A small boy walked along a dirt road in a poor neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Old lawnmowers sputtered and bogged in the yards and airplanes droned in the morning sky. The boy walked alone and inhaled the warm smell of cut grass. The breeze carried puffs of heat from the east and the sky appeared happy to be free of the overcast of the rainy season, but the boy didn't expect the summer to continue. He knew the true weather of this place was rain, and so sunlight was like a lie. But he walked and the muddy streets were baked by the sun and they were beginning to take on the new, hard shapes of summer.
         The boy didn't stop to look for bugs in the vacant lots, as he usually did, and soon he was five blocks from home. It was the farthest he’d ever dared to venture alone. He walked with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his stained, hand-me-down trousers. He held his head high and took deep, lung-straining breaths of the summer air. He was stripped to the waist and the sun's warmth felt like a pair of adult hands held close to the skin of his shoulders. He watched a jet airliner chalk a

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