I went out to the garage to see the sinister circle I've been dreaming about for years. I was relieve to see that it was merely a spot where someone, perhaps my dad, had spray painted something round on the cement.
Demons would come into this world to steal the virtue from little boys through that circle when I was six. In eighteen years I've seen where those demons really come from and where the virtue really goes still...

I stomped on the spot to render it harmless...

a symbol of my triumph over demons.

We painted and I daydreamed of what it would be like to raise a family of my own in this house as I peeled off years and layers from the sill in the living room to see the green it was in '73. I was reminded of how me and my dad would lay on the gold carpet listening to Country music from the Fifties. I looked out the wind and I could still see him washing his red '68 Grand Touring Torreno...
fastback fast...
just sitting there.

With the semi-skyline of downtown Cheyenne in the background. It reminded me of trips to my Grandmothers on muggy July afternoons down back roads in South Dakota as bitter gravel dust mingled with the smell of sweet wild flowers when the speed limit was seventy five the first time.

We moved on to paint the kitchen and as I looked out the window I could still see my mom sunning her self on a lawn chair reading a summertime novel on her stomach With The huge lilac tree and brick incinerator used to burn trash during a simpler time as a back drop. I knew then, that I couldn't let my dad rent this house out...
to another...
stranger.

I stepped out the front door to bring in more paint from the car. I could still see a faint outline on the porch where the Dairygold milk bucket used to sit.
The milk man would bring milk and cottage cheese early in the morning and we would have to get it before the sun got hot. The did that all the way into the Seventies.
I looked around to see some of the same neighbors seeming to have defied time, untouched by this world except for the elements. Like...

a deck made from two by twelve oak a little grayer, yet still strong. I turned around to admire the thirty foot pine tree obscuring much of the front of the house. My dad planted it there when it was two feet tall. It has grown...

like me.

We now live in the house I grew up in. As I look out the window of my old bedroom at the magnificent pine I imagine planting a small tree next to it.
The big tree would be like me and the small tree would be like the second chance miracle that swells again in my wife's belly.

A gentle breeze made its way through the branches of the tree as if God were signaling her approval: "Whispering pines, Whispering Pines... send my baby back to me"