We have to go meet the pizza delivery guy. I am always jealous of people in cities who can ride their bikes on sidewalks and have lemonade stands and have pizza delivered right to their doors. Dad orders pizza from the pizza place in Nashville, and then he has to go meet the pizza guy at Van Buren. The extra mile and half from the elementary school to our house is too much for the delivery guy to manage.

Dad heads out to the Crouch’s Market to rent a VHS and get some Coke. Coke doesn’t necessarily mean Coca Cola. “Coke” is any sort of dark soda, the way any tissue is a “Kleenex” or any photo opportunity is a “Kodak Moment.” We get to ride along.

Crouch’s Market has been around since the dinosaurs. It smells like gun oils and wood and the felt that covers a pool table. Norma runs the store. She sells lunch meat and souvenir hats and live bait. Right up by the counter, there are racks with Sour Straws and Kit Kats and Big League Chew Bubblegum.

The movie rentals are in three long rows. Dad rents the same movies every time – “Aliens.” “Predator.” “Terminator.” “Jurassic Park.” “Starship Troopers.”

One time, Gary and I found a huge mushroom in the woods and took my picture with it. It hangs on a board in the back room at Crouch’s, by the pool tables. I like to find it every time we go there. Pictures of Papaw and Troy and Gary with deer and turkeys they hunted are on display there too. We’re famous.

When we get home, Dad munches on the circus peanuts that always accompany a trip to Crouch’s. He cracks and shells nuts while he sits on the couch watching football or basketball or “Rambo.” He mixes peanut butter and syrup in a bowl and makes sandwiches with it.

Maybe once a year, he’ll order a pizza. He calls the pizza place in Nashville. Places the order. Waits a half an hour or forty-five minutes and heads out to Van Buren Elementary to meet the delivery guy who won’t come all the way out to our house.

Snow leaves our yard completely covered in at least a foot of fluffy white. Dad sets about making a snow village in the driveway. Some dads shovel snow so you can get the car out or make a path from the back door to the mailbox.

My Dad makes an igloo and a snow bench that lines the entire driveway. He creates snow chairs and a television with knobs and antennae. My Brother and I make lumpy snowmen out front. They don’t stand a chance in the face of Dad’s art and architecture and smooth edges and pristine, flat surfaces.

 He thinks he’s an artist. Sometimes, I believe him.

Wisdom.

Vinegar cures everything. Indigestion. Bad breath. Lady parts. And you can clean the mirrors with it. Everything.

It doesn’t matter if Clyde did it, you have to clean it up.

“Without my Nana, I’m a nobody. With my Nana, I’m a somebody.” She later updates this little chant to “Without my Jesus, I’m a nobody. With my Jesus, I’m a somebody.”

Get what you pay for. Ordering at the drive-thru window is not as simple as it seems. Nana needs seedless buns (for her colon!) and a hot fudge sundee with no nuts. And if we get a mile away and Sissy finds that there is an onion on her cheeseburger-with-no-onions order, you better believe we’re turning around and heading back to get a refund or a new, onion-less burger.

Auttabin hair is the kind you have when it ought-a been brushed before you left the house.

Always spray a little perfume or cologne on each wrist, your neck, and your undies – “Just in case,” Nana says. Also, always wear clean undies, in case you end up in the hospital.

“When you’re talking to yourself, you’re talking to the devil.” Grandma Dori, Nana’s mom, tells me this while I sit and admire the little glass figurines in her living room. I wonder if she meant to call me the devil?

“Roll me one, Ma!” I have no what this means or where it came from, but every now and then someone shouts this out at a family get-together and everyone busts out laughing.

The Pedigo house. This is how you refer to your house when the kids have trashed it and you want them to clean it up so you tell them, “This isn’t the Pedigo house, you know! Clean it up!”

“I made it snow!” If Nana washes the windows or takes a lot of time fixing her hair. If Papaw waxes the car or fixes a leaky pipe around the house or stacks enough wood. Anytime you do something you should do, but normally don’t, it will snow. Guaranteed.

“Don’t swear, Sarah. Ignorant people swear because they don’t have enough of a vocabulary to express themselves with real words. Don’t swear. It’s trashy.” – Mom

The Matlock curse. If you are a woman with Matlock blood coursing through your veins, you will have cramps on vacation. And on your first date. And at graduation. And on your wedding day. A job interview, choir performance, or moving to a new city. You will  be visited by the Matlock curse.

“Pray about it.” If you ask Nana for advice, she tells you to pray about it. If you don’t ask Nana for advice, there’s a miniature Nana-voice in your head that says, “Pray about it.”

Christmas Eve is at Nana and Papaw’s house. I hear sleigh bells outside, and when we open the front door, a McDonald’s Play Set is out there waiting for me on the porch! I make Gary crawl all on his knees past the drive-thru window and order from a menu of plastic pancakes and rubber fries.

Before it gets too late, we have to go home so we can get to sleep before Santa comes. Mom always says we have to wait until Christmas morning to open our presents, but we are insistent and persuasive little boogers.

“Okay,” she finally says. “You can open your stockings. But that is all.” But we already know we’ve won. An hour and a half later, we sit in a pile of tape and shredded paper and toys we can’t take out of the box yet because we’ll lose the pieces in the mess.

We set out cookies and milk on the kitchen counter. We set out celery and carrots for the reindeer. We feel bad that everyone else forgets about the reindeer. They’re the ones doing all the work, you know – all that flying.

