In my dream, I was accosted by sugar ants in the sandbox, near the honeysuckle and curled parsley behind the house. I was trying to eat the little ants but was called in for cheese and baloney.
When I came in, hopping in worn-out slippers, the glass door slid into the kitchen with plasterboard walls and beige ceramic tile. There was a black spider perched on the ceiling with bright yellow knees.
Those years ago I drew with sidewalk chalk, made myself mazes on the sloping driveway too steep for basketball. Cicadas dragged in heat on waves, droning. One landed on me - a yell caught in my throat - but I made myself look at it and be still, shaking.
Back then I had an old cape & a homemade bow-and-arrow. Iād sally forth into the backyard, barefoot, jumping over prickly mulch, brushing my shins against clouds of low love-in-a-mist with its threaded leaves & shy blue-white flowers.
Sometimes my sister was back there too, tanning, or Mom carving little men out of cherry, but more often I was all alone in that wilderness in moccasins & living off wood sorrel, the brighter clover, lemony.
Or in rain I listened to my brother play piano if he was home, maybe Bags and Trane, and Iād dance between shadows, the underworld of the patches of carpet in the light.
Later - a little older - I recognized that home is more a time than a place, and understood I would miss it years before it was gone
so around nine years old I went through every foot of that high-ceilinged house, that weedy backyard,
and made a solemn farewell to everything in advance trying hard to be ready long before the time came to leave.