I miss the rain. In the summer on the farm the skies would suddenly blacken and there would be a giant plop in the dirt. A little dust would rise up around the wet crater. Then another plop, sort of slowly following. It was warm, drops were cool. Little dust clouds rose and created a microcosm an inch from the ground as the sandy dirt was pocked. My Dad was cowboying for a rancher a county away and I was alone for a week. We had gotten kinda close and it was nice and made being alone nicer somehow. Reassuring. His purple Ford pick-up. The hay bale catapult behind it. The pale gold of the shorn hayfields in front of the house. I had pruned the wild trees when I had first gotten there. Branches lifted up as heaviness was removed. Though, now I would leave them as they were. The beauty in their wild lushness. The horse somehow got a worm in its back. It had burrowed in somehow and Dad had to cut it out with his pocketknife. He said it was fat, a grub worm. I didn�t see it, but I remembered how scared I was of them in kindergarten when the mean boys would dig them up on the playground and chase us with them. I cleaned up while he was gone. Hauled off chunks of cement left by the previous owner who had demolitioned the front porch when he relocated the front door to the side of the house. That house had been his weekend project. He came from the city once a month, stocked the fridge with beer and IBC root beer that he gave me when my Dad and I would visit him. I was probably five. Dad had bought the house and the forty acres it sat on several years before I came to stay there. After my parents divorced, he ended up there in his cowboy bunkhouse. You could see daylight through the corners of the living room where I slept. When Dad left for that week he made me promise not to knock down any walls inside as he was afraid the ceiling would collapse and he knew I was likely to attempt something like that in the name of improvement. I came there because I had no other place to go and I thought my Dad might let me stay there with him. All my life I had hated him, but I was less scared of living with him than sleeping behind the grocery store in town. Across the road in the triangular patch of field I would walk on top of the rows of giant round hay bales. Thinking. Sitting. Pacing. Looking back at my home, the fields, the pruned trees, desperately imagining ways to get away from there. The prevailing feeling was powerlessness. It was Heaven in retrospect. I must have loved it in some way to have fond memories of it now.