Editor's Note.

At work all day all you can think about is dinner, a beer, and if you're lucky the significant person at home you love. But she works, too, during the hours you sleep, the night shift. So you never see her, except when she wakes you in the morning coming in, or you disturb her sleep when you get home. It's always something, and if it isn't one thing, well, then it's the other.

But there are afternoons, if you're lucky, that you share, and the two of you hike down to the creek and the rope that swings you across the creek and the rocks and back. She takes the rope off the nail on the big oak and runs off the packed-dirt of the bank and swings out, yelling with pleasure, her eyes big and happy on the swing back. She hands you the rope and you take the knot in your hands, look up and follow the thick rope to the limb where it's tied that hangs out and over the creek fifty feet up. You leap from the bank and the effort to hold the rope grabs your breath, and for a moment you stay in the middle of that breath, hang at the end of the swing fifteen feet above the creek working its way among the broken rocks and fallen branches, the dog digging its nose under a rock in the water to find crayfish, and the woman watching back on the bank by the tree waiting for her turn in the air. The air and the trees and the sky up back behind them is everything worth all what is bad. You tell yourself this without thinking it, and then you breathe and come back.

That's what's in here. Stories about you and me. And it fits in your back pocket.