When it starts it is dark,

A wall closing in on all sides,

Warm and secure.

Suddenly- Light,

Warm and blinding,

Enveloping everything,

Like the rest of my life would be surrounded by.

The days of my first decade

Spent in the streaming daylight of the small cul de sac.

Running, screaming, bike riding to that canary yellow house,

Adventuring in that monstrous back lawn.

Long never-ending streets lined with identity-less houses,

Leading to familiar parks and cool streams.

Next to the fields in which houses are scattered,

And the far off mountains set in shades of strikingly deep orange and hot pink,

Where the roads are no more than strips of dirt.

Hot and dry and windy,

Peaceful and quiet.

Then torn away, nine hundred miles, nine hundred memories, away

To a land of blue lakes and blue rivers,

Where the trees so green dominate the land.

And hot, with a humidity that suffocated in the summer

And freezes out of the air, drift slowly down, in the winter.

Snow and ice feet deep layer the busy highways.

The days getting cooler, darker, until there is no longer any light.

Rushing through the darkness then

And returning to the lazy yellow light filters over the mountains,

So rocky and snowcapped and beautiful,

A true wonder making up for the tree bare fields of green grasses rolling from the winds that tell Of where I come from and where I have been.