a while.” He explained that he was from there. “Not a whole lot going on there.”

“Well, I’m going to be going on there.” That made him laugh.

We kept talking, and I told them about getting lost. I felt thankful to tell someone, even a stranger. “Shoot,” said the girl. “Yeah, that’s not a great place to get lost.” 

“Watch out on the way to Dubois, you might see some grizzlies along the road this time of year,” said Ronny as I headed out the door.

That’s when I knew I was headed to the right place.

So I thanked the Lord for 4-wheel drive, good gas mileage, Rick James, and grandmas and grandpas. I made it to Dubois in the middle of the night, and I had myself a summer.

Gas Station Burger

 I scarfed down a gas station burger in Bandera, Texas. It was the kind of place you wouldn’t think you’d want to get a burger from, with sticky floors and questionable bathrooms. This cowboy watched from across the booth. “Shoot, it’s not often I meet someone who eats faster than I do.”

“That’s what every girl wants to hear.”

Maybe I am shameless. Maybe I was especially shameless because I figured I’d never see him again. 

Regardless, I normally do eat fast, and I was hungry. It was an alright burger for a gas station. It also helped that I had somewhere to be about 5 hours north of there, a gig at a dive bar in Lubbock, Texas. I needed to get going.

I’d spent a few hours in Bandera. I didn’t know much about it other than the instrumental Willie Nelson named after it. It’s on the “Red Headed Stranger” album, and it sounds like the place felt, with live oaks, tall yellow grass, and cowboys.

 I’d missed riding horses, and I have this tendency to want to go to places I’ve heard songs about. I made a stop there and paid to go ride through the hills. 

The cowboy that sat across from me had been my guide. His name was Nick. Beneath the Stetson was hair that went down to his shoulders and a long beard. His sleeves of tattoos  contrasted with the plaid of his pearl-snap shirt, and his tendency towards sarcasm was suppressed beneath the need to be polite on the job.

“I like my stirrups down 4 notches usually,” I told him as he tightened the cinch.

“Well, alright then.” I felt him roll his eyes.

 He put me on a bay mustang named Buster. “He’s an ass,” he warned me, though I liked that little gelding.

It was my first time ever paying to ride a horse. Afterall, having worked at a stable, I basically did his job for a living. 

Nonetheless, it was something to see the Hill Country from the saddle. We rode for an hour, then it was back to the red barn to unsaddle and grain the horses. “You know,” he snickered, watching me slide the elaborately flowered saddle onto the peg. “You paid us, you don’t have to haul that thing.”

He went on to introduce me to all eight of their horses, which were mostly mustangs. He made sure to tell me which ones were the biggest “asses”. 

“Geronimo’s my baby though,” he patted the dun horse he’d ridden on the forehead.

Afterwards, I tipped him and headed towards the car.

“Hold up,” he hollered from the porch, hopping down the steps.

“I’m gonna go get lunch from the gas station,” he said, “And they really do have the best burgers in Bandera. Can I please buy you one, since you’re traveling through?”

“Hmmm.” I looked at the time. I figured I could swing an hour, but I really didn’t want him to spend his tip money on me. I felt for the cash in my pocket. “Ok, but I’ll have to leave soon.”

I followed his rusty Ford down the cactus-lined road for a couple of miles to get my first ever gas station burger.

We ordered, and I tried my darndest to pay. “Nope,” he shook his head definitively. “Put it in the tank.”

I ate like a hippo while he talked about his daughter in Florida and his love of heavy metal. “People just assume I like the country ‘cuz of the cowboy gig.” he said begrudgingly. 

“Ah.” I looked at the time.

“Hey, I’m sorry, it was nice talking with you, man, thanks for the burger, but I’ve got to get to Lubbock,” I said, sliding out of the booth.

“Lubbock? Shoot,” he said, eyebrows raised, as if I’d just announced I’d hitchhike to Canada. ”You’ve got a ways to go for a whole lotta nothin’.”

“Yeah, I reckon so. Bye!”

I bolted out the door.

One of my favorite parts of life on the road is getting to meet all these strangers. For some reason, some of them talk to me. They might become my friend for a few hours, maybe even a day. They often offer kindness that leaves me dumbstruck. I get to listen to their stories, getting to know the Cliffnotes version of the novels that they are.

And then I’m gone. 

But it’ll happen again, with the next person in the next town.

Maybe they’ll become my friend on Facebook, and I’ll be a curious onlooker as they go on with their lives. Maybe they’ll be a silhouette of a character, like Nick. They’re like poems in a book; maybe not long or detailed, just little pieces of stories I’ll hold onto (and sometimes write songs about).

Sometimes I feel as though God puts me in someone’s path for a reason, and vise versa. Maybe I’ll get to share the gospel with them, or pray for them, or make them laugh or smile somehow. 

