Four Personal Addresses

1. Eastern Standard

A grey cape with forest-teal shutters. Backyard pool, a luxury attracted all the summer block kids. Wooden play set with balance beam, monkey bars, a white trapeze. Wide sloping hills perfect for sledding, covered in dirty snow over dead orange pine needles slick with autumn. Chain link fences dividing lawns. Enormous granite boulders. Bikes with handlebar baskets and stickers, skinned knees and sticky hands.

Later, cramped dorm rooms with generic grey carpet and tiny closets, white-cement walls dotted with Polaroids from parties and hand-cut photos of scrawny men with guitars and microphones. One sagging brown Victorian, slanting balcony porch for typewriters and cigarettes. A secret rabbit. The road below unpaved, mounds of dirt piled across the street where someone scrawled “love” in red spray-paint.

2. Mountain Time

No apartments, only houses. Split-level at the foot of Peet’s hill watching the sunrise on the walk to work, coffee and cold hands in September. Orange cottonwoods, unfamiliar. All-boy roommates messy with climbing gear, carabineers in the kitchen. Craggy movie-set mountains, everywhere, at each horizon, smattered with snow, snowshoes, snow pants at the second-hand sports store, pray-for-snow parties, snow in October.

Men dressed as cowboys in the gas station casinos, 48-packs of Keystone in the mini-fridge, lift tickets scattered across the dining room table. Our own bedroom, his striped comforter and my throw pillows, his bookcase stuffed and stacked with my books, and his half-empty closet full.

3. Pacific Daylight Savings

Hummingbirds in March, enormous shiny green ferns and a hot tub in the condo complex. Dinner parties with wine and three different kinds of cheese, all the groceries from Trader Joe’s. Flip-flops and bathing suits, sandals and shorts so suddenly. Saturdays at the farmer’s market three blocks down, four parking lots full with yellow, green, red tomatoes, peppers, homemade sausage, free-range hen eggs, lumpy white goat cheese, black bean and jalapeno empanadas, avocados, lemons and lemons. Fields of lettuce and strawberries.

Kids on skateboards in the apartment-building’s driveway, cement basketball court surrounded by chain link fence where they signed autographs and needed help spelling their names. Sand in my sneakers staying in the carport after studying for the GRE at the beach. Riding bikes to the beach, surfing, watching the sun set, walking to the end of the Little Miss Sunshine wooden pier, for soggy salty French fries and apples. The ocean. Glittering and strange and no end in sight.

4. Central Standard

A stucco duplex, mail slot and a wooden number plate, covered with red ivy. Basement with microbrewing equipment and old Christmas decorations, extra wooden chairs. Cracks in the kitchen wall by the back door and hand-me-down furniture in the attic bedroom. New flowers in the vase every week from the green house, clumps of dirt on the rug by the front door. Clutter. Paper. Backyard hammock and pepper garden, three birdhouses, a wooden swing and a wild bunny.

Railroad crossings every few blocks, noisy trains and tornado sirens. Pantorium, antique stores, Whiskey River Saloon nestled a block down from the power plant, booming stacks, purple-grey smoke. Giant pitchfork and corn fields and soybean fields and corn and soybeans and trains of corn and soybean headed East.