It's been thunderstorms and tornadoes here for the past few days. The fields are all flooded. Yesterday I put on a pair of my dad's highboots and walked back through the fields and into the woods, where I used to spend a lot of time when I was little. There's a creek in that woods, with a bridge made of railroad ties my grandfather strung together over fifty years ago. The creek had overflowed with all of the rain, and the bridge was underwater by half a foot. I stood on it anyway, the current moving around my boots, and sort of poked around the place for a while. I used to sit on that bridge when I was a kid and read, or play with the frogs that lived there. I used to dangle my feet in the water and look up at the canopy of the trees, telling myself strange stories. I'm not sure why the place holds such significance for me, but I think it was a place where my imagination took over and the woods would come alive with fantasy creatures. When I sit down to write, I still think of that bridge, and the stories that crossed over it, that are still crossing. And I wonder at moments like this why I've spent so much of the past ten years living anywhere but home.