answer & some sentences

I was born in this small, scrubby town in the part of Washington that is never green. The air is very dry, the river is very wide, the sky is very big, and everything else comes in shades of very brown. The county fair is still a big deal. There are no good restaurants or traffic jams.

I have not lived here for years - and most of my growing up, my formation - took place in other parts of the world and country. Even so, there is something about this place that is coming home.

To: everyone who has ever asked.

This is where I'm from.

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When I was a small child I hated when the bottoms of my feet felt hot, dry, or dusty like the desert. I thought it meant I was sick and going to die, like maybe a rattle snake was about to strike. I still get this feeling when I read books or watch films about the Civil War. It is the reason I can't stand to look at pictures of President Lincoln.

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My grandfather always had parts of the newspaper spread around his easy chair. I feel newsprint and think of his whiskers, his undershirts, and the way he would lick his thumb before flipping through the deck thwap lick thwap lick thwap while playing solitaire. I love Louis L'Amour in his honor.

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My cousins, siblings and I can sum up our entire collective existence using lines from You've Got Mail, The Royal Tenenbaums, White Christmas, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

I think you have a gift for it. That's the perfect blend of poetry & meanness.

We are getting this emblazoned on our family shield; it is the matching tattoo on our hearts and tongues.

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We put on lipstick and met at the back corner table. Over a bottle of wine and calamari we talked about our grown up problems, which are neither earth shattering nor insubstantial. The little things add up: bills, broken hearts, fights, malfunctioning body parts, big choices and little information. The usual. You have a stack, too, I'm sure, staring up at you from your own plate.

Ten years ago we would've killed for a night on the town, some autonomy. We were bursting out of our skin, so eager to grow up, to step into the glamour awaiting our certainty & confidence. We sat on our grandmother's bed, chafing under our parents' restrictions while they played cards in the living room. We yearned for last night.

And then someone hit fast forward and last night showed up at the door. We put on lipstick like movie stars and met at the back corner table. We ordered red wine and ate calamari, and my cousin told me about her grown up problems and I told her mine. It was perfect, exactly what we ordered. And I couldn't wait to go back to my grandmother's house, where she peeled me an apple and sent me to bed.

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I've memorized the signs and symptoms: clubbed fingers, dyspnea on exertion, orthopnea, hypertension. I know what to look for and I don't want to see it. So I close my eyes and listen to her stories instead.

It is too late now on the East Coast, so I resist the urge to call my own mother. Tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next -- ad infinitum -- I'll tell her how much I love her.

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Our fathers come from wild, raucous people on both sides, but our grandmother took them to church and out of the chaos and rebellion, God delivered her a circuit preacher and an itinerant teacher. A generation removed, we kids are respectable now, if not exactly settled. There's no use in denying our stock, though. We still move in bands and ride our figurative horses bareback. The dust doesn't settle beneath our boots.

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Even though I would've been blind and had a smile full of crooked teeth, I'm the sort of girl who would've made it from St. Louis to the Willamette Valley with you. Sitting atop the buckboard seat or walking beside the wagon, I won't complain through the months of snow or the showers of arrows. This may be where I'm from, but I know how to be a family on the move; what it takes to make a home on whatever claim we stake.