Grass

I really don't know where I should start. At the beginning, maybe. That seems good. But what's the beginning? When did all this start?

I'll start in fourth grade. That was a very critical year in my young life. In fact, it just about shaped everything that I still am today. I was nine.

But since all really started after we moved (which would be around the middle of my fourth grade year) I'll start there.

ooooooo

Las Vegas was far too large, in my opinion. At the same time, though, it's all I had know, excluding Hot Springs, Arkansas, where we lived from before the time I was born until I was about five.

Being as such, I didn't really appreciate it. Las Vegas is, first and formost, a gambling town for adults. I found the whole affair rather boring, actually. Besides that, I lived with my Mom and Grandpa, and they were starting to get restless. What to do?

Move, of course, like you've always done. Throw a dart at the map and point the wheels in the direction of the sun.

And that's exactly what we did.

Grandpa pulled out the Ol' United States Map and one of his trusty darts (I'm not kidding, he actually used to play). We all closed our eyes and he threw it.

Where did it land?

Ironically enough, it landed smack-dab in the middle of a small black dot labeled "Mountain Home". In Arkansas. We couldn't help but laugh at that; we were going back to where we came from.

It took a few months to get off the ground, but we kept the map hanging on the living room wall for encouragement. Christmas came and went.

I think some of my fondest memories were of helping Grandpa take down the Christmas decorations while Mom slept. We were watching some sort of Disney Channel animated movie marathon. I was in my 'Be With Me' stage, as I like to call it, when I never wanted to do anything alone. Although he may not of liked it, Grandpa put up with 'Balto'.

Mom had set up a little Christmas village around the base of the Christmas tree (which we had a hell of a time keeping the cat out of, may I add). We were pulling up all the little people and houses and putting them in a storage tote. We padded it with the quilt batting that served as snow.

Christmas was my mother's favorite holiday. She just loved all of the decorations and all of the animated TV shows every station was showing during the whole month of December. She also loved trains, and we always had one that skirted the bottom of the tree.

It was Grandpa's favorite season as well, but it always made him depressed.

My Mom wasn't really his blood daughter, but she might as well have been. My Grandmother had met him when my mom was 13, and he had taken her in. As for the mother-daughter animosity... well, I'll get into that later. For now, I'll just suffice it to say that he was my Grandpa, and that blood isn't always thicker than water.

Sometimes love is thicker than blood.

I called him 'Daddy' because he was the only father figure I had ever known. He'd lived with us (or we with him) for as long as I could remember.

After Christmas, the plans to move to this little town we'd never heard of finally took wing. We started packing and throwing away most of the stuff that had collected in the three years since we had moved last.

I guess this is where I get the bug for traveling; We were always moving when I was younger. Even now, I get restless every year or two. I want to smell the open road, see the countryside flying rapidly past the windows, and taste the sweet anticipation that always comes with being in between somewheres.

The boxes piled up in the dining room after we had thrown out the table. It was actually quite funny... In the space of about three days the entire contents of our 2 Bedroom, 2 Bath apartment was piled into the dining room. I remember coming home from school one day (we lived right across the street) and seeing just this sold wall of boxes and three air matresses on the floor.

Mom was tranferring jobs; she worked at a department store at the time. We had three days until we would be piled into our 1993 Plymouth Voyager (grey, of course), pulling a trailer full of our belongings and driving off into the sunset.

As I always was when we started over, I was emmensly happy to have a clean slate. Of course, leaving my friends bewhin was hard, but by now I was used to severing attachments. I think by this point I had excepted the fact that this would eventually happen.

Starting in a new house, a new town, and a new school is ususually something that kids my age blanched at. However, I found it exhilerating.

We rolled through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas (The panhandle, lovely place), and Oklahoma on our way across country. It is in my personal opinion that the best countryside in the world is on that endless, flat highway. I'd only made the trip four times by that point, of course.

Finally, after three days of riding, hotel rooms and gas stations, we rolled to a stop inside the tiny town of Mountain Home, Arkansas.

I wonder if I would have shyed away if I had know what brilliant colors lay on the vista for me.