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we went back to newcomb today to help my momma with her water heater.

john roughed out the whole area for an electric water heater and it turned out that the water heater that was bought and paid for was a natural gas water heater.

anyway, we spent all day out there. it felt so good to just be there. that's where i was raised- at my grandma's house which my mom now lives in. to me, i'll always think of it as 'grandma's house'.

it's funny because when i dream of home, it's always there. in the house, around the sheep coral, up along the rocks on the hill, down the other side of the hill to the road. it's always where i dream of. i've never dreamed of the home we live in now and i rarely dream of the teacher housing we lived in when i was a teenager. it's always there- tse' lizhin. 

 

roaming around the area today and just looking at all the places i used to play with my cousins... it's bittersweet because the memories are good ones but the area is not the same anymore.

i knew those rocks like the back of my hand. i could run all along the top with my cousins from one side to the other and never fall off; we knew where all the dips and juts were, how many steps it would take to get over a certain rock, the trick to getting around a particularly difficult area.

we played house in the old camper behind the shed where i "cooked" with an old pan that my grandma let us play with. we'd find chicken eggs and i'd mix it with dirt and water from the sheep's barrels and make my cousins eat it since i was the 'mom' and also the oldest of us. (hey, they lived!)

even the old car that i photographed today was part of our playground. we'd play car or pretend it was a bus. i usually got to drive but not always. sometimes i was the passenger screaming, pretending that whichever one of my cousins was driving was about to hit a pedestrian.

now it's just a shell of it's former self.

like i said,

bittersweet.