A Geography of Blood Read Online Free Page B

the prairie towns of my youth were hundreds of miles distant and decades in the past, this place was almost as I remembered them. The grain elevators that presided over Railway Street, though strangely unbusy, recalled the dry, half-forgotten aromas of grain dust and “chop.” The guys in ball caps who drew their half-tons up side by side in the middle of the main street looked familiar as they leaned out their cab windows to exchange shop talk. The kids on bicycles who, unafraid of strangers, stopped to talk to me and Keith could have been my childhood friends or models for paintings by Norman Rockwell. When the school bell rang to announce recess, it was all I could do to keep from hurrying over to the playground and looking for my own small self, shrieking with joyful dizziness on the merry-go-round or catching spiders in the tall grass along the fence.
    If I were ever to lay claim to a hometown, it would have to be somewhere like this, a kind of simulacrum of all the places where my family had lived. Although my parents had both started out as teachers, my mother gave up her profession in the late 1940s to prepare for my birth, the first in what would become a family of three daughters. The result was that our family life, thereafter, was ruled by my father’s career. Motivated sometimes by necessity and sometimes by boyish ambition, he moved from job to job and from success to success. Every time he changed jobs, and sometimes when he did not, we moved house. In my first fourteen years, we moved fourteen times.
    I don’t know how my mother put up with it, all that packing and unpacking, all that rending and rebuilding of life, but as a kid, I was remarkably open to the promise of a fresh start. Maybe this time I’d get a room of my own. Maybe the new town would have a better library than the last one or a befuddled, grandmotherly librarian who would pat me on the head and let me borrow books from the adult section. Yet even then, I sensed that these opportunities always came at a cost. With every move, we left behind friends and newly familiar places, losses that became more painful the more often they recurred. And even more troubling, because irrevocable, was the loss of a material connection to our personal past. Clothes we had outgrown, toys we no longer played with, doodles and scribblers stuffed into the bottom drawer of a desk: everything that we were unlikely to need in the future had to be discarded.
    Why, I wondered, couldn’t we be like the families I read about in books, who lived in mansions filled with treasures amassed in years long past by generations of swashbuckling uncles and shadowy spinster aunts? In particular, I yearned for an attic like the ones in which the young heroes and heroines of those novels launched their finest adventures, a midden of romantic old lamps, mysterious wardrobes, and battered trunks filled with lavender-scented letters.
    â€œDid I ever tell you how I used to wish for an attic—” I ask Keith one day, but I can see that he’s busy with his own thoughts. We are walking down the main drag in Eastend: on our right, we pass a romantic old brick bank that has been converted into a used bookstore. A few doors down, there’s a mysterious storefront with a cracked window that, though vacant, still bears the boast of past glory as a “World Famous” antler exhibit. At the far end of the block, the former movie theater, somewhat battered but unbowed, carries the banner of the town’s historical museum (at the moment unfortunately closed for the season).
    â€œLook,” Keith says, pointing up a side street toward a squat brown building shaded by cottonwoods. “Does that sign really say ‘Cappuccino’?” Five minutes later, we are sipping espressos on the sunny patio at Alleykatz, an up-to-the-minute business that unexpectedly combines a coffee bar, a pottery studio, and a daycare. “Coffee, clay, and