elcome to my city limit sign, my population 986. I am a town long past my prime, set just far enough off the highway to discourage travelers, and encourage the myopia of small minds. You won't find me on most maps of the state, but if you aren't looking for me, you won't miss me. A one stoplight town with more beauty parlors than churches, I am more inclined to re-elect my mayor than to elect change. I am safe streets and unlocked doors.

A difference of opinion yawns like a canyon here, like folklore.

I am old timers sitting on porches passing gossip like lemons in their suntea, men and women who have passed their whole lives within my skirts, born in cast-iron beds that will buoy them through their own slow lives, leaking life rafts, complete universes sinking slowly.

I am restless teenage boys who have gunned their engines and paced my streets like resentful zoo tigers all too eager to be set free. I am the grown men who look up and find themselves still pacing, wondering where and when they have collected these lives around themselves, these teenage boys of their own. I am their wives and mothers, women who smoke cigarettes under beauty parlor hair dryers and think about carpools, and coupons, all the while carrying within their breast the memories of endless nights spent in backseats of cars, at parties where they smoked their first and only joints, or drank themselves past the checkpoints of virginity, knowing and not knowing what they were doing, thinking this important—this universe buzzing in their ears as they began to abandon fear. I am their daughters and soon their granddaughters who don't understand but will swiftly know why they keep saying study hard and go to college and make something of your life, that dreaded expectation that makes it that much harder to admit that its no longer a possibility for them either.

I am ten year olds in girl scout uniforms at your door selling cookies, their bright smiles good with those that aren't buying, well, maybe just one, oh put me down for some of those, too. I am their boy counterparts running through sprinklers, jumping on trampolines, pedaling their bikes down Main Street at such a breakneck speed that people shout, "where's the fire?" as they blur by.

On alternating Thursday evenings I am the Elks Lodge, the Knights of Columbus, the Rotary Club or the town council. Here on Third and Oak I am the haze of cigarette smoke in the basement of St. John the Baptist's on Bingo night as Deacon Percy calls numbers at a pace that makes his parishioner's suspect he's fallen off the wagon again. I am farmers venturing in from their outposts in beat-up trucks, worrying about the price of corn, the weather, their mortgage—if their wives might leave them before they can say thank you, thank you for staying and getting calluses on your hands and never being able to wear your wedding ring but on Sunday, for taking it when I yell because the bank is calling and there is nothing to do but yell, no one else to yell at, and thank you most of all for seeing in me something I don't, something lovely and better and worthwhile.

And I am daughters who don't understand their mothers, how they could throw their lives away on father's they love but don't respect, who will marry their own farm boys or never come home, even on holidays. I am a legacy of homecoming queens whose brilliant smiles hide inadequacies and secrets, who feel keenly the tight faces of the girls they have known since kindergarten whose sudden envy doesn't see their futures: early marriages to husbands whose experience on the varsity football team might lend them to violence more readily than tenderness, who see the world through the weight of their bodies. I am their teammates who have become the police force, who instinctively understand that guys named Jim and Greg don't mean to hurt their wives, that pain and anger are just a part of life, and that sometimes these ladies deserved what they got, wouldn't have got it if they'd just mind their husbands and their p's and q's.

What I'll never be is you, the passerby, the latecomer, the outsider, with your knowledge of bigger cities and your desire of bigger dreams. I won't attend your dinner parties, won't hop out and pump your gas at the self-serve pump, won't chat with you as I bag your groceries at the market. My peace be with you will be cold and tightly polite at mass, my eyes will follow your car as it passes me on Main Street, and even though you may never know me, I will know who you are, and all about the fights you and your spouse have about moving back to wherever it is you came from. If you stay here twenty years you will be the newcomer, because we have been here for generations, and you will never catch up.

Aching within me is this growing sense of alarm that grips a town that is dying, a collective regretful sigh of this is where I've landed, this is where I was born, this is where I'll die, this is where I live. Stuck here in a past that has stained the air we breathe, like a faint hint of smoke riding a breeze rippling through my trees, we sense some danger, but we are convinced there is something safe about safety, as if our white picket fences were battlements. We pride ourselves on the order of our days, lined up like dominos, all black and white and numbered.