The crackle of the juniper wood snapped me right out of the canyon and dropped me straight back into the 1980s.

I looked across the embers at the three women who, just seventy-two hours ago, had been strangers to me. The armor was completely gone now. We were dirty, sun-baked, and wrapped in wool blankets, sharing the kind of deep, easy silence you only get after fighting a river all day.

“You know,” I said, a soft smile catching the orange firelight, “soaking in this kind of peace feels a little surreal when your baseline for ‘normal’ was a 1980s Oklahoma suburb.”

Sarah, sitting directly across from me, adjusted her wool blanket and leaned forward. “Surreal how? What was the setup?”

“I grew up in Collinsville,” I told her, gesturing to the dark canyon walls as if sketching the map of my childhood in the air. “A small house. Pale green siding, bright red trim. We lived so close to the BNSF railroad tracks, literally a hundred yards from the back door, that the whole place rumbled multiple times a day. The kitchen windows rattled, the dingy brown carpet practically vibrated under our feet, but we just kept talking. We stopped noticing the noise entirely. To us, a shaking house was just the music, homemade.”

“Didn’t it drive you crazy?” asked Jen, the youngest of our river group, pulling her legs up to her chest. “I get annoyed when a garbage truck passes my apartment.”

“Not at all,” I laughed. “When it’s all you know, it’s just the background track to your life. And our house was chaotic enough to compete with a freight train anyway. It was a tight squeeze, three bedrooms for a family of six. My older sister Dora and I shared a room completely decked out in Mickey and Minnie Mouse bedding, while my brothers, Bobby Jr. and Jayson, had Donald Duck and Woody Woodpecker down the hall. My mom, Betty, somehow managed to keep the indoor chaos contained, but most of our lives happened just outside those walls. To the east, Grandpa Charley Snow and Grandma Stella lived just two houses away. I’d run through the yards to get to her place nearly every single day. We didn’t use the gravel roads; our small feet had beaten a physical path right through the neighborhood grass.”

“Grandparents down the street are the ultimate luxury,” Sarah murmured, staring into the flames. “What was her house like?”

“It was a complete sensory haven,” I said, smiling, “the memory warming me more than the fire. “It always smelled like baking sugar because Grandma Stella made pies constantly—pecan, apple, blackberry, you name it. And she had these two completely wild pet parakeets. They were always making noise, filling the kitchen with this loud, frantic, gossiping chatter while she rolled out lard crusts on flour-dusted counters. Between the trains shaking the house and those birds screaming at Grandma’s, silence wasn’t really a thing in our family.”

I leaned back, a specific, bittersweet memory hitting me. “But if Grandma Stella’s house was the kingdom of sugar, the backyard was Grandpa Charley’s pride and joy. He had these magnificent cherry trees planted along the edge of his lot. In the early summer, those branches would hang incredibly heavy, practically weeping with the most beautiful, plump, deep red cherries you’ve ever seen. They looked like little jewels catching the Oklahoma sun. The rule in the family was absolute: us kids were allowed to pick the cherries from the lower branches, but we were strictly forbidden from climbing up into the trees or breaking the fruit-bearing limbs. Grandpa Charley took care of those trees like they were royalty.”

“Let me guess,” Maria interrupted with a knowing smirk. “You guys didn’t listen.”

“Well, the temptation was too much,” I confessed, laughing. “One hot June afternoon, Bobby Jr. decided that the very best, sweetest cherries were dangling just out of reach near the top. He convinced the rest of us to form a tactical operations team. Little Jayson was designated as the lookout by the side of the house. Dora and I were the collection crew, standing on a couple of old, overturned wooden milk crates, holding the hems of our shirts out like baskets to catch the bounty. Bobby Jr. was the climber. He scrambled right up the trunk and nestled into the center fork of the tree, shaking the branches and tossing cherries down to Dora and me. We were all stuffing our faces as fast as we could, our lips, chins, and fingers stained a dark, incriminating crimson.

“Suddenly, Jayson hissed from the corner; Grandpa Charley’s heavy boots were crunching in the grass. We all panicked. Bobby Jr. tried to drop down from the fork too quickly, but the thick denim of his jeans snagged a major, fruit-laden branch. There was this horrific, loud snap, and a beautiful limb tore right off the tree, crashing down into the red dirt with Bobby Jr. tangling up inside it, right as Grandpa rounded the corner.”

“Oh, no,” Jen cringed. “Was he furious?”