Maybe I was meant to park at that truck stop in Idaho at 4 a.m., to groggily wake up midmorning and tumble out of my car to greet a couple of the cashiers in the parking lot on their smoke break. 

“You are so beautiful! You look like a mermaid,” I told the one with green and blue hair. I wasn’t lying, but I’m sure she was confused. Why is this homeless-looking girl bothering me?

“Thanks…”

I shuffled through a box of stuff and found a starfish I’d bought for a quarter at this thrift store in Utah.

“This is for you!”

“Oh my gosh, this is so weird, thank you so much!”

We talked for a while before I headed south. I can’t be certain it made her day, but having something to give her made me so happy.

 Now I make a point to carry trinkets with me for such occasions. You never know when someone might need the stones I found on the Northern Pacific coast, or feathers from the desert, or postcards from any antique store. 

It’s fun. Maybe you should try it if you want to rebel against what your parents told you and start talking to more strangers.

“You know, you do actually need to sell CDs,” my Mom laughs at me a lot. I do bring my CDs on the road to sell when I play in the bars, and they do help fund my gas tank, but from a business perspective I probably do hand out my CDs too much. Or do I?

Like with the dreadlocked man in Oregon who noticed that we were both living out of our cars, so he gave me a little bag he knitted with lavender in it to hang on my mirror, or the rapper in Oklahoma who gave me his CD for one of mine, or the sweetest girl I met on a hike in Big Bend, who told me about being a wildland firefighter, who encouraged me to cancel my plans and stay in the desert longer, who I just wanted to give a CD to…

If someone shares a piece of their heart with you, don’t you want to share some of yours, too? 

And strangers on the road do share their hearts. It’s taken me a long time to understand why, and It’s taken me longer to learn to accept these gestures.

 For one,  it has taken me a long time to learn to accept things like compliments, gifts, and offers of help in my day-to-day life. I still struggle. 

Because if I feel that someone is going out of their way on my behalf, I tend to assume they don’t actually want to, that I am being an inconvenience. I hate the thought of taking up precious space in someone’s life, space they might not want me in. I like to feel that I am being self-sufficient, that I am bringing something to the table.

So if I have a hard time accepting compliments, how much harder is it to accept a hand with carrying my PA, or food, or a place to sleep?

Food tends to be a popular offer, like the gas station burger. It was probably the first thing I became comfortable taking from strangers (of course its food, right?).

Like last year, when I wound up spending a couple of days in Centennial, Wyoming. 

“This is where people come to disappear,” the lady outside of the one all-purpose store, known as the “Friendly Store,” told me. It made sense. It’s in the middle of the Medicine Bow National Forest, the population is 308, and there’s one gas pump and 2 bars. I initially went there to play some songs for some food in one of the bars, but I fell in love with the place. Who doesn’t want to disappear amongst rocky mountains and evergreens for a bit?

The bar I played in featured Bill, the old drunk with long, wispy white hair, who had a lot to say about my music career. Apparently I needed to stop being a folk singer and start singing rock’n roll. “Men wanna hear rock’n roll, sweetie,” he blabbered in an English accent. I prayed for the patience to not slap him.

Then there was Josh, a middle-aged good ol’ boy from Kansas with a heart of gold and a love of alcohol. He was a buck farmer. His wife was taking care of their 9 kids, and he was very excited about that. “Don’t let ‘em fool ya, now!” he hollered. “There are hills in Kansas, they just don’t talk about it!” I raised my eyebrows. “Ok, Josh.”

And then there was Mason. Mason was from Arkansas, and like me, he was rambling around, living out of his van, seeking adventure. It made sense; that’s probably the main reason anyone who wasn’t running from the law would end up in Centennial, WY. He was headed towards Jackson.

 “Her name’s Pearl,” he said later, referring to his van, which wasn’t just a van. The inside was complete wooden cabinets, a bed, a fridge, and a stove that popped out of the trunk! 

Pearl was really something, which was a good thing, because Mason said he had a long road ahead of him. As far as I know he’s still rambling around the country right now.

Josh was also really something. Mason and I both thought so, so after the one bar closed down we followed Josh to the next one, leaving Bill to blabber to himself. 

We soon found that we couldn’t keep up with Josh as he chugged his Miller Lights and raged into the night, so Mason and I walked around the town (which was basically 1 block). We swapped traveling stories, and we found out we both loved Jesus. I don’t meet a lot of strangers who love Jesus, so to be around another believer filled my heart with this peace. We wound up staying up till about 3 a.m. watching mule deer run across the road, and we parked our “homes” behind this bed and breakfast.

“I’m gonna make you breakfast,” he told me in the morning. 