In the morning, Mom wakes us up. She can’t wait for us to get up on our own. She wants us to see what Santa brought. In the dining room, in front of the fireplace, little globs of melted snow on the floor show us the route Santa took from the Christmas tree to the kitchen for cookies and then back up the chimney.  The celery and carrots are nibbled too.

All of our presents from Nana and Mom and Sissy are wrapped and under the tree for ages before Christmas. In the weeks leading up to it, my brothers and I divide up our stacks and shake the boxes and count who has more and therefore must be more loved.

But Christmas morning – Santa Presents – this is different. These presents aren’t wrapped. Four shiny new toys sit in front of the Christmas tree. Our names are displayed in curly, North Pole-esque letters. Our stockings are also magically full again. Candy. Squirt guns. Lip gloss. Teeny figurines. We gorge on sweets and Tic-tac’s. We watch Christmas Vacation before lunch and after lunch and before bed, quoting every single line.

The stores are all closed. So are the restaurants. No one is on the computer or a cell phone or even earphones. We sit cozily ensconced in our little house, losing pieces of our new toys in the discarded wrapping paper, bundling up for brief sledding and snowman building and creek ice skating adventures. We come back inside; our snow-covered things end up sopping wet in the floor by the door.

Hot chocolate.  Eggnog. Homemade peanut brittle and a cheese tray that someone left for Papaw on the mail route. We finally feel brave enough to sneak the candy canes from the tree that have been hanging there as decoration. I like the sweet ones with rainbow colors that taste like skittles or bubble gum.

Our Christmas – the jolliest of holidays.

We are making address books in class. We learn how to put the dashes in our phone numbers and to capitalize the street names in front of our houses. We write our addresses in shaky, oversized letters on thick, dark lines across the page. Everybody in the class gets a copy of our Class Address Book, photocopied on the big copier in the office, with three staples holding it together down the left side.

On Sunday, the phone rings. It is for me.

“Sarah, it’s Ni-ick,” my papaw says.

I am excited! This is the first time the phone rang for me that it wasn’t Sissy or some other family member. A real phone call!

“Hi,” says a little voice on the other line. “I called everybody in our Class Address Book so far down to you and you’re the only one who is home.”

We talk for a minute or two, our nine-year-old selves having little to contribute in the way of conversation.

The trouble, though, is that now a boy has called me. A real boy. From school.

Papaw tortures me mercilessly.

He croons to me, “I just called…. to say…. I love you. I just called… to say… I care.” Some weird old song from a long time ago. Embarrassing.

I’m taunted around the house with “Nick. N-Nick.Nick. Nick. NICK. Nick. NICK-O-LODEON!”

“Oh, Ni-ick. So glad you called,” he mimics me. Except, I don’t think I even said that.

“NO! It’s not like that! I was the first one on the list to answer. He wasn’t even trying to call me especially.” My protests, pouts, and shouts go unanswered. Papaw is not the least bit concerned with who Nick did or did not mean to call.

I live in constant fear that another boy will accidently call me someday. Papaw doesn’t care when four years go by, then ten, and Nick never calls me again. He carries on in his own little pretend world where Nick and I are estranged lovers, holding out for the day we can be together, just calling to say "I love you."

We’re going to Disney World! It is Christmas and my brother and I are sleeping on the pull-out couch at Nan and Pap’s. Santa comes in the night and brings me a soft Barbie, the kind you can snuggle and sleep with. I saw them on TV!

It is so dark and early when we get in Troy’s truck to drive to the airport. We pile into the back seat and I am comfortably dozing in a half-sleep state. I can smell Troy’s cigarette. He has the window down, so most of the smoke goes right outside, but a small, sweet bit of it drifts back toward me and it smells good.

At the airport, they put big orange and yellow tags on our suitcases. They are going to fly on a different plane and meet us there. But when we get to Florida and wait at the baggage claim, we find one, two, three suitcases. The others never appear. The airport people tell us they must have been tagged wrong and sent somewhere else, so we’ll get them in a day or two.

At the hotel, we sort out what clothes we have to share among four adults and two children. Nana finds my brother and I shirts with matching sweats. Mine is pink and has Pocahontas on it. There is a Laundromat in the hotel and we go with Nana each morning while our one change of clothes washes. I catch myself staring at a washer, and not thinking and not realizing I am awake. This seems like an important moment. My first daydream. I’ve read about it and heard about it, but now I’ve felt it.

Even though the commercials make Florida look warm and sunny and bright, it is cold. Sissy has diarrhea when we are walking to a ride in Toon Town and we have to wait. We stop by the ocean and watch the waves come up to the sand, but it’s so cold no one wants to touch the water.

Back in the hotel, all the grownups are getting ready and talking and I have to sneeze. The bathroom is occupied. There are no Kleenexes and this is coming out. I grab the closest thing, a t-shirt, and let ‘er rip. I think it is Troy’s. A few minutes later, Sissy picks up the shirt and asks what happened. “Who blew their nose in this clean shirt?” I say nothing. I hate being in trouble. If I just keep quiet and look away, maybe she’ll forget that it happened.

Before we leave, Nana makes a finally sweep of the room to make sure we got everything. Papaw leaves a twenty dollar bill on the nightstand for the cleaning ladies. Sissy whispers in my ear, “After everyone leaves the room, run back in there and grab that money!” So I do.

“No! No! I was kidding. Go put it back,” she says. Sometimes, I just can’t tell with her.

Food.

Fried potatoes. A staple with every meal. They are a little more done on one side than the other, dripping grease. Nana cooks them in an iron skillet and doles them out on Styrofoam plates. She makes Papaw’s plate first. He likes to eat his dinner cold, for some reason.

