text: My sister and I, wed pick up the thrown rice from the weddings, pack it away in small brown paper bags and take it home and save it. Then run up the street and throw it at the next wedding, and the next wedding, and the next wedding. We also had front row seats to watch the townsmen in their Sunday suits carry out an endless array of dark wooden boxes to be slipped into the rear of the Freemans Funeral Home long black Cadillac for the short ride to Saint Rose Cemetery Hill on the edge of town. And there, all our Catholic neighbors, all the Zirillis, all the McNicholass, all the Springsteens who came before, they patiently waited for us. On Sundays, as my mom tended to our graves, my sister and I, we played hide and seek amongst the gravestones. I gotcha. Now when it rains in Freehold, when it rains, the moisture in the humid air blankets the whole town with the smell of moist coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafe plant from towns eastern edge. Now I dont like coffee. But I love that smell. Was comforting, it united our town, just like our clanging rug mill, and a calm and sensory experience. There was a place here. You could see it. You could smell it. A place where people made lives, and where they worked, and where they danced, and where they enjoyed small pleasures and played baseball and, and suffered pain, where they had their hearts broke, where they made love, had kids, where they died, and drank themselves drunk on spring nights, and where they did their very best, the best that they could, to hold off the demons outside and inside that sought to destroy them, and their homes and their families, and their town. Here we lived in the shadow of the steeple crookedly blessed in Gods good mercy one and all. In the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, race-rioting, freak-hating, soul-shaking, redneck, love and fear-making, heartbreaking town, of Freehold, New Jersey