When I visit ‘home’, I still sleep in the same bedroom I slept as a baby. That baffles my husband, who moved as many times as he ages. Which, by the way, I have slowed that down. Not his aging, but moving.

The mile-long road we lived on killed our animals-mainly dogs, some cats. It is where the bus stop started in the mornings and ended in the evenings. It hosts trailers, houses, barns and even one bar.

The last names of the homes said it all. Those so-and-so’s, who knows whose kid belongs to who – there’s so many. Some of the neighbors intrigued me, some scared me.

I used to go to school high in first grade. Just that one sentence spoken to my mom will send her into a tizzy, straight up rage. You tell stories! That is not true. Why do you have to make THAT up? Well, I am here to tell you it is true. It wasn’t by my choice. What six year old wants to be the first child shivering on a cold bus and smell the wafts of joints join you down the aisle of hell? By the time I arrived at school, my stomach was churning and my big brown eyes had devil red in them.

I get it though. Nothing speaks to an early morning wake up call as smoking a joint in your denim jacket-waiting on the bus. It made the wait – off and on the bus – tolerable. It made me much calmer when fistfights broke out between the female bus driver and her son. I surrendered to death quietly when a spider bit me on the chest. Instead of panicking, I just stared out the window waiting to die peacefully. I also endured tobacco juice in my face, spit out by a kid a few seats in front of me, with a calmness that had to be some type of zen before I even knew what that meant. Two hours with the bus stuck in the ditch in ninety-five-degree weather? I stared out the window with a tiny smile on my face.

Where was I? I have wondered this since childhood.

Oh, picking pot. The pot teens lived between my house and another family that had four children. These four were the smart kids and took it in stride as we would pass their father peek out of the county dumpster and wave at us. No one made fun, we knew he was one smart cookie. Brilliant actually, he made his own plane and would fly over all our houses. I can’t say my dad was happy about that, but I saw the positive in everything – to make a plane out of garbage and actually FLY it! wow!

One of the pot teens would help my dad clean his barn and my chihuahua had it out for him, a huge disdain for pot smoking. I witnessed her chew his ankle off and as fast as he could grab her (not very fast) he bunts her the length of the barn. Needless to say, I lost my ever-loving shit on his stoned ass.

His other brothers, uncles, sons – who knew who was who – that I befriended out of fear, had asked us to help pick butter beans in the woods behind their variety of homes on their compound. Myself and the smart kid that was my age obliged. It was fun, picking leaves with pods of beans. We felt cool and part of something bigger than our one-mile long road.

On a good picking day, the animals stayed in the ditch on the walk down. No one was injured and the shade of the woods and steps through the bog to get to the field of butter beans was an absolute adventure. We would talk and talk, pick and pick.

Later on, the smart kid told me we were picking marijuana leaves. I was stunned but didn’t feel like I had been a fool. I felt worldly. I felt ahead of the times. I felt like I had been illegal – in more ways than one.

Colorado has nothing on me.