Sweet tea. The instant, caffeine-free kind. Shaken and chilled in an old two gallon milk jug.

Nana’s homemade chicken noodles. She rolls the dough out on the cutting board and uses a little plastic gadget, with 6 wheels across the front, to slice the noodles into thin little strips. I like to eat the raw dough, with some flour still stuck to it.

Zebra cakes. First, you eat the icing from around the sides. Then, you peel the icing from the top. The bottom is pretty tough to get just the icing. Then, you lick the crème filling from the middle. You eat the cake part last, because it’s leftover and you don’t want to waste it.

Generic root beer. No family gathering is complete without generic pop, but especially without generic root beer. It is warm from sitting out in the van or the jeep, but you drink it just the same. It’s tradition.

Sissy’s deviled eggs. She makes them with the perfect blend of sweet and tangy. Troy sneaks one when he goes to get them from the car, and comes back with little bits of yellow fluff in his whiskers.

Andes Mints. We get Troy Andes Mints at Christmas time. He doesn’t like them. He gets them every year. He takes them home, stashes them in the freezer, and the rest of his family munches on them.

Vegetable soup. If Nana is at work and Papaw has to make his own dinner, it’s going to be microwave vegetable soup with crackers. Nana stocks up on it when she knows she won’t be home to make dinner.

Mountain Dew. The Mountain Dew is Mom’s. Don’t touch it. Don’t even think about it.

Banana pudding. This is mine and Papaw’s favorite.

Cake. Nana makes cake for everything. If you have a birthday or it’s Halloween or it's a Wednesday, Nana makes cake. White cake. Chocolate cake. Angel food cake. Homemade sugar crème icing. It sticks to the spatula when you try to get a piece, so you scrape the clump of icing along the side of your plate and dip the cake in it, like dressing.

It is dark and cold and drizzling. Papaw and Gary let us come hunting with them, and we have camouflage overalls zipped up to our necks. Papaw has a flashlight on his belt and on his hat. They are carrying shot guns slung across their backs. The dogs are straining on their leashes, whining and barking. They know what's coming.

They pull the dogs close and soothe them for a minute. “Shhhh, girl. Shhh,” the grown men coo, petting the dogs' heads and trying to get a grasp on the leash latch, trying to let the dogs run free. “Go get ‘em, boys! Go on!” The dogs take off with a yelp and we hear them from what seems like miles away, barking and scratching and treeing animals we can’t see in the dark.

Gary shines his flashlight up into the tree. Big, eerie glowing eyes stare down at us from a tree branch. It’s an opossum or a raccoon. The dogs are going crazy at the base of the tree. They jump up on their hind legs and paw at the tree trunk, like they would climb right on up the tree if they could just get a good grip. Their tales are swinging so violently, and they thump each other on the backs and butts, excited beyond belief.

But it is so dark and cold and wet. My legs hurt and my eyes are heavy and I just want to be warm. Why is this taking so long? How long do we have to stay out here? Papaw, can we go back in now?

When Papaw shoots a squirrel, he lets me carry it back down the hill to the yard. It is limp and warm and so much heavier than I thought it would be. I carry it by the back legs, clenching my fingers to hold its unexpected weight. Suddenly, I feel a pulse, a heartbeat. I feel it against my thumb. I fling the squirrel to the ground.

“Papaw! It’s alive! I felt its heartbeat!” I holler.

“No, no. That’s just your own heartbeat. You can feel it in your thumb.”

“No! It’s alive!”

“Here.  Press your thumb and your first finger together really hard. There, just like that. Do you feel it? Is that what it felt like?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Do you feel how slow it is? If it was the squirrel, it would be beating really really fast. “

I’m not quite convinced that the squirrel is dead, but I trust Papaw, so I hold it very gingerly between my thumb and first finger, just like he said. I have to press hard, though, because it is so heavy. I can feel the heartbeat again, but its slow like he said.

Back in the yard, he starts to skin it. I hold the squirrel, one foot in each hand. It's hanging upside down, spread-eagled. Papaw takes out his knife and runs it right along the center of the squirrel’s belly. I can feel the skin and muscles and tendons give way, the legs spread farther and farther apart in my hands. He pulls the guts out.

This is so cool.

Mom is making me go to Mean Vicky’s house. I hate it here. We get up really early in the morning, when it’s still dark and still cold. I am bundled up in layers of hats and scarves and jackets and carried to the car. By the time I start to feel awake, we are almost there. I start crying because I know what’s coming.

We pull into her drive. It’s raining. It’s dark. I can see the raindrops falling in the beam of the headlights. The windshield wipers are working over time. Mom unfastens me from the car and carries me up the walk. I’m crying. I hate it here. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me with Mean Vicky.

“Hurry. Finish your cereal. It’s time to lay back down. Time to nap,” she says. I am staring at the little tan O’s floating in the milk in my cereal bowl. I push them to one side and then the other with the spoon.

“Eat it! Quit playing with it.”

Finally, she’s had enough. She takes my cereal. She dumps the milk. She leaves the rest of the soggy Cheerios in the bottom of the bowl. When she says to hurry up and eat, she means it. I’ve never been treated this way before. I wasn’t finished yet!

At nap time, we are not allowed to play in the living room with the toys. She has a chest full of toys, and the lid is propped half open. I can see them from my nap spot. Bright pinks and blues, shiny plastic balls, doll hair, levers and handles. They peek out of the top of the trunk. No one is allowed to play with them during nap time. Even if you can see them from your nap spot. And even if you'll be really quiet and not wake up anybody else.

Nope, no one. Mean Vicky said so.

