Walking Home

I have nowhere to go. Have no meetings. Have no auditions. Have no friends in town. No family to visit. No lover with big hugs and soft kisses waiting at my doorstep. I have nowhere to go.

So I walk slow. Real slow. I dodge puddles and avoid passersby with big, wet umbrellas. I heave heavy shopping bags in each hand and a purse that grows fuller every day, yet I walk home real, real slow. Cause I have nowhere else to go.

I am on a new street now. It is still raining and there are droplets hanging off each earlobe and one slowly slides down my nose like a Six Flags ride. I like walking in the rain on humid summer evenings. I love the smell of rain. I suddenly ache for Kentucky hillsides, green as blue and yellow fingerpaint. Wish I could drop my bags and run barefoot across my farm back home, dodging cow patties and thistles instead of cigarette butts and dog crap. New York is getting to me. But I have nowhere else to go.

A firefly stops me still. He is hovering right in front of me and if I step to the left of him, I'll brush up against a very wet lion statue. Yet, to the right of this little bug is an overflowing trash can, water dousing its contents so that the leakage is forming a formidable puddle. I have nowhere to go, so I just stop; wait for it to flicker its light up, up, up and above me. I am taken back to summer nights and mason jars, running barefoot over dandelion kissed backyards, my papaw poking holes in the top of aluminum foil make-shift lids. Remember watching them flick on and off again, their lights hovering on the bookshelf in my bedroom, held captive in their jars. I would free them the next day and catch them all over again that night. I wonder if they were the same bugs. They could have caught on, could have moved to a new backyard, free of zealous blonde pig-tailed little girls. But maybe they just had nowhere else to go.