Woodlawn, Ohio.

I grew up in Woodlawn. Contrary to unpopular belief, it is not a city. It is not a town. It's a village. Nestled deep in the forest on the outskirts of Cincinnati. Locust trees, Maple trees, Crabapple and Walnut, all dot the hilly terrain from the lake on its western edge to the railroad tracks to the east, to the wide sweep of cow pasture that now shares its acreage with a Kroger strip mall and a clunk of condominums simply called The Commons.

Most of the people there are working class. Truckers, factory workers, car salesmen, school teachers, ministers, supervising cashiers, and lots and lots of children. Rough-kneed children who's idea of play is tipping cows, catching lightening bugs and terrorizing other children who, for an example, earned an A on their spelling test.

On cold days, Woodlawn exists in this perputual gloom. Gray skies hover above snow-laden streets, polluted by bright yellow dog urine and black ice from somebody's Oldsmobile. The trees are without the plume of their leaves and the dry bark of the Maples shiver in the air. Small birds of every kind bounce from limb to limb—a dance of frostbite maybe, one can never be sure. Sometimes your mother will warm up some milk on the stove and tease you away from the window with the thrill of hot chocolate in a mug. And more often than not, a snow storm will dump inch upon inch and you and your mother worry a little about your father somewhere on a highway, delivering frozen foods, from a Kroger truck.

On warm days, Woodlawn spins in greens and reds and Robin egg blues. The sky is so clear and the air so clean, even the mailman is whistling. If you're lucky, your bike survived winter's rust and you pop a wheelie three or four times up and down your culdesac as others watch in envy. And even though on the fifth wheelie you fall backwards and cut a hole on your hand, well... that's okay. Because the baseball game is in an hour, and though you're probably the worst player on the team, all is good once the team treks it over to Dairy Queen for vanilla ice cream on waffer cones.

Woodlawn, Ohio. Where parents divorce and children graduate in the top twenty percent of their class. Where the Army recruits some of Ohio's most promising no-nonsense boys ever. Where girls leave their mother's backporches and travel to Atlanta and become pediatricians and wives, or lesbians. Where on some nights you can smell the sweet stench from the whiskey distillery two miles away and your mother closes all of the windows because she says the smell makes her sick, and your father comes home from his 14-hour day and you all sit down for a Sloppy Joe dinner, and talk about laying down tar on the driveway, a note from school about someone talking too much, and whether Saturday should be spent cutting the hedges. And even now, thirty years later, hundreds of miles away, you remember the gloom and the spin of Woodlawn and you smile. You smile wide.

Until next time,

Keith