a family vacation home By: grant kittrell Franklin, NC Arriving, we sniff around the place, check-boxing memory that all’s where it’s always been, where it should be. That we are also where we are: together, oddly enough under one seeping roof--some changes are impossible to ignore after a seasoned step away: the linoleum snakes its skin along the corners of the bathroom floor, unearthing yet another stratum of linoleum, a lineage spiraling further back than any ownership we can claim of it. Outside, the same birdhouse, unpainted, is doing what raw things do when left undiagnosed in the Carolina ebb and flow, but it’s still standing, and the birds are just everywhere. And now, the faucet runs creek clear again. The fresh siding burns barn red again, and a gutter hangs ready to deflect another summer storm, once we’re gone, home to our distances. And here, already, in our driveway farewells, the burgeoning sun scribbles new watersheds into our faces, topographs our trajectories, which, like everyone’s, are downward like rainfall, which both rots and carries breathe, muddies for a while the creek we’ll walk again, with luck— we, whoever we may be then—leaving it mineral-flecked and clear as our thirst for it.
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