a worn out sofa with photo albums piled around us, and i realize that i am afraid to leave. i am excited and i am fucking terrified. i can't imagine any other place being home. and i think about how i grew up.

covered in dirt from digging potatoes alongside my dad, bike rides and swimming in lakes instead of watching television. knowing every tree in the woods, never getting lost, following train tracks by the river, scratched wrists from blackberry bushes and hay bales. hardwood floors, painting, beads and string. playing my parents' records when they were gone: the white album, joni mitchell, the grateful dead, examining album covers and inhaling the scent. terrible 3x5 photographs, hoarding rocks and insect exoskeletons and dried plants. writing stories, pages and pages of crayola marker rockets and stars. reading myself to sleep every night, ramona quimby books dew-wrinkled from being abandoned in the yard by the swingset. candles and a woodstove when the electricity went out, fourteen foot snow drifts.

i don't know if i'll ever be able to let our children call anywhere else home. we know we have to come back.

on repeat, because it's too damn short.

[ cat power ]