“I thought the sky was going to fall,” I said. “Grandpa Charley stared at that broken branch, then at the four of us, covered in cherry juice, looking utterly guilty. He didn’t yell, though. He just let out a long, heavy sigh that made us feel about an inch tall. He made all four of us haul the heavy branch away and clean up every stray leaf. Then he marched us over to the back porch. He didn’t tell our dad or ban us from the yard. Instead, he lined us up on the wooden steps and made us eat every single cherry off that broken branch until our stomachs were completely aching. The real kicker was that this exact stunt was how I discovered, in the most miserable way possible, that I am severely allergic to cherries. By the time the four of us finished eating them all to serve our collective sentence, I didn’t just have a stomachache. I broke out in massive, burning, red hives from head to toe. My skin was on fire. My mom had to coat me in pink calamine lotion, and Grandpa Charley felt so bad about the hives that the punishment ended up backfiring into a lesson for him, too. But he still patted our heads, handed us a glass of water, and told us he hoped we learned that shortcuts usually end up breaking the things you love. It was a classic Grandpa move, firm, loving, and taught entirely through the medium of fruit and allergic reactions. After that, we respected those trees like holy ground.

“Then, if you looked to the west of our property, things got even wilder. We lived next to Old Man Abbott, who had an old farmhouse on a five-acre lot. Our family rented those five acres, and we kids essentially ran it as our own private kingdom.”

Jen looked up from her marshmallow stick. “Wait, your parents just let a pack of kids run a five-acre farm? What kind of animals are we talking about?”

“A total menagerie,” I said, leaning closer to the fire. “We raised chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, rabbits kept in wooden hutches, and an incredibly stubborn Shetland pony. The air out there was a thick, heavy soup. It smelled of sweet alfalfa hay, dry grain, turned earth, and the pungent, unmistakable odor of livestock, a scent that might turn some stomachs, but to us, it just smelled like home and responsibility. My mom was managing the domestic chaos indoors, and my dad, Bobby Sr., worked the grueling night shifts at the rendering plant in Collinsville.

“Now, if you’ve never lived near a rendering plant, you have no idea what true olfactory trauma is. It wasn’t just industrial grease or iron. They processed dead animals out there. On a hot, humid Oklahoma morning when the wind shifted just right, this thick, heavy, sickeningly sweet stench of decay and scorched fat would roll across the town. It was a smell that clung to the back of your throat. My dad would come home from those shifts carrying that heavy, heavy scent on his clothes, bone-tired and ready to crash. Because he had to sleep through the blazing heat of the day, the daily operations of the five acres fell squarely on our shoulders: Bobby Jr., Dora, myself, and little Jayson.”

“Did you actually do the heavy lifting, or did you just play with them?” asked Maria, who had been quiet most of the evening, tapping a stick against a glowing coal.

“Oh, we worked,” I told her. “We hauled heavy water buckets, filled feed troughs, and collected eggs while trying not to get pecked to death by the birds. But when the chaos outside got to be too much, or when that rendering plant smell got too heavy in the air, I had my own escape route. I was a hyper-intellectual little nerd. I’d climb up to the top bunk, right on top of my Mickey and Minnie Mouse bedding, or tuck myself away in a quiet living room nook where nobody could see me. I would drag the heavy, gold-lettered volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Webster’s Dictionary up there with me. I read them top to bottom. I didn’t want to learn about the world just to be smart; I wanted weapons. I collected the biggest, most clinical words I could find just to lob them at my brothers. There is nothing funnier than watching a boy’s face cloud over with confusion because his six-year-old sister just used a five-syllable word to insult his hygiene or his intelligence.”

Maria chuckled, shifting her weight on her camp chair. “Okay, so you’re six years old, dodging a town that smells like dead animals, running a five-acre farm, and hiding out on a Minnie Mouse top bunk with a dictionary. Please tell me you actually used those words in real life.”

“Oh, absolutely,” I laughed, pulling the wool blanket tighter around my shoulders. “They were my absolute shields. My brothers, Bobby Jr. and Jayson, were typical country boys, loud, physical, always trying to roughhouse. I couldn’t outrun them, and I certainly couldn’t out-wrestle them, so I decided to out-syllable them. I collected words like polished stones and waited for the perfect moment to strike.”

“Give us an example,” Jen pleaded, her eyes wide with amusement. “What is a six-year-old insult from the Encyclopedia Britannica?”

“Well,” I said, leaning forward into the firelight, “my top two favorites were abecedarian and pusillanimous. Whenever Bobby Jr. would do something completely reckless, or Jayson would whine about having to carry the heavy water buckets to the chicken coops, I’d just look at them with the most superior, clinical expression a six-year-old could muster. I’d cross my arms and say, ‘You are being completely pusillanimous.’ Or if they were struggling with a basic chore, I’d sigh and call them abecedarians.”

Sarah burst out laughing, throwing her head back into the canyon darkness. “How on earth did they react to that?”

