smaller_with_distance_and_time reminiscent bird even empty, stripped of all of the things that personalized and cluttered the house, it seems small now. the place i'm going is no bigger, but growing up in and around this place has colored my perception of it. the old kitchen tiles are long since gone, worn through to the natural ceramic by my grandmother's constant path, worked in over decades. in that empty part of the room, i can see the ghost of grandfather's easy-chair, the cracked vinyl pocked by cat-claws and cracked with age memories of waking up from naps in the spare bedroom as a child, pondering the flecks of dust that drifted in on the sunbeams that ehone through the blinds before the cinderblocks, the partition between the house and the neighbor was an old bailing wire fence concealed by honeysuckle mom and grandma chatting with funny, crazy, toothless old hillbilly woman next door over the fence and the exchange of barks and yips from the old woman's wobbly chihuahua and my grandfather's small army of feisty little terrier mutts below the lower reaches of the plants i'm out of there next week no more to call it home like a barbed arrow in flesh, i can only move forward now. 061019 ... unhinged gears_stripped 180816 ... unhinged when did you stop cutting your hair? 180816 what's it to you? who go blather from