I won’t ever be eight again, woken late at night by my dad so we can slip out to catch nightcrawlers. Won’t half-sleepwalk through the wet grass with a flashlight—humid after-storm air, mosquitoes, cricket-song, peals of thunder rumbling west. Won’t bend down, breathless, a hand hovering over a nightcrawler’s glistening, swollen body. Won’t pounce. Won’t pin a nightcrawler in the mud, its dorsal pores stiffening. Won’t drop it in a coffee can filled with loose dirt that will live in the fridge until tomorrow when we go fishing. I won’t ever be eight again, impaling nightcrawlers on hooks, casting them into frothing eddies of the south fork of Wildcat Creek in Tippecanoe County Indiana, the song of a redwing blackbird deep in the maple tree one I know by heart, cottonwood seed puffs floating in the air around me, the hairs on my dad’s big Popeye forearms glinting gold in the sun. I won’t ever again sit in heavy boredom in the pews at church on Sunday, tie too tight, staring out the window during prayer at trees and sky, dreaming a wilder salvation. Stink of mud and fish. Scum-slicked shine of nitrogen runoff. Scads of electric blue dragonflies, fizz and fission. The easy intimacy of it all. Gone. Walked away from a day at a time.
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Steve Edwards is author of the memoir BREAKING INTO THE BACKCOUNTRY, the story of his seven months as caretaker of a backcountry homestead along the Rogue River in Oregon. His writing can be found in Longreads, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Rumpus, Electric Literature and elsewhere. He lives in Massachusetts.
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Siim Lukka
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