“Total, absolute confusion,” I said. “Their faces would just cloud over. They’d freeze, blinking at me like owls, trying to figure out if I had just insulted their intelligence, their hygiene, or their mother. Eventually, Bobby Jr. would puff up his chest and demand, ‘What does that even mean?’ And I’d just smirk from my top bunk and say, ‘Look it up.’ Of course, that just made them furious. They’d yell back, ‘You don’t even know what it means! You’re just making up words!’ But I knew. Oh, I knew exactly what they meant. I had the Webster’s Dictionary right there to prove it. It was my private joy, watching them get completely derailed by language they couldn’t grasp.”

“I love that,” Maria said, shaking her head. “A tiny dictator on a bunk bed. But what about the animals? You mentioned a stubborn Shetland pony. Did you use your big words on him too?”

“Jim,” I said, the name coming out with a mix of affection and lingering exasperation. “The pony’s name was Jim. Now, Jim was technically broke to ride. He had a saddle, he had a bridle, and on paper, he was a children’s pony. But Jim had a fatal flaw: he was a total coward. He was perpetually terrified of his own shadow. We’d be riding him across Old Man Abbott’s five acres, everything perfectly peaceful, the sun beating down on the Oklahoma dirt, and a bird would flutter, or a leaf would twitch. Jim would catch a glimpse of his own dark shape in the grass, get completely spooked, and execute this sudden, violent sidestep. Without fail, we kids would go flying right off his back, landing flat in the dirt while Jim stood there snorting, looking at the ground like it was haunted.”

“Did you ever give up on riding him?” Jen asked.

“Never,” I said. “We’d just brush the red clay off our jeans, curse him out using whatever vocabulary words I had memorized that morning, and climb right back on. We were tough kids. You had to be when you were managing an entire sovereign kingdom before dinner.”

Sarah reached down, using a long stick to poke at a glowing log, sending a fresh shower of orange sparks up toward the crowded canyon stars. “So you have this wild farm life, a dad working the night shift at a rendering plant, and a house that literal freight trains shake to pieces. How did your parents ever manage to get all four of you out of there for vacations?”

“In July,” I said, the word itself carrying the weight of that heavy midwestern heat. “In Oklahoma, July is less of a calendar month and more of a spiritual endurance test. The temperature routinely clocks in over one hundred degrees. The humidity rolls up from the Gulf of Mexico, making the air so thick you feel like you’re breathing warm water. The vibrant green lawns we ran through in June would bake until they turned into dry, prickly brown straw that crunched under your bare feet. To survive it, my parents, Betty and Bobby Sr., would pack the four of us into the back of the car for these epic regional road trips.”

“Oh, god,” Jen groaned, laughing. “A family road trip in the 1980s. No iPhones, no DVD players.”

“And no luxury,” I agreed. “We are talking about four kids crammed into a bench seat, our bare summer legs literally sticking to the scorching vinyl upholstery. If you moved too fast, you’d peel your skin right off the seat. We would fight over the window territory, argue about who was touching who, and inhale the hot wind blowing through the open windows because the air conditioning was either broken or couldn’t handle the heat. But despite the misery of the car ride, those trips were the absolute highlight of our entire lives. They were the ultimate proof that we were a normal, happy, stable family.”

“Where did you go?” Maria asked.

“We hit all the great regional meccas of the Midwest,” I said, cataloging the memories in the air. “We would drive south to Arlington for Six Flags Over Texas. For us, Six Flags was all about the water rides, specifically the Roaring Rapids, that ride with the big round boats. We would get completely soaked, our clothes dripping wet in the Texas heat, laughing until our stomachs hurt as the water crashed over the sides. That was the year I won the ultimate prize, too, a massive, stuffed green snake with bright pink polka dots. I hauled that ridiculous reptile everywhere, completely proud of myself.

“Then we’d go north to Kansas City to Worlds of Fun, spinning on the rides until our faces turned green and our stomachs were full of cotton candy and soda. But my absolute favorite was Dogpatch USA. It was this wonderfully bizarre, hillbilly-themed amusement park tucked deep into the Arkansas Ozarks, based on the Li’l Abner comic strip. It had log cabins, artificial trout ponds, and actors walking around dressed up like cartoon characters. But the crown jewel of Dogpatch for us was this terrifying ride that used centrifugal force. You’d get inside this massive, spinning wooden barrel, and it would start whirling around faster and faster until you were completely pinned against the wall. Then, right at the peak speed, the entire floor would drop out from under your feet. You were just suspended there, held against the wall by physics, screaming your lungs out while staring down into empty space. It was completely ridiculous, totally unique, and we loved every single second of it.

“If we wanted something a little more educational, my parents would drive us up to Wichita to the Sedgwick County Zoo. And when we stayed closer to home, we would head to Grand Lake. We’d line up to board the historic Cherokee Queen, this massive, beautiful paddlewheel riverboat. We’d stand by the wooden railings, watching the huge wheel churn the dark green Oklahoma water into exploding white foam. The breeze coming off the lake was the only thing that could finally cut through that brutal July heat. Sitting on that boat, watching the shoreline glide past, I felt completely invincible. My parents had planned it, my siblings were right next to me, and everything was perfectly secure. Or so it seemed. Because when you grow up in that kind of absolute, beautiful normal, you have no idea how fragile it actually is. You don’t realize that a single second can punch a hole right through the canvas.”

