It’s opening up, yeah. You can tell by the way the cars sound driving by, that sort of shh sound they make. I always liked
that. I just like the rain, I guess. I spent a lot of time up in the Northwest when I was a kid, you know, you sort of get used to it up there. A lot of time. Whenever my folks felt like a little vacation they’d just ship me off to my uncle’s place up there, near Seattle. Summers, winters, weekends, whatever, I was up there all the time for, like, five or six years.
It was weird, actually, the way that happened, out of the blue. It seemed like it to me, at least. I guess there were probably things going on behind the scenes, you know, but I wasn’t ever aware of any of that. The impression I got from my folks was that they felt like my uncle sort of owed them something. I guess when my grandparents died they had left the house to him and my mother both, so they could share it or sell it and split the profit or whatever, but he was the only relative still living in town by then. Mom had moved away, and neither of them wanted to mess with selling the place, so the deal was that he’d live there and just pay the utilities and property taxes, and do the general upkeep, like that. Maintenance, you know.
