Address of the house forgotten, the road to the house forgotten, how much I remember only from photographs unknown

Ralston Alberta population 514 not counting those only there for the summer

Including you age seven -- sarsaparilla, starling in the basement, mica black feldspar pink quartz white

With your eyes fixed on the ground all day rockhounding looking for dropped change matchbooks pieces of newsprint tin cans with occasional success

All night eyes fixed on the sky for the aurora borealis and it never came

The front yard of the house the Boston terrier puppy running endlessly at the base of the picket fence the back yard an endless wheatfield

Or ending only where the explosions happened alternate Friday afternoons

Learning the deadman's float jellyfish float, movies on hard folding chairs

You were a better chess player than I am now, nowdays I never win against my father

The backyard swingset incongruous at the edge of the wheatfield -- don't swing over the top your brother said you'll turn yourself inside out I've seen it happen

Aiming the sun's rays through a magnifying glass at the anthill alongside the dirt road expecting it to explode in flames nothing happened you were half disappointed

Two photos I still have -- one from the newspaper sluglined BLAST EFFECTS TEST, your father as you knew him best in a picture in uniform but this time prodding a dummy with his foot next to some broken two by fours -- the other you three kids standing on a glacier in Banff in your cheap sunglasses double-exposed with a stoic Gilbert and Sullivan Mountie

Stamp album, bouncing on the bed that was high as your shoulder, matchbooks with little maps of the provinces you got a nickel each one you could recognize

The hardwood floors in the kitchen your mother waxed so you could throw a ball in there and watch the Boston terrier dog take off after it and go skidding into the kitchen cabinets while your mother waxed the floors upstairs

Somehow a starling with one broken wing one eyesocket empty found its way into the basement

You yourself found it one morning when you were down there to handcrank your finger through the wringer and see if your sister was lying when she said it didn't hurt

Your mother tore up pieces of bread on a paper plate for you to push at it with a broom under her supervision it made loud noises when you came too close

It walked in circles scraped at its eyesocket with its good wing and never ate any bread

One day -- the next day, maybe the next week -- it wasn't moving, hundreds of bloodspots around it from the gone eye? nothing else seemed to be bleeding, your mother said it didn't want to live any more how come

How come Jesus didn't just climb down from there

Every other Friday afternoon your mother took you Lewis and Beth out on the back steps to watch your father detonate the prairie

200 to 400 tons of conventional explosive with a makeshift town clustered around it -- your father spent the two weeks between explosions measuring the Hollywood backset ruins, supervising the building of other empty storefronts and housefronts

Reeking of chlorine all day the comic about the UFO invasion hidden on top of the refrigerator -- Beth knew where it was but didn't say till five years later because it scared her too

Noticing for the first time there was something moving in the sunlight through the window hundreds of somethings white and tiny and no matter how you threw yourself at them waving your arms they wouldn't do any different

Sitting on the back steps at night the wheatfield meeting the sky somewhere down toward the test range never able to stay up late enough to see if the skycurtain would be in front of the stars or in back

Never able to believe you were just too far south barely over the Montana border

Heat ducts you yelled through to your sister two stories below, plastic swizzle sticks with animals on them gifts from the people across the street who went out drinking

Was that strange child more innocent than I am, or only more daunted, without the right questions? A favorite family story -- you raising your hand when the preacher asked a rhetorical question

Or holding the brass collection plate at the end of the pew it seemed like forever getting bored arm-tired finally letting it clang down on the stone floor the money including your own nickel scattering everywhere

Being the last one in the Bible school class to confess Jesus Christ because the blonde girl started crying when she did it, so getting last choice of the books given as spiritual rewards, a blue paperback too hard to read

2:30 in the afternoon pink light then a red half-moon of light eight miles away earth rattled like a pocketful of rock specimens and the cloud rose on its black stem looking you realized only much later like a writhing brain

Knowing for the first time standing outside the community building with a book about dinosaurs too early still for the aurora to maybe come out with all the stars stretched above you like the tips of incisors knowing you could never see the universe from inside your mother's head your father's you were alone inside there forever

But you were in there at least and not up there waiting for the charged particles to coalesce around you or maybe that pointed mouth to snap shut

The next day being the second Friday of the month you stood on the porch and watched your father work