Some stayed long enough for me to recognize them, though, and I found myself clinging to those fiercely. They were images from when I was small, before Mother and Father were too tired to hide their fights from me. Saturday morning pancake breakfasts and games of catch out back, afternoons spent helping Mother with her strawberry patch and pushing a hand-powered mower across tough crabgrass and clover. Good memories, mostly, and pleasant ones. I’d missed those—I hadn’t thought about them in too many years. Right about then I realized I still rested on the ground. A blade of grass was tickling my ear, but otherwise it was as fine a bed as a man could ask for. Stretching out my legs, I decided against getting up quite yet. I could smell the tang of the red clay, sharp and cold and mixed with the sweet scent of the crushed grass underneath my head. The dew off the leaves had soaked through my clothes here and there, but it wasn’t uncomfortable so much as it was refreshing. It was as if my skin had been drinking it in, taking water directly from the land that had cradled me.
