We didn’t live there very long, but here is what happened. It is 1960. I am almost five years old. I have two sisters, four, and two. My parents call us from the hospital to tell us we have another sister, to ask us what we should name her. “Sleeping Beauty! Cinderella! Rapunzel!” we shout. Joan has always regretted that we didn’t get to name her Rapunzel. She was born with the hair for the role.

My baby sister gets chicken pox. I get the chicken pox. We all get the chicken pox. I remember the scab on baby’s red-headed head, the boils on my own skin, all of us itching, scratching. Arkansas. It seems like a likely place to have the pox. An unlikely place for my sister, conceived in the hot house of Pakanbaru, Indonesia, to be born.

A GoKart race track that my father used to take me to secretly, so we could drive at high speed without my mother’s disapproval. One cloudy day as we walk along the granite track, I fill my pockets with pieces of rose quartz that glisten in the gray. I don’t know why that is such a strong memory. Maybe this is why I pick up rocks to this day.

Another cloudy day. I’m flying a kite with my father, a box kite that we’d made together, my favorite kind. The wind picks up and the sky turns a sickly green. Dad sends me inside. My mother races around the house opening windows so the house won’t implode from the change in pressure. The wind rocks our little brick house. I am not afraid, just curious.

After the tornado my father drives us slowly through Jonesboro to assess the damage. Along one street are foundations of three houses just like ours, stripped of their bricks, which are piled in neat heaps, one, two, three, across from them.