Three boys in a cotton field. West Texas. Summer.

The water was coming up slow through the furrows — crystal clear at first, so clean you could see the bottom. We packed the dirt between the rows with our hands and waited. You had to wait. That was the part nobody told you about.

When it cleared you'd lower yourself down. Knees first. Then all the way to your belly. The water cool and still. Nobody said a word.

That was Shallowater. That was before.

I found myself thinking about it sitting in the middle of a pond in Rockwall, Texas. An old aluminum jon boat. Oars resting in place. No west Texas wind to battle — just the rustle of the cattails and the hull flexing softly against the water.

I felt something I didn't have a name for yet. Freedom, maybe. Or something that felt like the cotton rows used to feel.

I didn't know the code then. I didn't know what any of it meant.

I just knew I wanted to stay.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Before the pond there was west Texas.

I thought the small country house was mine forever.

The way kids claim things — completely, without question. You live inside a place long enough and it lives inside you.

It was a small house on a dirt road outside of Shallowater. Two bedrooms. A bathroom that was barely a bathroom. A kitchen that opened into a living room. Out back there was a barn and a chicken coop and a yard that was mostly dirt and a little bit of grass trying its best.

I had a red bicycle. One speed — the speed I gave it. There were four other houses between ours and the end of the road, and past all of them, past the chickens, the dirt road just stopped at an old house where nobody lived anymore. When I felt adventurous that's where I'd go.

I'd ride all the way to the end — lean my bike against a tree and go explore the old wooden farmhouse that had been somebody's home. The house was small, only one bedroom, bathroom, and the kitchen was part of the living room. Inside and out the paint had been washed away by years of sand and sun. All the boards gray and many worn so thin the house should have collapsed. Patiently, that old house sat waiting on the owner to return and restore the life it once knew.

The wind was always up to no good out there. Cutting across the fields, whipping up the dust, making little dirt devils just to show off its mischievous power. The house stood silent but firm. Just as it had for over forty years.

Walking in where the door used to be the floorboards were rotten. The windows broken and the sand drifted in and was slowly burying the house from the inside out. I'd walk through it carefully, imagining who had lived there, looking for clues. Why did they leave and never come back?

My mom told me later that when we first moved in the owners had tried to make it a church. Put a sign out on the road. Never happened. The wind got the last word on that too. And with one little piece of tin hanging by one last nail that wouldn't let go, that tin would flap against the weathered wood — sending a message to the wind, "I'm still here my friend."

Riding home, always slow and unhurried. The dirt under my tires would give softly, leaving a small trail behind me. I'd stop at the house with all the chickens and pick up dirt clods and throw them at the chickens — never actually hitting one, just trying.

Park my bike under the big mulberry tree. If any had fallen I picked them up, brushed them off, and sat under the tree while I ate a handful.

Inside that sandbox my toy tractors and earthmovers sat quietly. Just waiting for me to come back. The dump truck and earth mover both faded yellow but solid steel.

I didn't go back.

But I knew they were there.

I had a wooden toy box in my room with my toys in it and they belonged there the same way I belonged there — settled, claimed, in place.

I didn't have much but all of it was special and had a place.