I think about all of it.  The things that have taken place since I was an adult.  The concerts, travels, events. All the things. The meanings attached to each of it.  Those things literally historical.   The pictures made.  Airplane tickets for things too far to drive.  The “likes”.  The coming together with my peers at bars, through work and playing social sports. The books read. The films watched.  The Q&A’s had. The sex.  The laughter.  This is living life.  Without my own personal family this is my meaning.  The brunches, the drink specials, the mimosas and the chats. They become my everything because the only thing left is me on my couch with my dog drinking a beer and watching TV. Yet my mind drifts.

I think about 4th of July 2004. I was 24. I was married, but my recluse of a husband just wanted to sit at home and play X Box so I drove 90 mins to be with my Me Ma.  She and I drove in her little red Dodge truck from 1991 into the country and watched the fireworks.  I will never forget this day until I die.  We sat there in silence and watched them explode.  Just the two of us.

When I was a little girl it would be just the two of us at all times.  I would ride on her tractor out in the hay fields. Just us. She drove, and I sat on the wheel well holding on for dear life to the reflector as my grip. We would move bales of hay, feed the cows, tend her gardens.  Just an old woman and her young grand-daughter out in the middle of 200 acres.  And many times as an adult later I will be doing “cool” things in Austin or NYC or LA and I would think back to my Me Ma and me in the line at Piggly Wiggly (now long gone) buying groceries and Shasta cream sodas for $.20 a can and using coupons and them asking us if we needed help to our car and that’s the only thing on earth that really matters because all this other crap I’ve accumulated as an adult and all these “glamorous” experiences I’ve racked up pale in comparison to standing in line at the Piggly Wiggly after buying a snow cone on a hot summer day.  I miss that. I would trade in everything to go back to that.  I would trade everything to “not know”. To just be sitting in the front seat of the truck with the local newspaper folded up and the local radio station playing softly in the background while just the two of us peered out the windshield and watched the firecrackers exploding overhead. This will always be my baseline.  No matter how cool nothing will ever trump this and I will always remember…