If I’m going to be more than a 2008 blogger in 2062 pretending you might be interested in what’s on my little mind, while I’m just sitting at home with my grandmother drinking cold tea, then it’s time to get out of town. Grandmother tells me nobody gets out of town anymore, that’s a false memory of the age of automobiles and cheap flights to Las Vegas. I don’t know how I could remember this bygone age because I wasn’t alive then. Maybe there’s a way to remember things you didn’t witness firsthand.

Your body and your being are the memory of your ancestors, Grandmother tells me. Don’t be disrespectful. In the winter she wears a Chicago Blackhawks jersey with the number nine and the word ‘Hull’ on the back that hangs all the way to her knees. She keeps our tiny carriage house shipwrecked in the middle of a forest of giant mansions warm by stealing electricity from the house in front of us where nobody lives. The Nuclear Authority believes that the Sturgeon family still lives there after all these years but it’s just my grandmother who has brought them back from the dead to enjoy their fair share of the electric.

I need to get out of town, Grandma, I tell her, so I have something more to write about than what’s in my head and in this house. She doesn’t take it personally, as some kind of judgment on her character. She knows it is no more possible to abandon her than it is to forget what the ancestors know. I’m not a stupid girl. I know who butters the bread.

Where do you want to go? she asks me.

Yellowstone, I tell her. They say it’s going to explode and I want to see it before that happens.

I was there once, she tells me. I cleaned rooms at the hotel, stole jewelry and cash from the ladies’ purses.

I must have some kind of look on my face because she starts laughing and sez there’s a garbage dump full of things I don’t know about her. But if you really want to get out of town, all you have to do is talk to me.

I try to explain to her that this wasn’t going to be enough. Someone else’s story can only take you so far. I feel like I need to be the subject of the story to prove that I’m alive. She is still laughing at me.

There’s a boy whose grandfather I knew once that runs drugs out West and maybe he could take you with him. He’s got a truck fitted out with solars. The same truck I loaned his useless grandfather the money to buy. He never did pay it all back.

It is raining now and the last of snow is sinking into the lawn, turning it bright green. The first leaves are sticking their heads out of the branches of the maple trees. I’m thinking I could get away with a sweater today, that I can put my scarf and gloves away for the season. My grandmother tells me people used to worry about climate change and some of them worried so much that they changed the climate even more than it was going to change on its own. Maybe change was just what we all needed. The climate change I know about is that tomorrow, definitely next week, it will likely be warmer than today and maybe the sun will stay out longer and rise higher in the sky. Closer to traveling weather. If I’m going to Yellowstone I will take my winter coat and the cap my Grandmother knitted for me that looks like a bowler hat. It’s an Indian hat, she tells me, from South America. You could wear it with a nice tie if you wanted to make an impression.