yet another memoir, this time about changes.

Today we're supposed to blog about a life- or perspective-changing experience: something that altered what we knew about the world, or how we looked at it. Alaska was telling us about some of his big experiences, and he raised a point that really interested me: knowing versus experiencing.

You can know that there are certain things in the world, or that things are a certain way, but that doesn't necessarily mean you've experienced them. I think the point of this memoir activity is for us to talk about a situation where we experienced something that we already knew... so here we go.

My mother passed away when I was four years old, so I've known from a very young age that bad things happen, people get hurt, and sometimes they even die. But, like Alaska said, there's a big difference between knowing something and experiencing it. I knew from the moment I woke up and saw an ambulance in my front yard that people did actually die -- even people I loved more than anything else in the world -- but I didn't know until I was eight years old that I could die, too.

A big part of my family is made up of farmers. My uncles Mike, Bobby, and Bo are all part of a farming co-op, as are my cousins Tommy and Brandon and Brett. I've spent a whole lot of time at my Aunt Carol's battered old house and inside the ancient rust-colored barn, and it was there that I faced the big, looming, terrifying shadow of the idea of death for the first time.

It was afternoon, almost supper time, and Brett, Tommy, and I had climbed up into the hayloft. We liked to play games up there, swinging around on the rope that hung from the ceiling and jumping over the square feed holes cut into the floor. Sometimes, when there was enough hay down on the lower level, Uncle Mike and Uncle Bo would pile it all up and let us jump down into it. That's what we wanted to do that day.

(We didn't have permission to play our little jumping game, but we hadn't been expressly told not to play it, either. I guess the adults just assumed that we were smart enough to know that it's a bad idea to jump out of a second-story loft onto hard-packed earth without anyone over the age of ten around to supervise, and in that assumption they were wrong, because that's exactly what we did.)

There was some hay down there, not a lot, but enough to fool us into thinking it was safe. Tommy went first, which was typical for him, and landed right in the middle with a soft, crackly poof sound, perfectly safe and sound. Once he'd scrambled out of the way Brett followed, and again, it was perfectly fine. The middle of the pile flattened out a little under his weight, and a good bit of the hay dragged out behind him or stuck to his clothes when he rolled away, but he and Tommy declared that it was my turn and, trusting that they wouldn't tell me to jump if they didn't think it was okay, I took it.

I remember to this day how I took exactly ten steps back, the way Tommy always did, and how I pushed out with my back foot as it left the wooden floor of the loft. I went up and out at a pretty gradual angle--and then down, down, plummetting, rocket-fast, straight towards the ground.

The hay wasn't as thick or fluffy or safe for me as it had been for my cousins, and when I hit it -- hard -- it completely flattened, whooshing away from me, so I landed flat on my back with barely two inches of padding between me and the ground.

The first thing I registered was that it hurt, and the second thing was that, when I tried to suck in air and scream for my uncles, I couldn't. It was Tommy who fled, wailing at the top of his lungs, to the house and dragged his dad back by the hand. It was Brett who babbled through his tears what had happened.

It was me who lay on the ground, gasping, barely able to breathe and, because I couldn't even muster up enough breath to sob, unable to cry. I don't remember how long I stayed there like that. It felt like an eternity, but in reality it could have been as little as two minutes. I thought I was dying, but in truth I'd just had the wind knocked out of me.

When I finally got up, my Uncle Mike swept me into a hug and told me to never, ever do something like that again. Just like he had so many times before, he warned me that doing dangerous things could very well result in me getting hurt.

For the first time ever, I believed him.

snapshot memory: a night at the beach.

The ocean is louder than anything I’ve ever heard before, roaring and crashing in a way that I didn’t think was possible. I’ve read about this, about how to sound of the waves can literally obliterate everything else. I’ve never believed that it’s true, that it can really happen—but it is. The sound of it surrounds me, blocks out the rest of the world as I stand with my feet planted in the soft white sand and the wind whipping against my clothes, and I think that this is the most peaceful I’ve ever felt.

The beach umbrella is heavy in my arms, the metal rod cool against the palms of my hands. I can feel the myriad of dents and scratches that cover its surface; it is the topography of an entire planet shrunk down to fit on this five-foot-long pole, grounding me here and reminding me that this is, in fact, a real event.

