leftovers
there is a place--a cabin in the canyon--where i've gone since i was a small child. when i was three, i sat beside my father on the couch while he read us a story and i watched a little mouse dart across the stone hearth of the fireplace. when i was eight, i proudly unfolded the chaise lounge chair beside the stream and watched, horrified, when our puppy was taken by the current. then i marveled when he floated to my mother twenty feet downstream and pulled himself from the cold water. when i was ten, i corralled girlfriends into acting like my boyfriends in the woods. when i was fourteen, i sat in the backseat of the station wagon, holding a towel over the same family dog after a porcipine filled his mouth with its quills. when i was eighteen, i brought my boyfriend and showed him the woods. i was there when my father was on oxygen, i was there by the stream when my mother placed some of my brother's ashes beside a newly planted tree. i've been there for many an ar
