1.26.24

I just got back home from visiting my parents. We hadn’t been over to their place in a little while, and I’d forgotten just how much feelings get stirred up, going back to the place where I grew up.

Ma and Dad only live about 50 or so minutes away, but the drive there and back — no matter how frequently it happens — is as close to time travel as I’ll ever get.

There’s a ton I could write about. This is a deep, rich vein, but I’m going to just focus on one thing that hit me hard tonight.

Ziti, my dog, needed to pee, so I took her out the back door of the trailer my parents have lived in for 52 years. It was dark, and Ziti was sniffing all the new smells and gobbling up snow instead of doing her business. She pulled me around the corner of the house, and I looked up.

My breath caught in my throat.

I was looking up the hill on the easterly-facing side of the trailer at a darkened tree line, split in half my an old impromptu road that’s been used for logging, sugaring, and farming over the decades.

It’s also a path I’ve walked countless times, tromping up to the old sugar house, first as a child to play with pals, then as a teen for private makeout sessions with my high school girlfriend, and later still with my own kids as we explored the woods behind where their Mama and Papa live.

And just over that hill is the farm where I learned so much. Things like how you need to be flexible because you’re never actually in control. (The animals and the weather are the bosses on the farm.) That there’s no such thing in life as “that’s not my job.” And that sacrifice comes in doses of various size.

I stood at the foot of that hill tonight, powerless against the flood of sweet memories as they pooled around me. Driving back home just now — shifting the time machine into reverse — I thought about those moments with Ziti earlier. How it wasn’t just taking my dog out to pee.

I mean, first of all, Ziti isn’t just any dog. She’s Ziti. She’s my good girl.

And this evening, she became part of that lineage of memories.

It’s a different world I see

When it’s just my dog and me