FRACKING CHICKENS and ANT ACID

I love going to grandma's. Last year the county sheriff moved in across the street so we really don't have to worry about her being taken care of, it’s a sleepy little town anyway. Sometimes I get stuck on that old road east of town while I’m dove hunting, but an old family friend usually comes by in a truck, a really rusty old truck, and soon I'm on the road again, lemonade down my chin and fish in the ice chest. So.


The hardest part of the trip is that sometimes I keep going back and forth from home to grandmas’, and back home again, and again and again sometimes there are many stops on the way, like two weeks ago when they had the road closed for fracking for pecan pie down around Corsicana, the Pecan Capital of the World. Lots of that going on, and they say that just when you think the pie is gone all you have to do is bring out the dynamite and frack some up. Its really worth the stop after all. So.

And when we put grandma in the nursing home I think it was a mistake, but there was nothing we could do about it, like the tornado that seems to always be in the garden right next to the house. Thus far its done no real damage, and it is nice to look at. It’s like grandmas friend Lila, at the nursing home, she seems real nice just don't look too long. So.

Last night when I went down grandma had new carpet going in to the old homestead, and the fishing was good in her living room. She had one of those lights on a pulley that you could pull up and down to get them closer to the water or the book or the newspaper if you needed. She always told me not to eat the grapes from the vine, the vine out there in back where the chicken pens were. They are always green, and sour, and I never could stay out of them, because there they sit just for the picking. I get up there on the cage, and eat away, my mouth all puckered and my lips raw and you know there got to be snakes here somewhere in these vines and all this old wood and I hear one now its ringing its fool head off and now I got to wake up and get some ant-acid (ant acid, now there’s something to make you wanna be an ant) and get in the shower and get my ass to work.

I have dreams all the time about being with mom and dad, and then dad dies and it’s just me and mum, and we are talking about how much we miss him, and then at some point I realize I'm just dreaming, and mums already gone too; that they are both gone.

It sounds real sad, but its really a good feeling--bittersweet--- but good.

The kind of good where you can't wait to have another dream like that.