We all go home eventually, only some of us choose the long way around. When my mother died suddenly when I was four, and Samuel came to live with us the following year, life's dominoes began falling and setting what some might call fate into motion. These two events occurred seamlessly and simultaneously, and yet in isolation of one another would probably have never held any particular significance. Together they predetermined my future which is why I've been pulled back to Kneehill County from Toronto, where I've been living the past thirty years. Kneehill County is the place of my childhood, the place where dreams rose like optimistic kites only to later fall, plummeting to earth where they deflated and lay dormant amidst the barley and wheat fields. Vast acres of tremulous green undulated in the summer breeze of my youth, dominating the countryside and surrounding our faded two-story house. If I am being truly honest with myself, when I left Kneehill County, I wasn't chasing freedom or a dream. The truth is that I was running like hell from a heart that had been pierced by a man's indifference, which began hemorrhaging hope and emptying itself of all the words he had ever given me; mystical words I secretly hoarded within my heart's chambers. Despite what he once said about a terrible beauty getting beneath his skin and never letting go, it was me and not him, who in the final analysis became prisoner of both beauty and the spoken word.