“No! You’re good, you’ve got a long way to go.” I knew from experience how much you have to think about food and how much it costs when you’re trying to fill your tank. The thought of eating his gas money made me sad.

“I want to bless you, let me make you breakfast.” He popped out the stove from the back of the van and cracked some eggs. At least I made the coffee. 

Since then I’ve accepted food and beverages from strangers all over the place. From bacon and eggs on a front porch in Washington State, to a shot of whiskey from a biker at a biker bar in Utah, to waffles from this family I stayed with in Idaho... 

More recently, one of the best free foods I got was from the back of this guy Kyle’s truck. We were parked at this overlook in Big Bend National Park, both cooking dinner from our vehicles. He looked about as scraggly as I did, and he saw me boiling my boxed Velveeta. 

“You want some steak?” he called from the stove on the back of his truck. Admittedly, that was a hard one to turn down after having hiked 15 miles through the desert.

“You want some crappy Mac n’ Cheese?” I offered.

“Sounds like a trade.” Not a fair one, but he went for it, and there was another night of swapping traveling stories and laughter. He told me about surfing in California, I taught him the B7 chord on my guitar, and we wound up going hiking in the Santa Elena Canyon the next day.

Alright, you’re probably thinking, Gees, we get it Alma. You go places, you do stuff, people look at you, think you’re homeless, and say, ‘That girl needs food, let me feed her’, and you’re shameless and stupid enough to just up and take it.

Yeah, maybe. That’s not the point, though.

I have often found that by not accepting what people have to give, you are, in a sense, rejecting a piece of them. “No, thanks, that’s ok,” I’ve often said to kind gestures. The response is often downcast eyes or an insistence upon them doing the gesture anyways. 

For instance, once in Mississippi, I slept in my car in someone’s driveway after a gig. The next morning I left a CD and a note on their windshield and headed out. A couple of weeks later they found my contact information online and expressed that they had really hoped I’d stayed and had coffee with them the next morning. “Aw,” I replied. “Maybe next time!”

Because that gesture is what they had to offer. That is what they wanted to share. 

I love this quote by MFK Fisher: “Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.” 

To share is to build friendship, whether that’s me giving the gas station cashier my starfish or someone making me breakfast. In my case, maybe they’re long distance friendships, or maybe they’re friends that take the shape of a fond memory, but the sharing has led to stories, laughter, and kinships that I wouldn’t trade for anything, and it's made traveling alone not so lonely.

But in order to properly share, you learn how to accept what is shared with you.

Even if it is a gas station burger.

Ode to the White Shoe Box

 I walked down the dirt road. The open fields sprawled around me, dotted with live oaks, hay bales, and cattle. The Florida winter was mild.

At the end of the road was a plot littered with tires, chunks of fencing, scrap metal, and broken Christmas lights. Pieces of plastic confettied the grass. A plywood shed leaned like a feeble old woman. Pieces of the treehouse where we once played hung in the oldest live oak. The younger oaks had grown since I was a kid.

In the middle of the junk was a dirt patch that marked where the single wide I grew up in once stood; a white trailer that looked like a shoe box on the edge of the family farm.

Even though we’ve lived in North Carolina for nearly a decade, all of my dreams still take place in that childhood home.

My parents moved into the trailer when they first got married. It was where they brought my sister and I home from the hospital. It was where they’d lived for 17 years. 

It was home. And it was gone.

In its place was this scrapyard. 

So I closed my eyes and imagined it as it once was, as to not let the current scene infringe on my memories. 

The base of the home was covered with grey lattice. We’d sometimes hear the 2 stray cats that took shelter under the trailer sounding like they were trying to kill each other. Evidence of what they were actually doing came a few weeks later when random kittens would crawl out of the lattice to surprise my sister and I.

Holly bushes lined the porch. In December, my sister and I would decorate them with half-hazardly strewn gobs of tinsel and lights. While our friends had houses dotted with evenly aligned lights, blown up snowmen and santas, dazzling stars and classy wreaths, our trailer looked as though we’d sprayed it with a can of silly string. But we thought it was grand.

One thing that our friends also had were Christmas cards that looked like they came from Hallmark; the family in coordinated outfits in front of a picturesque background, dolled up and smiling sweetly like they liked each other. They’d have them developed at Walmart with a cutesy holiday message and font.

My family had never been into that.  “Look at them bein’ cute,'' we'd say as we hung up our friend’s cards. Our holiday reciprocation was usually home squeezed orange juice from our citrus trees. 

But there is a picture of my sister and I that, while it wouldn’t make Hallmark, could have a shot at Awkward Family Photos. We’re standing in front of the messily decorated trailer. We probably could've brushed our blonde heads, but who’s nitpicking here? 

