diamond pattern and triangle head means that these reptile friends were actually copperhead snakes, venomous and plentiful in our gardens. So I was almost killed x2 and all for the sake of beauty in the garden, tidying the soil. Last and most fatally, shortly prior to deciding never to touch the gardens ever again, I briefly brush up against something that causes me EXTREME pain, which turns out to be a stinging caterpillar. I did not realize caterpillars could ever sting. I develop a small rash, feel feverish the rest of the day, and soon leave this potentially cursed home for the fall semester. When I think about home, I still imagine everything the way it was like when I was three years old, ten years old, and sixteen years old. I can, in my mind, move through rooms and feel the textures of the wood panels, the thickness of the paint, and the couches that didn't make the move. Where I felt rooted into the earth, I put myself down into the ground. Can't be pulled out so easily, ’till you are. My mom asks if I miss the old house; I say I don't. I don't miss it. I think I miss something else. I’ve been uprooted. Came back for break. Everything's dead anyway for winter, but my mom informs me that the weeds came back. The house is still potentially cursed, men with hammers and stuff still going in and out Fixing more and more stuff. Things don't feel so right. Feels like we are treading water and getting nowhere. Doing things that get undone as you do them. The pipes freeze
in the December subzero; as soon as they unfreeze, like crazy people, we leave all the faucets slightly dripping so the water keeps moving, not frozen. We burn through piles of firewood. Sweep dead leaves out. Some thing’s different at home and part of it's me and my new attitudes and proclivities and things I like, things I'm used to, and things I'm, like, used to. My mom and I don't dare to touch the gardens, or look at them. I do a 500-piece puzzle, then put it away and do a 1000-piece puzzle. Pipes freeze again with snow and ice coming down. I wonder about the copperheads and what they do in wintery sleet like this. Pipe-specializing hammer man comes to let us know that our pipes keep freezing because they're in the attic, which isn't properly insulated. Pipes should never be in an attic, and whoever built this cursed house thirty years ago must have been some kind of maniac. So, leave the faucets dripping, move the pipes somewhere else, or leave the cursed and cursing house... which shall it be? And a heat wave comes through; snow and cold are gone. I go back to college again. Won't be uprooted anymore. "I don't know when you'll be back again," my mom says and I don't know either. Maybe not this summer, but maybe next winter. But I don't know when I'll be back again, for a long time, and ideally I won't ever be back to live with my family, to stay for a long time, for a month or more. So I put my clothes away in the closet, don't leave anything out when I pack to leave, and don't put roots down here, now.
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