the green and gold kitchen where I was a child. Yes, that's it. And I'm also going to admit something I know will either illicent the response now that's strange or I feel this way too, but thank God you're the crazy one who said it. It is this: when we're heartbroken, when we feel that we just can't put one foot in front of the other, when we are beyond weary or worried ... don't we just want to go home? I mean, really home? And somewhere in the depths of our souls, in the marrow of our bones, in the crevices of our memory, on a scary, Freudian-skewed plane, is it not the home where we wore pajamas and cuddled up to watch cartoons, where we caught fireflies, rode bikes, and wished on stars? The home we knew before there were mortgages to pay and floors to sweep. The place and time before we were responsible for putting pajamas on someone else.

And so I close my eyes and see what I haven't seen in a very long time —a small kitchen with a small window overlooking the chrysanthemums, a small Formica table dusted with gold specks, a pitcher of red Kool-Aid next to three Tupperware tumblers, pot pies oozing and cooling on the stove, my mother sitting on a chair, mixing something in a bowl and talking on the wall phone, the back screen door leading out to a poured concrete patio the size of a saucer. And it makes me want to feed my dolls and put them to bed, smell my play perfume on my play dressing table, steal a MAD magazine from my brother's room, create another