So why do I see a girl sitting in the middle of the floor, playing with a doll or a truck or a bouncy ball? She has long hair and she’s older than me, but she’s still a kid. Why isn’t she taking a nap? And why does she get to play with the toys? That is against the rules. Mean Vicky said so.

Just when I think I cannot stand another minute, Mom and Nana come to pick me up. Oh, what joy!  I am saved at last. I hope they never make me come here again. I tell them in the car  about my poor, abandoned Cheerios, never to be sweetened and eaten. I cry to them. She’s mean. Who does that? Pours out your cereal like that? Just because you didn't eat it fast enough. I tell them about the girl, the one who got to play with the toys.

“That’s her daughter,” they tell me. They say it like that is supposed to make it okay. I’m someone’s daughter too. What makes her special? Better yet, what makes her more special than me? To not have to nap or follow the rules?

I beg them not to make me go to Mean Vicky’s house again. But I know they will. They have to work.

We skate on the ice in the Creek. Some patches of ice are wide and we build up pretty good speed. Mostly, though, where the water was shallow, rock edges stick up through the frozen surface and trip us in our tennis shoes. When a big snow hits, we start teeny little snow balls at one end of the field and roll them until they are ten times our size at the other end. Little bits of hay and brown grass and dirt cling to the snowy surface of the giant snow balls littering the pasture.

Ginger and Jiggy have shaggy coats. Their hair clumps in sections when the snow or sleet dries on their backs.   Their manes get tangled, and I brush them out and braid them. I am enchanted to be this close to such a big creature and not be trampled by hooves. Ginger especially likes it when I brush her. I  can see it in her eyes and the way she ducks her head down, inviting me  to pat between her ears. She and Jiggy sleep in the barn at night, packed in with bales and bales and bales of hay.

The hay loft is full. We climb the rickety ladder and squeeze through the square opening, coughing and sputtering as bits of hay and barn-dust invade our lungs. When you get into the hay loft, you’re supposed to pull the heavy wooden slat back across the hole so that no one accidentally falls through. But we always forget.

We’re too busy climbing over the scratchy bales, stacked high to ceiling. A barn cat has kittens and we hear them mewling in the back corner. Cozy and warm. Tucked away between two bales, their crusty eyes and wobbly legs are beautiful and pitiful to see. We can’t touch them yet, and it’s killing us.

 We peek out the loft window and watch the horses in the field below. They don’t do a whole lot. They just eat grain and hay and grass and get fat. Sometimes, Papaw sits us up on their bare backs, but they never learned what do with a kid on their shoulders, so they simply stand there, perplexed.

Papaw put a block of salt in the field. The deer have thick tongues and, in the wee hours of the morning, they lick deep grooves into the sides of it. We get down on our hands and knees and lick it too. We break ice cycles off the porch roof and suck on them like lollipops. They taste like rain water and tin.

My brother has a brilliant idea. “Let’s sled down the creek bank and onto the creek!” I go first. The round, silver sled flies down the bank! Excellent. I hit the surface with a thud, my head falls back with the jolt. My head hits the ice. No real damage done. Just a bump.

Oh, and I’m never listening to my brother again.

My brother has a brilliant idea. “Let’s stick our tongues to the pipe, like they do in A Christmas Story! Let’s see if it works.” I go first. And now I’m stuck. I simply cannot move, my tongue stuck to the piping above me in the tunnel. “Hewp!” I cry out. My brother says he’ll run inside and get some hot water. I wait. And wait. He isn’t coming. I rip my tongue from the frozen surface, and run back up to the house, bleeding. My brother is on the couch, stripped down to his long johns, drinking hot chocolate, and watching cartoons. In the bathroom, I peer at my battered tongue in the mirror. It’s brown around the edges, and red and bumpy in the middle.

I’m never listening to my brother again.

We sit in a circle in the morning and play a hand-clap game, counting the number of days we’ve been in school so far. We finger paint, which feels like something we should be in trouble for. Smearing colorful goo all over the table top surface? I would be in so much trouble at home. But it’s okay here. Actually, it’s wonderful here.

In the afternoon, we get to drink chocolate milk from little cartons. They bring it in to the classroom in brown, square crates stacked on a cart. Some days we have to do fluoride. Tiny cups of pink liquid stand in rows on a lunch tray. A line of tape runs the length of the room, and we stand on it in a row, waiting our turn. She checks our name off the list when we take a cup. I don’t like fluoride day. It smells funny and tastes funny and makes me feel all woozy, like my head is full of yarn and air instead of brain.

We have a substitute teacher at recess. It rained in the morning, and there are puddles scattered around the playground. One by the swings. One by the sandbox. The sand there is sticky and rough from the earlier showers. One under the monkeybars. We take turns climbing across the cool, slick metal bars, trying not to fall in the puddle. But we aren’t really trying that hard. Someone lands in the puddle.

Uh oh! Look around. Quick. Did she see? Did the teacher see? We’re going to be in trouble.

But she’s laughing. How fun! A grownup who likes fun, kid things? This is a miracle.

Suddenly, everyone is jumping in puddles. Splashing. Stomping. Dirty, brown puddle water spraying up the backs of our jeans and onto our coats. Little flecks of mud and rock stick to pink round cheeks and in the girls’ long ponytails. This is the best recess ever.

Suddenly, everyone freezes. Now, we’re in trouble. Here comes a real teacher. She teaches first grade. She’s tall, and has red hair and glasses, and her voice is sharp and straight like a razor. We’re all ordered to sit against The Wall. That’s where you have to go when you’re bad at recess. Go sit by yourself along The Wall and watch everyone else have fun. With my back to The Wall, the scratchy bricks pick at my coat and catch pieces of my hair, pulling it when I turn my head.

