At some point, when I was a little, little girl, my family spent a few days and nights on the Gulf Coast, Alabama or Mississippi, I don't remember which. What I remember are these things: crabs scuttling in the metal mesh cage which we hung from the dock; my brothers gigging frogs or saying they had and making me squeal (but I don't remember seeing any frogs); playing canasta, a game my mother loved and taught us as soon as we could hold the Bicycle playing cards; and the flicking lamp on the screen porch where we stayed (a cabin perhaps?), glowing golden bugs buzzing beyond.
2.
At another, older age, I remember one moment on one muggy summer evening at my Aunt Ruby and Uncle Alec's creekside cabin south of Birmingham, where, between the shuffleboard court and the screen door, I stopped a moment, just a moment, and looked at the shadows of adults on the other side, lit only by a single golden lamp, the shade ambered with age. They murmured, softly, like a lullaby.
3.
Lying in bed, in the left-side room, in Cabin 1, Redstone Camp on the Black Warrior Camp, I heard the soft thunk of swollen wood slap swollen wood.
4.
Beersheba Springs Assembly: a single door, a single lamp, so many associations, all of them embracing me like a family's arms.
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