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things—talismans against tough times, reminders that the world was bigger than what I saw.
    But even at the junkyard, even with my brothers there, I still found myself alone. They ventured deep into the garbage while I scavenged in heaps close to the street, in case we had to run from the dogs.
    I was tense around dogs. One had almost killed me when we lived in the House with No Steps. I had gone to play one afternoon with other children at the Methodist church down the street, its asphalt-and-gravel parking lot doubling as a scar-multiplying playground. I stood savoring a bottle of soda. It was a rare treat, so I took my time, paying attention to every swig, sliding my tongue into the opening until bubbles burned the taste buds on the tip.
    At the time, my mother was chatting with her friends in an adjacent house, trading gossip and giggles, talking as they did about half-a-husbands and a whole lot of problems, propping each other up so that life wouldn’t wear them down.
    One of the neighborhood dogs, a German shepherd named King, weaved a path among us children, panting in the heat. He stopped with his back to me, his fluffy tail rocking back and forth in slow motion. I extended my hand and gently grabbed it. That was my mistake. King turned, fangs bared, and attacked—his hulking frame pinning my small one to the ground. As I lay on my back, he lunged for my face. His eyes went blank. The King I knew was no longer inside that animal.
    I instinctively grabbed his throat with my free hand and held him off with an arm made stiff by sheer terror. With the other hand I held the soda out from the commotion, upright so that it wouldn’t spill. Two hands would have been better to keep myself from being mauled, but my brain didn’t make that click. That was my soda, and I intended to finish it.
    The other children screamed for the mothers, and the mothers burst out of the house, yelling and screaming with the emphasis and pitch only mothers can produce when a child is in danger.
    They scared King away, but not before he carved a wound deep into the part of me that trusted things. I would especially never trust another dog that didn’t belong to us, let alone a rib-bare, junkyard dog scrounging for scraps.
     
    When my brothers and I finished our digging in the junkyard, we climbed into the ditch across the street and dug for a treat. We flaked off pieces of edible clay dirt that smelled to me like dry earth at the beginning of a fresh rain and tasted like chalk soaked in vinegar. Folks said it was good for you. Settled your stomach. Staved off illness. All I knew was the taste was addictive, and that ditch—where the curve of the road cut deep into the ground and exposed the strata—was the only place in town where that dirt could be found. Best of all, it was free.
     
    In my family’s new life, the most pressing need was to make sure that we stayed fed, so most of our time and energy went into the growing, picking, and preparing of food.
    Luckily, the house was set on two acres of land strewn with fruit trees—crab apple trees to the right, peach trees behind, fig and plum trees across the street. Another tree out back rained pecans in the fall, and blackberries sprouted up along the fencerow every other summer. We munched on fruit and nuts all day. Whatever we picked in abundance my mother baked into thick-crusted cobblers or bubbling pies.
    We grew our own vegetables across the road. The paved street in front of the house had been laid without regard for property lines, sometimes leaving thin slivers of people’s property across the road from their houses. Some folks did nothing with these scraps of land. Others used them for parking. We turned ours into two truck patch gardens, each about five yards across and fifteen yards long, lying on either side of a small abandoned house that Papa Joe used to rent out to make extra money.
    In the spring, an old man with a mule-drawn plow came to turn the earth. I watched as