Cincinnati

I first moved to Cincinnati in 1978, after spending the winter in a rented lakeside house in Rockaway, New Jersey, with my cousin Mike and two other knuckleheads like ourselves. My car had no gas gauge or working windshield wipers and I still remember driving into New York City in freezing rain as Mike wielded what he called the “magic stick”, a long chunk of wood he used to move the wipers while leaning his right arm out the window and into the elements.

I moved to a huge farmhouse outside of Bethany, Ohio, which is close to Cincinnati, now akin to a suburb. Close friends were renting it, complete with much land and two large barns, and they had invited me to rent one of two apartments upstairs.
At that time you could stand in the front yard, near an intersection of two country roads, and gaze at fields of grain and corn all around. Today, the farmhouse and the barns and fences are all gone, replaced by condominiums and a large sunken pond at the corner of the now-enlarged intersection.
Somewhere I have a photograph of a double rainbow against a gray sky overlooking broad crop fields, shot from where that pond now resides.