I am digging through my mother’s lingerie drawer for the lavender and periwinkle slip with the lace along the bottom that I always wear when I’m a gypsy. It is Halloween 1976 and I am ten- years-old. It will be my third year as a gypsy because we shop for our costumes in our parents’ drawers and closets. Or in my brother’s case, in the linen closet. He’s wearing a sheet again. Casper the Friendly Ghost. At least this year the sheet is white. Mom assured him last year that the

It is a cruel trick of architecture that a house always looks so much smaller without the things in it that made it a home.

Now I am haunted not by the wondering of what is in a creek in South Carolina but of what’s in a landfill in North Carolina.

I entered first grade with tears on my face, blood on my lip from a lost loose tooth, no lunch and a hole in my tights.

He was East Cary Junior High School’s Leif Garrett. If I could have had a photo of Skip printed and enlarged, he’d have been on my bedroom wall right next to Tiger Beat poster boys Scott Baio and Shawn Cassidy.

They call it a landline for a reason. Not just because of the cords and cables rooted to the earth. It identified where we all landed when we entered that place called home.

I am about 10 yards behind them and behind me I hear someone say, “Come on Johnny, catch up!” and Johnny says, “I have to wait for the old lady to pass.”

The only time our lives we were truly in danger was when, like Nemo’s dad, we had that unexpected “swim with the jellies.”

I’m a pop out of the birthday cake kinda gal and I started young. I mean I was nine when I planned my first surprise party for my mother’s 30th.

I was moved by the revelations in the development of the pin-pricked image. That volunteer parent had no idea the little light they’d shined on my imagination.