We are all in trouble, but it doesn't seem fair. The grownup in charge was letting us play there. She was okay with it, and she was the one in charge, so why does this other lady get to come out here and tell us we all did something bad? How can you be in trouble for something that you’ve been told you are allowed to do? Rules are supposed to be simple and constant, and I do not like it when they change. It is the essence of unfairness. My five-year-old self is offended and outraged.

Now, any time it’s rainy before recess, even if it stops in time for us to go play, we have to have Inside Recess. Board games. Books. The costume area and play place where we can play house or doctor or ride on the pony seesaw.

And each morning, we sit in a circle and clap our hands and slap our knees and add one more day to the count. These are the days we are in school.

When the nights get cooler and the dark comes sooner, my brother and I play in the light cast by the Security Light. A power line runs through the yard, and we play a game. The high, thick, black cord is our target. A small Nerf football, with little holes chewed in the sides, is lobbed back forth across the wire. You get points based on “over it,” “under it,” or “hit it!” You get the most points when you hit it. We play this game for hours. Talking about everything and nothing, all at once.

At Christmas, we got fake laptops. The kind that look like real computers but are really full of dumb learning games like Hang Man and a music maker. Instead of using it to learn math or “spot the noun,” we play like we are in Twister and we run behind the tool shed, dodging tornados and trying to calculate the next likely touchdown in our area. My brother got a Terminator doll – excuse me, action figure – for Christmas too. When you push the buttons he says, “Hasta la vista… babay” and “Aisle be bach.” His arm is plastic flesh, and you can see the machinery underneath the skin.

Someone, Mom or Dad, tied up an old tire to the side of the barn and I practice pitching to it. I hate practice. I always get tired, and then I get worse, and then they want to make me stay longer until I get better again. But I’m not going to get better. At least, not tonight. They keep making me pitch the ball at the tire, trying to hit it dead-center, right through the heart. Those are strikes. "Keep going until you get 10 strikes." I hate it.

When I’m not playing or practicing, I’m reading. I read everything. I get in trouble for it sometimes.

“Sarah, we’re going to watch this movie as family. Come inside right now or you won’t get to watch it at all,” they say.

“But I only have 2 chapters left!” Oh, the humanity!

“Fine. Stay out here and read, but don’t think you can come in and watch it with us later. You made your choice.”

But I don’t care if I miss the movie. I’m reading about someone far away from here, someone grownup and free and setting out on exciting adventures and falling in love. Who cares if there’s a ghost man who plays on the basketball team? The Sixth Man is a dumb name for a movie, anyway. You can’t have six players on the court at one time. Everybody knows that.

Okay, maybe I do kind of want to watch it. Too late. I chose the book and now I can’t go in. That’s what you get when you make choices around here. Stick-to-it-iveness. Even when it’s against your will. I sit and read by the light of the Security Light, content in this other world that I wish was mine. Somewhere far away...

I have chickenpox.
And no front teeth.

Everyone else at school has had missing teeth for ages. Wiggle. Wiggle. Wiggle. Pop! Missing tooth. But it’s taking forever for me to lose one! I’m afraid my baby teeth are going to last forever. Not even the hint of a hint of a wiggle in my gums.

On the first day of kindergarten, Sissy tells me there will be a Pee Detector. It means that if I pee the bed in the night, the next day when I walk through door of the classroom, the detector will go off and everyone will know. Horns blaring. Flashing lights. Just like when they Slime someone on Nickelodeon.

I never pee the bed again.

Finally, my front tooth starts to wiggle. I make the mistake of telling Papaw. He wrestles me to the floor in the living room, like he always does, and starts mashing his fist into my thigh muscle, like he always does. This is the worst kind of tickling. I’m laughing, but it hurts, but I’m laughing. Then he goes for my mouth. YANK! My tooth is gone. Blood is gushing everywhere. Did I mention the other front tooth had wiggled just a bit too? YANK! Both teeth are gone. Even more blood. It’s salty and warm in my mouth.

“Don’t put your tongue in the hole and a Gold Tooth will grow there,” they tell me. But it’s too late. The mushy, fleshy crater is too enticing a sensation to resist, even for a gold tooth. I dip the tip of my tongue in the hole again and again, looking for a sign of the new grownup teeth that are supposed to be growing in there.

On Spring Break, I get the chickenpox. I have itchy, scabby, red dots all over my body. Even on my butt and armpits. Nana uses a scratchy sponge and rubs Gold Bond power on my back, my arms, my legs. This is heavenly. She makes me sit in a vinegar bath too. This just hurts. It stings and smells bad and the water gets cold too fast. I don’t normally like when Nana makes me take vinegar baths anyway, but this is the worst.

My mom wants to take my picture. I have no teeth. I have chickenpox. I cry to her, “I just want my old self back!” What if I stay this way forever? Dotted and toothless? What a horrible fate! No one will ever be my friend or want to sit next to me at lunch or let me borrow their red crayon. I am in a state of abject despair. Mom just laughs. And takes my picture.

Aunt Sissy is grownup, but she’s kind of not. She smells good and has big, blonde, poufy bangs, and she’s the coolest person in the world. Her nails are long and pink. She plays the radio loud in the car, and gets Cheetos and Big Red pop when we stop at the gas station.

