RECCE ROOM

There’s a corner on the property where two fields meet. It forms a clean 90-degree angle—an L-shaped boundary marked by barbed wire fencing. To the west lies the larger field. To the north, the eastern field stretches out. To anyone else, it’s just a corner. To me, it was a battlefield. My brother and I spent hours there with GI Joes and Transformers, turning that patch of ground into something far bigger than it actually was. The terrain mattered. The angles mattered. The fence line became cover, the dips in the earth became strategic positions. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were learning how to see space—not just as it is, but as it could be used. We lost things there. Accessories, probably a figure or two. Small plastic pieces that slipped into the dirt and never came back. And there’s a good chance they’re still there. Buried just beneath the surface, waiting for someone who doesn’t know what they’ve found. But I do. Because I remember not just the place… …but wh...

The Day I Stopped Playing the Game I've mentioned that I grew up in a violent household. Well, not surprisingly, it was also a household filled with mental and verbal abuse. Something that should never be aimed at a child from their parent or parents. But, it was aimed at my siblings and myself.  There are moments where you realize the rules you’ve been following were never fair to begin with. This was one of those moments. The Story My mother asked me to fix her TV. I told her I would, but I couldn’t do it immediately because I had plans already in motion. I left. I came back several hours later, exactly as I said I would. When I went to my room, my TV was gone. There was a note: “Since you went back on your word, I went back on mine.” The TV had been taken. It had been given to me by my grandmother. This was somehow the "word" that my mother was going back on. Don't ask me to make it make sense. Folks with paranoid schizophrenia rarely make logical sense. My mothe...

  Behind where the house once stood, there is still something left. We called it a barn, but that’s not quite right. It was more of a shed—high-ceilinged, open, covered with a mix of tin and plastic roofing that had seen better days even back then. It extended forward and to the right, creating additional covered space. It wasn’t pretty, but it was useful. Vehicles, equipment, whatever needed shelter found its way under that roof at one point or another. Today, it still stands… barely. Time has not been kind to it. The structure leans into its own age. The roof looks like it could give up the ghost with the next strong wind. And yet, it remains. The man who rents the pasture keeps a piece of farm equipment under it. There was also an old Mitsubishi Mirage sitting there, its license plate years out of date, like it had been forgotten mid-sentence. That shed is the last physical connection to what this place used to be. Everything else is memory. But that one structure… it st...

The Day I Realized I Could Fight Without Hurting People I grew up in a violent household. There was not violence every day, but there was more than there should have been. No, it wasn't spanking - though spanking did happen. There was also true violence. Something that should never be aimed at a child from their parent or parents. But, it was aimed at my siblings and myself.  There are moments in life where something shifts, and you know it’s not going back. This story is about one of those moments. The Story I was about 19 or so, still living at home and attending college. My girlfriend at the time (now my wife) was there with us. The family was doing something simple: folding and putting away laundry. There was a stack of towels that needed to go upstairs. My mother asked my younger sister to take them. My sister asked a reasonable question - how many towels should go in each of the two bathrooms upstairs? That question was taken as defiance. The situation escalated instantly. ...

About 30 to 40 feet west of the house stood a two-car garage. It wasn’t tall—maybe ten feet at most. Low enough that my grandfather’s 1985 Dodge Ram barely cleared the opening by a couple of inches. Pulling into that space required attention. You didn’t just drive in. You placed the vehicle there. The driveway in front of it still exists. Concrete doesn’t forget as easily as wood does. Inside the garage, the front half was for vehicles. Functional, straightforward. But behind that, partitioned off, were two smaller rooms. Storage rooms. The kind of spaces where things went when they were no longer needed daily, but not yet ready to be discarded. You could access those rooms from the main garage or through a side door on the east. They weren’t glamorous. They weren’t organized in any modern sense. But they served a purpose. Like everything else out there. The garage, the shed, the grain bin—these weren’t aesthetic choices. They were solutions. Each one answered a question: Where...

  The house is gone now, but I can still walk through it. It faced south, like it was meant to greet the day head-on. There was a front porch that wrapped across the front and leaned slightly toward the west, as if it wanted a better look at the setting sun. A side door sat on the west wall, and a back door on the east—each one used for a different purpose, each one part of the rhythm of daily life. Inside, everything revolved around a central fireplace. Not tucked away on a wall, but planted right in the middle like a heartbeat. The rooms spread out from it—bedrooms, bathrooms, the kitchen off to one side. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t modern. But it worked. There was a small room near the kitchen, something like a utility space. My grandfather used it as a laundry room. It also served as a kind of back entry—one of those in-between spaces where outside life met inside life. Upstairs, there was an unfinished attic. No insulation. No drywall. Just exposed structure and stored item...