> This afternoon, i drove down the street where i grew up. I do that occasionally, just to remember what the house used to look like before the people who got the bungalow after us chopped down MY dogwood tree in the sideyard and moved the fence around the back up the 15 or 20 feet it took to make it even with the front of the house.

The first house I lived in when we moved to Tennessee always seemed small to me growing up there. I lived in it for 4 years. We had a barn, a pasture and a graveyard all in our backyard. Usually when people tell you there's a graveyard in their backyard they mean a little graveyard of the same family. No, I'm talking about a graveyard that's still in use today and that's so old there are slaves buried outside the fence because they were black. Last time I went there, which isn't very hard since the back of my pasture surrounds the said graveyard, the house wasn't small, it was extremely tiny and the used-to-seem-like mile bike ride to the graveyard just seemed like a short stroll.

It is kind of strange how things change in general. Things don't even necessarily look the same as you remembered them. Everything from childhood is kind of warped. Strange. If I ever go back again to Sheridan, Arkansas where I lived before we moved here 11 years ago, I'd like to see that HUGE field that we played in. I betcha I could walk it faster than I could run it back then. Of course I was in the 1st 2nd and 3rd grades when I was playing in it. Ah, memories. G'day!

Wedge Antilles