Jen leaned in, her chin resting on her hands. “Alright, you can’t leave us hanging on a cliffhanger like that. What happened to the canvas?”

“The Fourth of July, 1981,” I said, a dry chuckle escaping my lips as I adjusted my position on the canyon dirt. “I was six years old. The adults handed each of us kids a massive brown paper grocery bag stuffed to the brim with fireworks. Sparklers, smoke bombs, jumping jacks, absolute wealth. I went out to the yard, sat flat on the blistering red dirt, and proudly straddled this huge paper bag right between my thighs to protect it from my siblings.

“My older brother, Bobby Jr., was nearby, playing with a live firework. It was spitting sparks, hissing, and smoking. He thought it would be a hilarious older-brother prank to startle his bookworm sister. With a careless, laughing flick of his wrist, he tossed the lit firework directly into the open top of my grocery bag.”

Sarah gasped, her hand flying to her mouth, while Jen let out a sharp “No way!” Maria shook her head, staring at the embers. “Oh, brothers are absolute monsters. My older brother once threw a hornet’s nest into my playhouse just to see how fast I could run.”

“Right?” I laughed, nodding along. “For a split second, time stopped. Then, the universe tore wide open. It wasn’t a single pop; it was a chaotic, rapid-fire, heavy-artillery assault right between my legs. White-hot flashes, metallic cracks, and a cloud of acrid, sulfurous gray smoke. I shrieked and did the most frantic backward low-crawl of my life across that prickly grass, kicking my legs like a flipped-over beetle while my holiday stash disintegrated into a flaming inferno right there in the yard.”

“Oh my god, Stephanie,” Jen said, wide-eyed. “Were you hurt?”

“The physical damage was honestly minimal, just some soot and singed fabric,” I reassured her. “But the domestic fallout was epic. My dad came charging out of the house, his night-shift exhaustion instantly turning into pure adrenaline. He let out a roar of anger that completely eclipsed the explosives, scolding Bobby Jr. until the ground shook. Right then and there, he confiscated every single one of Bobby’s remaining fireworks, leaving him completely bankrupt for the holiday. Meanwhile, Grandma Stella and Grandpa Charley ran over from two houses down to see who died.”

I softened, a warm, nostalgic smile returning to my face. “But the reason it’s actually one of my favorite, happiest memories is because of my mom. Betty didn’t panic. She knelt right down in the dirt, entirely unbothered by the smoke, and started gently brushing the ash off my shirt. She held me close, checked me over, and just made me feel completely, unshakeably safe. It was terrifying for a second, sure, but the second my mom stepped in, the universe went right back to its proper axis.”

I looked up at the river of stars stretching across the canyon sky, bringing the story back to the warmth of our current fire. “That was the beauty of my childhood. Even when chaos threatened to spark, I had a family that wrapped me up and kept me safe. It was a beautiful, bulletproof kind of foundation.”

Interlude, Quiet Before the Storm

The canyon had gone entirely still now. The low murmur of the river seemed to drop an octave as the midnight chill rolled down off the rock walls, slipping under our wool blankets. Across from me, Sarah’s eyes were heavy, fixed on the dying embers. Maria had stopped tapping her stick. The easy laughter from the fireworks story had quieted down, leaving a heavy, reflective space between the four of us. “It’s funny,” I said softly, my voice barely carrying over the dark water. “How cleanly memory preserves the packaging of a life before it breaks.”

They looked up, listening.

“When you’re a child,” I continued, pulling my blanket up to my chin, “you assume the setting is permanent. You think the pale green siding, the smell of Grandma’s pecan pies, and the house rattling from the train are the absolute laws of physics. You don’t know that the light hitting the cherry trees is fleeting. You take for granted the absolute, bulletproof safety of your mother brushing ash off your shirt because your brain hasn’t learned the word fragile yet.”

I looked up at the crowded stars, tracing the brilliant, icy line of the Milky Way against the ancient black gorge. “I can still smell the thick, sickeningly sweet weight of that rendering plant on a hot July morning. I can still feel the prickly, sun-baked straw of the lawn under my bare heels. My childhood self took those things as a promise that tomorrow would look exactly like yesterday. We are beautifully blind at six years old. We build our entire sense of self on the assumption that the people who hold our hands through the smoke will always be the ones keeping us warm.”

A lone piece of juniper popped, a solitary spark floating up into the dark.

“But a child’s world doesn’t end with a loud explosion,” I whispered, the firelight catching the sharp edges of my face. “It ends in the quiet. It ends when the wind shifts, the armor goes up, and you realize the people inside the house are the ones you have to watch.”