Don’t make me send you outside to find a switch,my grandmother used to say. It was years beforeI had the nerve to ask her why switch was the wordher anger reached for when she needed me to acta different way. Still, when I see some branches—wispy ones, like willows, like lilacs, like the tan-yellowforsythia before the brighter yellow buds—I think,these would make perfect switches for a whipping.America, there is not a place I can wander inside youand not feel a little afraid. Did I ever tell you about thattime I was seven, buckled into the backseat of the Volvobefore buckles were a thing America required?My parents tried, despite everything, to keep ussafe. It’s funny. I remember the brown hills slopingtoward the valley. A soft brown welcome I looked forother places but found only there and in my grandmother’sskin. Yes, I have just compared my grandmother’s bodyto my childhood’s hills, America. I loved them both,and they taught me, each, things I needed to learn.You have witnessed, America, how pleasant hillsidescan quickly catch fire. My grandmother could be like that.But she protected me, too. There were strawberry fields,wind guarded in that valley, tarped against the cold.America, you are good at taking care of what you value.Those silver-gray tarps made the fields look like a pondI could skate on. As the policeman questioned my dad,I concentrated on the view outside the back window.America, have you ever noticed how well you stretchthe imagination? This was Southern California. I’d livedthere all my life and never even seen a frozen pond.But there I was, in 65-degree weather, imaginingmy skates carving figure eights on a strawberry field.Of course my father fit the description. The imaginationcan accommodate whoever might happen along.America, if you’ve seen a hillside quickly catch fireyou have also seen a river freeze over, the surfacelooking placid though you know the water deep down,dark as my father, is pushing and pushing, still tryingto get ahead. We were driving home, my father said.My wife and my daughters, we were just on our wayhome. I know you want to know what happened next,America. Did my dad make it safely home or not?Outside this window, lilac blooms show up like a rashdecision the bush makes each spring. I haven’t livedin Southern California for decades. A pond herekilled a child we all knew. For years after that accident,as spring bloomed and ice thinned, my daughterremembered the child from her preschool. And now,it’s not so much that she’s forgotten. It’s more thatit seems she’s never known that child as anything otherthan drowned. My grandmother didn’t have an answer.A switch is what her mother called it and her grandmotherbefore her. She’d been gone from that part of Americafor over half a century, but still that southern soilsprang up along the contours of her tongue. America,I’ll tell you this much, I cannot understand this mind,where it reaches. Even when she was threateningto beat me, I liked to imagine the swishing sounda branch would make as it whipped toward my bodythrough the resisting air. She’d say, this is hurting memore than it’s hurting you. I didn’t understand her then,but now I think I do. America, go find me a switch.