Driving home from dinner and ritas with Kel, the windows are cranked down, I’m listening to some funky wannabe bluegrass-ish music, and as I turn down one (of the many. effing. roads.) to home, the bugs were screaming so loud I could hear them over the audio distraction and feel them over the hummmmm of the subwoofer buried under the console of my right elbow.

I was suddenly seventeen again.

I was sneaking out of my house with Tony and Jason in the middle of the night to meet up with Julie. For what? Who knows. We were seventeen. Mailbox baseball? A night chatting in the graveyard? A trip to Gravity Hill?

She never showed up at her window, and we spent the rest of the night on a spontaneous scavenger hunt, trolling around Anchorage in the spring/summer twilight plucking pink flamingos and sunflower windmills from front yards. We even managed to find an unsupervised toilet in the yard of a house under construction - and since we were oblivious then as to the impact on homeowners - shimmied that somehow into the trunk of Tony’s orange mobile.

We subsequently left the assortment decoratively organized on Julie’s lawn.

That was the night I came home and found the window I’d crawled out of had been closed and locked.

That was the night I climbed the porch stairs and found my father waiting.

That was the night I went back to live with my mother.