Her house

was like a museum to my adolescence. Everything was the same. Same chairs, tv, stereo, pictures on the wall. I was thirteen when we moved. Seven and a half miles out. Not so great for my social life. We lived past the school bus turnaround spot. I walked to where it turned around and got let off at the same spot. In September the mornings were cold but in the afternoon it was hot. The hills had some scrub trees but mostly just dried out grass. There had been low grade coal mines years ago and a small town about a mile away. You could still make out the word K-OLA on the hillside, made with white rocks. The folks across the road had a ramshackle house and lots of barns and out buildings and old vehicles and tractors in different states of decay. They had the banks old stagecoaches and would load them up in a big rig and drive all over the state to participate in parades, fairs and wherever the bank wanted them. 

It was pretty deadsville. I smoked pot and listened to records and tried to play along with my guitar. But my ears weren't so good. When I was young the Beatles all sounded the same. I couldn't tell one from the other. 

My dad was kind of a cheapskate. He was an engineer but we had no air conditioning and in the summer it was hot. He had bulldozed into the hill when we built the house and the bottom floor had ceramic tiles to try to stay cool. The well water smelled like sulfur. He'd put a filter system in but it still smelled funny. I had no friends that lived anywhere near me. 

When they bulldozed the hill they found a Native American skeleton and some stone tools for crushing acorns.