She works at the Season’s Lodge waiting tables. She stops there to say hello or pick up her check, and we stand at the front by the hostess and eat the mints. They’re in a bowl on the counter, and only guests who have just finished their meal are supposed to have them, but we’re with Sissy, so we’re allowed. They are delicious, and I shove five in my mouth at a time.

I’m trying to follow her as she weaves in and out of the tables and through the halls. I follow her into a room behind a heavy swinging door. It’s so loud. Dark. Smokey. Everyone in here is old. “Hey! You can’t be in here! This is a bar!” someone shouts at me, and I turn around, run back through the door and out the hall, mortified. What’s a bar? And why can’t kids be there? And why can Sissy be there if I can’t? We’re friends - don’t they know?

Because we’re friends, Sissy takes me along when she goes to a baby shower at the Season’s. It’s for one of the girls who works there with her. We play games at big round tables, but I don’t know how to do any of it and I don’t know the answers. Except for one. Baby food jars with characters’ faces taped to them are passed from hand to hand. Who’s that? Who’s that? Write it down on your list, but don’t show anyone or else they’ll cheat. “I know that one! It’s Cruella De Vil!” I helped.

At the drive-thru, Sissy tells us about conjunctions and types of nouns and teaches us new words, words that are way longer than the ones on my spelling test at school. Inside the truck, waiting for our fries, my brother and I get to sit up front. Some sharp corners make us slide and topple in our seats and look for something to hold onto, so Sissy tells us about the Cuss Word Bar. It’s right above the door, on the ceiling, and only for emergencies. And when you grab it, it’s just like saying a cuss word. We giggle and try to sneak our fingers to it when she’s not looking.

My brother and I get to ride in the back of the truck sometimes, but we have to lay down flat. The police will take us all away if they find us back here. We lie still, flat as boards and barely breathe, the wind rushes over us and sometimes tiny, sprinkling raindrops fall and splatter on our faces, our knees, our bare feet. I watch the leaves and branches and telephone poles passing overhead and try to guess where we are on the route home.

Any time I try to watch TV, Sissy attacks me. Sprawled out in the floor watching Yogi Bear or Lamb Chop, and suddenly she’s twisting her fingers tightly in my hair, or poking her long, pink nails into some baby-fat flesh, or sitting on me, pinning me down. “It’s loooove, Sarah,” she says with a grin, and then flits away, off to do something cool and fabulous and young. But when she wants me to sleep, she gently, gently rakes her long fingernails over my closed eyelids, soothing. It makes a soft scraping sound. It feels divine. 

The barn smells like dogs and dirt and old tobacco leaves.

Papaw grows fields of tobacco in the summer. When the tobacco is first planted, we get to ride around on the planter, pulled along behind the tractor. Two-seated, with a wheel in the middle, you have to stick the little backer plant into it really fast or else  your fingers catch and you miss a row. Papaw walks around afterward and presses the dirt in around the little plants, and fills in the holes we missed.

It’s really hot out when they cut the tobacco. The leaves are so tall and bright green. The Bacci Worms are long, and fat, and full of juice. Papaw squishes them and they ooze green backer juice into your hand or on your shoe. The cut stalks are stacked on Bacci Sticks, and left in the field to dry out in the sun. My brother and I use the Bacci Sticks as swords to be Donatello, or as canes, or tie them together to make a raft to float on the Creek. The rafts never float. 

The leaves are sticky and browning at the end of the summer when they get hung up in the rafters of the barn. Still on Bacci Sticks, they hang and are spread out evenly to dry out even more. When the barn rafters are full of upside down backer plants, the Bacci Worms fall from the sky. I’m sitting on the second or third highest rafters, which are as big around as a horse. I scoot back to make room for the bundle on its way up to the boards above me, and my bare leg catches on the dusty wood. I have splinter. And it’s huge. The wood inside my skin is as big as the tip of my pinky finger.

It takes forever for it to come out. Nana makes me sleep with a sliced potato wrapped against it to “draw it out.” I beg Papaw to take his pocket knife to it when it’s been in there for a week. I promise not to cry. I can tell he doesn’t want to, but it hurts. He sits down and exams my leg, places the knife to my skin, and the splinter pops out. No cutting necessary. The skin that was stretched scars and bubbles up and you can see it on my left calf.

When it gets cold, they run a kerosene heater and dress in camouflage coveralls and peel the leaves off of dry, crackly, yellowish-brown tobacco plants. We sit and watch, mostly trying to stay out of the way so the grownups won’t make us go back inside. Nana, Papaw, Sissy, Troy, Gary, Brian. They take turns standing in a row, forming an assembly line of tobacco stripping efficiency. A small, black radio blares country music. The floor of the barn is dirt and hay. When they get a pile of leaves big enough, they put them in a small, wooden box with a press at the top. Lower the press and then crank the handle until the tobacco block is small and compressed and a billion pounds.

Polly and Daniel lay content in the back stalls, howling occasionally, but mostly ignoring us. Ginger and Jiggy whinny when we ignore them, but Jiggy is old. She has arthritis in her legs and she bites our thighs when we try to sit on her back. Instead, we climb the tractor that sits in the middle of the barn, only scramble off again to press our noses close up to the crank handle when they start to press another load. Papaw is the strongest man alive, and he’s got the pressed backer bundles to prove it.

It’s so dark here. Security lights form constellations, lining the neighbors’ driveways up and down the road. Cars pass and their high beams cause the deer and dogs in the pasture to have eerie, glowing blue-green eyes. Looking up at the sky on a cloudless night, you can see every single star that ever existed, and then some. The moon is huge and round and sometimes has dark blots on it, but sometimes it’s perfectly smooth and shiny.

