This is the house where you were born:

At the crest of the great hill towering above Ouachita’s campus, a tiny little park is hoisted. From there, one can see past the softball field for miles, tracing the little black asphalt road which twists and curls under the horizon.

During my freshman year of college, I made it a particular point each Sunday afternoon to take a foot-long Subway sandwich to this treasured spot, flip down the tailgate of my truck, and position myself so that my bare feet dangled in the gelid breeze.

Somehow, it was always Fall there in the park, and even in May the ground was somewhere hidden by an impenetrable coat of shimmering, orange Oak leaves. It was in that place where I first grew comfortable with my [not-so-mild] introversion; a Eureka! of how necessary it has always been to take moments to myself to reflect on how I had/could/should relate to others, and what must be done to make right anything wrong. I needed a step outside of Context to look back in on it.

It was in this park that I first began to process the events of my eighteen years prior, and through this, I finally became awake to a host of things that had effected the person I’d by that point become. After hemorrhaging in the surprising awareness of who I was [or, wasn't], I began to develop a deeper and more honest sense of self [so how to deny it]. And though I discovered a thorough comfort in that broadening awareness, I was a little disheveled by the responsibility it extended.

In my later years at the University, I made more visits to the park during the night, finding that the some-time past 11 pm was most suitable to the beholding of a day’s events. I liked to imagine that the darkness – especially there at The Ozarks’ Feet – carried in it a silence that was surely, to some extent, an impartation of Divinity. And that was not to be missed, by any means.

As it often works out, the memories that remain most explicit for the longest are those which embody either extreme joy or its counterpart. If I could look at all my experiences collectively – the task I imagine would be some giant equation in which the Bests are added to the Worsts and the Sum is divided by two. Perhaps this is the Spirit’s reminder that the greater portion of journey is to be traveled on neither the High road nor the Low, but that the Middle Way - Balance - is the one most righteous.

In one of these [hauntingly] explicit mind-scenes-of-mine, I find myself sitting in a 1997 white Ford Ranger at Arkadelphia’s little hilltop park, then a Senior. And I am watching the playground swings in my rear-view mirror solemnly drift with the evening current.

Creeak. Creeak. Creeak.

From what I can remember, there was but one light in the entire park, and it stood mightily near the place where I was parked. Directly beneath it those swings swayed resiliently, occasionally borrowing the light’s sparkly reflection on their chains.

“I will never sit in one of those,” I thought, looking deeper into the image on the mirror.

It was always Fall there, and it was so Imperfectly remote.