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I am a small tow-headed girl of about seven. I am standing in the middle of an empty field that butts up against the backyard of my parents’ house. I am visible to my mother from inside our house but she is not watching me; she is cleaning the bathroom and has told me to go outside and play. I have this whole field to myself.

It is a sunny, summer day and the sky is very blue. The grass has been not-too-recently mowed so that it is starting to grow back from its last trim but the clippings are still laying in clumps on top of it and they have turned brown in the sun. I am making nests for ducks with the clumps of dead grass. There are no ducks living in this field, yet I continue making nests for them.

Twenty years later when I wake up lying on the floor of the bathroom in a motel room in Amarillo, Texas, I will remember those duck nests and the smell of the dead grass and the way that the breeze was so warm and how the only sounds I could hear were a lawn mower running up the street and the breeze. I will remember this and will get goose bumps.