Of course I promised, but submitted by Renee.

Hello, E by Renee.

Hello, beautiful Edie and Mr. Nick.

I last wrote you an encounter

was of a crazy boyfriend, and well, who cares about those?

But I no longer know how to share privately. This may be of interest. about most validity. When I was about eight I was a troublemaker and my daddy's best friend.

He worked in Air Force Intelligence during the Cold War. My dad was a boss.

When I was a child, we were shot at twice.

The second time he just said, duck.

We all did, my mother and I and him.

We carried that bullet on our windshield from a red pickup in Illinois

for almost a decade.

He has since passed, but it's cool to have someone in the National Cemetery, right?

Dad was a die-hard atheist. The one thing he believed in was aliens.

He retired from the military when I was about 8. We moved to a quiet developing town in Virginia.

Our neighborhood was on a border of a forest and a creek. The other side was a firefighter training facility, the local youth shelter, and

juvy. When expanding the neighborhood, they had bulldozed a two-lane grass road between the neighborhood and the creek.

One day Dad and I decided to take a walk on this path just going straight.

We came across this really strange abandoned farm.

On one side was a long hedgerow of tall Osage orange trees which is

uncharacteristic of them and a white farmhouse.

All across the clearing was a white shed.

...