He stands a few feet behind me, laughing – though I can’t hear it over the waves – and waving me forward, toward the ocean. The moonlight hits the metal clasp of the necklace he wears, throwing silver in my face, reflecting out of his dark eyes. I hesitate, unsure, and he raises his voice so I can hear him over the cacophony of the waves.

“Do it!” he shouts. He’s smiling, wide and blazing and confident in me, and it makes me smile, too. “C’mon!”

I heft the umbrella up so it’s level with my ribs and yell back, “But it’s not ours!”

His response is thunderous and simple: “WHO CARES?”

I don’t know what it is – the giddiness of the day, the unbelievable beauty of the ocean, or just the surreal haze that covers this whole night – but something breaks the last remainders of my conscience and suddenly I don’t care about rules or consequences or right and wrong.

I lift the umbrella to my shoulder, holding it in both hands, my grip wide, like some kind of medieval warrior holds and spear, and I rush forward. The sand clutches at my feet and the wind threatens to knock me over, and when I hit the water it splashes up all around me, even louder here than it was ten feet away on the beach. I run forward, struggling against the waves, until my shorts are soaked through and the water is lapping at the hem of my t-shirt and then I stop, draw a deep breath, and hurl the umbrella forward with all of my strength.

It doesn’t go far, or straight, and it’s definitely not the kind of throw a medieval warrior would execute, but when the umbrella hits the water with an almighty splash, and I’m hit full in the face with the smell of salt and ocean and life, I’m thrilled. I literally squeal with excitement as I swing around, back to the beach, and there he is, doubled over now, laughing so hard his eyes are squeezed shut.

I fight my way back to the sand and kick a giant cloud of it in his direction, and he shouts, “Hey!”

“Catch me if you can!” I reply, and before he can even react I take off down the beach, running where the water and the shore meet, as fast as I can, arms pumping at my sides and air ripping through my chest. Every once in a while, when the waves ebb, I can hear his feet thumping against the ground behind me, or a snatch of his voice, laughing or shouting my name before the wind carries it away, and I keep running, laughing, shouting with absolute joy as the moon shines down on the best night of my summer.

the blues: a memoir.

The summer air hummed heavy with the songs of crickets and cicadas on my last day living in Georgia, when I sat in the back yard with my brother Matt and listened to him play the blues on his guitar.

It’s really difficult to describe the sound of the blues to someone who hasn’t ever heard them as I have, raw and unrestricted and beautiful. I’ve sat back in the warm Southern heat that the music was born in, felt the hard plastic mold of a patio chair burn slow through my t-shirt, and I’ve heard: heard fingerpicking and slide strumming, heard the notes hang sweet in the air, heard the soul that lives in the music.

That day we sat still, but the world kept moving around us. Birds chirped in the trees and squirrels chattered at the feeders Dad had hung in the backyard. Blue- and yellow-tailed skinks rushed up and down the wooden sides of the house, chasing spiders and tiny bugs. The dogs raced around in the overgrown grass, tearing after anything that dared to move, and one of them got a swat on the snout from my overgrown, easily-annoyed cat, Fuzz.

Matt played his guitar and I closed my eyes. I let my head fall back and the sun flared gold against my eyelids. In an hour it would begin to set and I’d have to go inside to finish packing. I had spent the past several days hopping from brother to brother, house to house, trying to visit everyone and put in adequate face-time before tomorrow, The Big Day, when I would board a plane and change all of our lives forever.

While we sat there we didn’t speak. I didn’t exactly know what to say, and Matt probably didn’t, either. The weird thing about our relationship has always been that we don’t really talk very much; we’re just good at being around each other. Even now, four years later, when I visit Matt we don’t bother with small talk, don’t do the whole how’s-school-how’s-work charade. We sit, we eat, we watch T.V., he plays guitar, I pluck at the strings of a ukulele.

One thing I’ve always been insecure about is my own ability to maintain stable relationships with people. Friends, family, significant others—I can screw up pretty much anything. But with my brother Matt, it almost seems like I can’t. I can’t mess up our relationship, our weird little brother-sister bond, because it’s stronger than I am. I guess that’s why Matt means so much to me, why I remember the times I spend with him more than I remember my times with anybody else in my family.

And I guess that’s why he’s the subject of my memoir.