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.

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. 

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.