LostThenFound

Nestling into my side on the couch, she murmurs half-asleep that “Home always had a fireplace for the winter, even when we lived in the Winnabow boonies.” Her father would buy dried oak logs from the beds of pick-ups, later hauled in by her brothers to join wood-smoke with the home-smells of vanilla candles, baking bread and Brunswick stew, drifting outside on wisps of chimney smoke. “When we were younger, we were always dirty,” she tells me, smiling at her dusty feet buried in the light, silty soil of her early-childhood island. “But in a healthy, little-kid way, you know?” They did not believe in shoes

I’ve tried to find that place in the coastal-plains forest where he took it, that first time when I shivered in the Southern summer and couldn’t meet his eyes, but it was always secret and now it’s lost down the twists and turns of narrow roads. I only remember scratching bites for weeks, little red reminders of what I’d lost in the pine straw. Later, it was never rolling waves of hot pleasure or toe-curling, mind-melting anything, so I started to think I was broken, that he’d broken me. I stopped caring – Men were built like mountains and trees and draft horses and I liked the smell of them. They would c