Peculiar and quiet, from a broken home, George spent summer afternoons watching me tear down what was left of a fallen barn to make room for another of those enormous gardens his adoptive parents wouldn't share with anyone. George helped me pick up the pieces by hand. Held the salvageable two-by sixes on saw horses as I hammered out every last rusted nail. Almost every afternoon he did this. Then he'd be gone for days at a time. The curtains would be pulled at the renters place-the sound of piano keys-redundant chord progressions and John Thompson techniques echoing in the air. And on these days I always thought it was wrong. George not around-cooped up in that stuffy house, forced in to some sort of homegrown recital. * * * * When the barn was done And I returned to graduate school I forgot about George. Two years later on the local news I see a picture of the house, the two gardens gone to weeds and a reporter tells me about the adoptive parents, arrested for tying the child to her bed for days on end-feeding her homegrown habanera peppers. All this education, I think, and I never stopped once to ask him if everything was okay. ("Homegrown" by my friend Jim Reese) P5Antonio and dynamic clothes, PTVickie and dynamic clothes AKMorphable bed ROSecrets Everseer smokes Girlsroom book with Trekkiegirl text