sitting behind my market table remembering halloweens of my Texas childhood… dressing up in costumes my mom had sewn on her grandmother’s old sewing machine, walking with her around our neighborhood at night… dry leaves blowing in the wind and collecting in gutters…

shooting tin cans with a BB gun in the backyard. old wooden fence, dry grass, sunbleached plastic table & chairs with floral waterproof cushions. catching lizards, trimming tunnels in the hedges, flattening pennies with a hammer in the garage & soaking them in vinegar to make them shine…

one time it snowed an inch and I scraped up all the snow in the front yard & built a small, dirty, foliage-infused snowman. I saved some snowballs in the freezer for years & they became rock-solid. I was a sentimental kid.

I obsessively scanned my surroundings & collected small rocks, sticks, metal fragments, bones, shells, bits of plastic, etc. my mom bought me some cardboard sets of drawers to organize my collections over time. the drawers became packed so full that they were difficult to close. when I moved out, she kept the drawers in the garage and now uses the objects in her assemblage pieces.