The bats love the security light. They flutter and flap and seek out their prey - the bugs. The bugs are drawn to the security light in the drive way, and at night we watch the bats swoop and swerve as they make chase. A life-or-death game of "Tag, you're it."

Crickets and katydids and bullfrogs and whip-poor-wills perform a flawless evening symphony. On some dark nights, we camp out in the camper on The Hill. Nana’s family graveyard is here. I don’t mind the graves during the day, but at night it is spooky and scary and I’m afraid our family ghosts are going to decide to take one of us back under the soil with them.

As we get ready for bed in the camper, Papaw pulls out the cassette player. It’s small and portable and shaped like a Troll, the collectible ones with neon hair and jewels for bellybuttons. We have a set of bedtime stories on tape, but always listen to the same one. It’s about Frances and she’s not ready for bed. She keeps putting off sleep by asking her parents for a glass of milk or other favors. Eventually, she has to stay in bed but then cracks start to grow in the ceiling and the shadows grow on the floor and she gets really scared too, hugging her teddy bear. We must have played this same story a thousand times. We don’t have speakers, but we all listen carefully. “Shh. Be quiet,” we scold each other.  Our heads so close together, our breath mingling. We lay silent and still, listening to the headphones with the volume cranked to the max.

One night, Troy and maybe Papaw bring home their trophies after gigging frogs. They have the most enormous toads on a string. Really, it’s twine with a metal piece in the shape of needle on one end and a big knot on the other end. You shove the frogs on one by one, stabbing them through the belly. They are still alive. Somehow, they end up dead and someone starts cleaning and battering and frying up the legs. Frog legs. We eat them.

They also have a snake. It’s long and thick and shiny in the moonlight. Someone tells us to stand back, and we press against the slats on the porch, forming a sort of stage. The head of the snake is sliced off. I don't get to see. But it dies. And yet it doesn’t. Its body continues jerk and thrash and its poisony snake blood slings everywhere, forming tiny blood rivers on the boards of the porch.

All the while, the bats are circling overhead, sticking close to the security light, chasing bugs, paying us no mind. But we aren’t the ones with no minds. That would be the snake. 

Rufus lives in a shack in the woods. My brother and I found it once. Old, rickety, a lean-to, really, at the base of a tree. Rufus scratches the side of the house at night, looking for children to steal. He takes the ones who won’t go to sleep when they’re supposed to. And we hear him. Scr-r-ractch-ch-ch. His gnarly, claw-like hands pawing at the house, hoping to find a way in and take us away.

We’re snuggled up in Nana and Pap’s waterbed. It’s warm. The blankets are warm, the bed is warm. The love is warm. Nana has an illustrated Bible that she props on her knees and reads us one story each night. She puts her finger to the page, searching out the stopping point from the night before, takes a breath, and says, “Okay….” That’s how we know it’s time to get down to business.

She wears a robe. The color changes, but it’s always thick and it’s always fuzzy. The belt is tied haphazardly at an angle. She has curlers in her hair. Pink and plastic and right out front to hold her bangs through the night.

When the story is over, we curl up on a pallet on the floor. She’s made us a cozy cocoon of blankets and sheets and pillows. We sleep there, between the bed and the wall, and she wakes me up in the night to use the restroom and have a glass of milk and a cookie. Sleepy and cozy and wrapped in Nana’s robed arms, Rufus is forgotten.

One night, I hear Rufus scratching outside the bedroom wall, hoping one of us will stay up just a tad too late. I notice that every time Rufus scratches outside, Papaw’s arm moves above his head, against the headboard. I know now. I’m in on the secret. But I do not tell my brother.

At night, we snuggle again on the semi-tipsy jiggle of the waterbed, making waves when we can get away with it. We read a Bible story. We curl up in our little nest by the bed. We wake to bowls full of dry Cheerios, already sprinkled with sugar, on the mornings Nana has to leave for work before we get up for school. So much sugar. Everything has a hint of sweetness – the tea, the Cheerios, the cookies. It tastes a little like sugar. It tastes a little like love. 

Trick or Treating is tricky around here. I am jealous of all of those kids on TV who live in neighborhoods and can set up lemonade stands and ride their bikes on the sidewalk and walk door-to-door collecting candy on Halloween. We get dressed up in homemade costumes, patched together that day. A tie-dye vest here, a drawn on mustache there, and we’re ready to go. Unless we are Power Rangers, or Trolls, or M&Ms. Those we buy at the store. We pile into the car and drive to a select few homes. Usually Nan & Pap, and Sissy & Troy. Sometimes, Mom drives us to random people’s homes and we walk down long, dark driveways and ring the doorbell because their porch lights are on.

The real treat is Artist Drive in Nashville. Here, there are sidewalks and doorbells and everything seems just like on TV. I hold my sister’s hand and gather candy in my bucket well past the age I should have stopped, but she’s a baby and I’m carting her around, so I figure it doesn’t hurt to be rewarded a bit for that, right? It’s weird to see my friends outside of school with their parents. Seeing them in their family units is much more strange than seeing them in costume or with painted faces.

At first, we get some packaged candies as well as some homemade treats. Popcorn balls, apples, brownies. Then the news tells us that people in some town far, far away from Nashville are hiding razor blades in apples and poisoning popcorn balls. After that, we just get candy.

The best is when people splurge and give you the full-sized name brand bars, like Hershey’s or Reese’s. Or at the end of the night when it’s almost curfew and people start throwing candy into your bucket like it’s yesterday’s trash and they can’t wait to be rid of it.

