Moleskin 5.4: Backyard River

And then my family moved, and I moved. Homes seven, eight and nine were those transitional places between the drainage ditch and the Des Plaines River into which it dumped: the townhome, the apartment, the stepdad’s parent’s home: places I wanted to romanticize as being in the big city and not so far away from the old Chicago River and the great Lake Michigan, but homes I tend to remember and realize in more cynical shades. Our prior dwellings had never been big or glamorous, and we had lived in an urban apartment and even a trailer home before, but I missed the Buffalo River parsonage and everything about it: the neighbors, the space around us, the sense of “us” living in one place, one family with a river in our back yard, just down the hill.