Chloe is in nothing but her underwear, as she usually was around age 5, and she’s wearing a CSX trucker hat that our train-working grandpa got us. Beside her, I’m clad in camouflage sweatpants and a tie-dye shirt, which is something I would have coordinated myself around age 8. I’m proudly holding a styrofoam plate of cookies, and my stately blue Crocs round out the picture. 

One year, after getting all of our friends’ fancy cards, my Mom thought it would be funny to send this picture out as a Christmas greeting. 

I didn’t see the humor at the time. It was just us doing our thing. But it is a classic picture that still hangs on some folk’s refrigerators today, and I will forever love my mom for it.

The inside of the trailer was a hoot. Walls of celery green, Christmas lights strung year-round, tomato-red furniture and beanbag chairs, a neon-green alien statue that my Dad found in the dump, two pugs, board games, books, a karaoke machine, all the evidences of a homeschooling family, a whole lot of character, a whole lot of of love...

Chloe and I shared the room at the end of the place. I got the top bunk. The square room was crowded with legos and stuffed animals, but the yellow walls were happy. I’d open the window and let my pony stick his head in (the pony that our Grandpa brought home when I was 5, without my parent’s permission, but so it goes). 

I still remember the peace of falling asleep to the sound of the freight train chugging and whistling across the field, dreaming about where it was going.

“I’m gonna be an arter,” I’d tell my parents when they asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I meant to say “artist,” but they knew what I meant. With this came an endless stream of doodles and paintings of horses, mountains, and mermaids, and Mama hung them all up in the kitchen like they were Picasso’s.

Chloe was all about pirates. Whether it was Captain Hook or the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Barbies that well-intentioned family members mistakenly bought her always ended up walking the plank of her toy pirate ships.

With this, Mom had the bright idea of redecorating the bathroom on our end of the trailer and making it “pirate themed.” Pirate gold and seashells decorated the mirror and the little dimly-lit chandelier, a model of the Black Pearl graced the top of the medicine cabinet, and sea creatures were littered about. It was every little girl’s dream.

If the inside of the shoe box wasn’t cool enough, we had the most wondrous yard.

Of course, there was the entirety of the family farm, with fields to run in, hay bales to jump on, and cows wandering around. There was the nursery my grandparents owned with potted shrubs clustered together that doubled as imaginary jungles, the pile of mulch that we’d climb like it was Everest, the green house where’d we’d go to find snail friends, grapefruit trees perfect for climbing.

But our yard was magic for us and our friends, a place for imagination and dirty bare feet.

My Dad and uncles took plastic pallets and wood scraps and built a 3-story treehouse in the ancient-looking oak in the corner of the yard. It was Swiss-Family-grade; roofless, so the spanish moss could tickle our heads, and at the very top was a zipline that ran across the lawn that was just scary enough to be fun. 

We decorated the place with rocks, shells, broken glass, mason jars, and paint. It’s where I first learned to play fiddle, because the first year of fiddling sounded like a dying cat and I wasn’t allowed to play in the trailer. We’d climb up to look across the sprawling fields and daydream. We were princesses and it was our castle.

There was a tire swing that swung so rapidly it made some people motion-sick, a trampoline where we’d play “dead-man,” where I probably laid down to read books more than I actually jumped. 

There was a large patch of thickets and wildflowers that we referred to as the “butterfly garden,” and a giant metal flower that my uncle welded out of old oil drums.

There were places to shoot our pink BB guns, places for Leela the lab to dig holes, places to hide for the most epic games of hide-and-seek, places to be loud and rambunctious or quiet and thoughtful.

While our yard was as magical as it was, we took advantage of what space that little shoe box had to offer. On Friday nights we’d invite over everyone we knew, young and old, family and friends. We’d play games, eat my Mom’s cooking, and fill the place with laughter. Some nights it was so crowded you could barely walk around. 

Those were my favorite nights. I think they still are.

“Why can’t I have my own room like all my friends do?” I’d asked my parents a few times, a question I now regret because we were (and are) so blessed.

Sure, my Dad worked a good job. We probably could have swung at least a double-wide (that was my dream, a double-wide), or maybe an actual house. 

But why? For more space to put more crap to gather more dust? For a nicer house to take composed family pictures in front of? So we could invite people over without feeling like sardines in the kitchen? So my Mom would have to work full-time instead of homeschool Chloe and I and help us become weird individuals we are, or so we’d have a bigger bill to pay and less funds to spend on trips to Disney, or to see the country, or to help a neighbor? 

There’s nothing wrong with having a nice house.

But one thing I took from my parents is that maybe it’s not the wisest to buy into a lifestyle just because you can technically afford it, or because it’s what the people around you are doing, or because it would look nicer in a Christmas card. 

Maybe there's something better.

And I’ve had my own room for a while now. 

But, oh, how I’ll always love and miss that little white shoe box in the middle of the field.