Nana always prepares way too many goodie bags of candy, just in case a passel of kids decide to make the long trek up the dark driveway because their porch light is on. They hardly ever do, and we always end up divvying up the extras. It doesn’t occur to me that some people don’t know their grandparents. 

Singing in the car is our form of family bonding. No song is safe. Disney tunes, Christmas carols, little ditties from childhood, “Arms of the Angel” by Sara McLaughlin. We sing at the top of our lungs. Mom in the front seat driving and the rest of us crammed in the backseat with random articles of clothes, discarded fast food containers, jars of coins, ribbon. Mom just can’t seem to keep that car cleaned out. We pile in on top of it all, seatbelts optional, and sing.

On a road trip to Utah, we take a minivan. It’s a long drive. 16 hours. We sometimes pull over to nap in a rest stop or to watch the sunrise. My basketball team made it to nationals and we’re making the long haul there and back on the interstates. We stop at a little museum somewhere out west, and climb aboard covered wagons and watch a fountain of a man pouring water out of his boot. Costumes, sets, and other props take up an entire room in the back. We put on a play. Mom records it. I am a damsel in distress. My brother is an Indian chief who captured me. My other brother is the sheriff on his way to rescue me. We laugh so hard that we cannot breathe, cannot stand up straight, cannot think straight. And in the car, we sing “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang when we finally reach another state line.

Mom stops on the side of the highway to video a cow in a pasture. We have cows in the pasture at home too, but this is a Nebraska cow (or a Utah cow or something “western”). Our cramped legs can use the stretch anyway, so we gripe and whine and complain but we get out of the car and watch the cows. Suddenly, a snake! Mom is terrified of snakes. It is positioned between us and the van. Did we walk over it and not even realize it? It starts to slither. We jump and shriek as one, as a family. Perhaps more terrifying than attacking us, it makes its way toward the van. The side door is hanging wide open. Kids never think to close the door so the battery won’t run down or so the snake won’t be able to get inside.

We don’t have any idea where the snake went after he disappeared beneath the van. Someone surmises that he slithered up our tailpipe and would most likely poison, strangle, and eat us all in our sleep. We sing louder now, because we are afraid. The songs carry a hint of desperation. After a while, we forget to be afraid. Winter comes, and we drive through the streets at home, attempting to belt out “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” but no one can remember all the words, so some parts come out as simply noise or hums. We sing on the way to school Christmas concerts, on the way from winter dances, on our way to town to get groceries. Our breath fogs up the glass and we draw little figures or write things backwards so you can read it from the outside or make foot prints with our hands, the way a girl showed me how to do on the school bus once.

We sing in the car.

“Papaw, what’s this scar for on your belly?”

“That’s where they cut my beans out.”

Each time he leaves his long-sleeved, button-up, always-flannel shirt undone bare-chested, we have this conversation. He’s standing by the window in the kitchen, munching on buttered toast, watching the birds flit and scatter around the birdfeeder out back. It’s chilly. Mornings with Papaw are somehow always chilly. It’s also the weekend. His mailman hours have him out the door by some ungodly, 6am hour every workday morning. But this day has to be a Saturday, or perhaps a Sunday since Nana is running a hot steamy shower in the big bathroom, getting ready for church.

The kitchen smells like coffee and ladybugs. So many ladybugs. At some point, someone trimmed a comic from the newspaper about the ‘bajillion’ ladybugs on the windowsill. Only, in the cartoon, the boy called out, “Dad! Look at the ladybugs!” but our copy is modified, scribbled out and replaced the first word with “Pap!” Our version.

Maybe it’s chilly because it’s fall. Leaves are scattered everywhere. The walnuts have all fallen out of the trees that line the drive, and they crunch and pop under the tires of The Jeep. The Jeep. That’s how we always refer to it. Nana had an accident in The Jeep once, and slid off the road in the ice. She hurt her shoulder and had to kick her way out of the passenger side door. For a long while, she called her shoulder her “broken wing.” She also ran over TJ in The Jeep. He wasn’t hurt too badly. She was backing up, still in the driveway, and she didn’t see him basking in the sunlight, lying on the gravel. He had a bit of a limp after that, but he was a tough dog.

My brother and I had our own version of “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” that went something like, “Jingle Bells, Papaw Smells” and “The Jeep-mobile lost a wheel and Troy did ballet! Hey!” Clever children.

Chilly morning. Toast. Fallen leaves. This means Papaw will get out on the tractor today and scoop up all of the leaves on a huge tarp, dragging it (and us) along behind him. He makes the biggest leaf pile you’ve ever seen in the Creek. He just dumps them all there. And we just jump in them there.

When lunch time comes, we are a sweaty, dirty, covered in leaf debris and starving
todeath.

Nana brings us macaroni and cheese on Styrofoam plates, which is so bad for the environment but so tasty and creamy and cheesy and we don’t care. We drink purple Kool-Aid from Styrofoam cups too. Kool-Aid, shaken not stirred, in an old milk jug. Milk jugs hold every consumable liquid in the refrigerator. Papaw makes instant Nestle tea with 3 cups of sugar. You have to use warm water to mix it, though, or the sugar won’t dissolve, so he’s sure to pour the last of the old jug into a cup to keep in the refrigerator and sip on until the new jug gets cold.

She brings our lunch out to the club house, or the garage, or the trampoline, or the porch, or wherever we happen to sit still long enough to eat it. Papaw is on the mower now, or maybe still on the tractor, or working on a car in the driveway. She brings him a cup of cold, sweet tea. It may be chilly outside, but he’s always working up a sweat. And she’s always bringing him cups of cold, sweet tea.