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.