Tonight, I'm staying at my paternal grandparents' house, and it's giving me a sad kind of nostalgia.

When I was little, we would come here all the time. Quite a few of those memories include my dad, who I don't talk to anymore.
It doesn't help that his parents talk about him a lot. He was their youngest.

When I let their dogs outside and watched them, I remembered how, one day, Mom got a cheap plastic pool with a slide. Me and my three siblings (then, anyway) played in the pool and she watched us. She pointed out an airplane to us, and I stared up at it in wonder.

One other time, my dad took me and the others out to the woods behind the house. He helped us to cross a creek (that seemed vast to me at the time) because he wanted to show us the cows.

Another time, at night, he came inside with a tarantula. I saw the pumpkin magnet on my grandma's fridge and said we should name it Pumpkin.

One time, my grandma borrowed a Barbie mansion for my sister and I to play with while we stayed with them. My mom and dad went hunting (my mom reluctantly went to make him happy since she hates hunting), and they didn't come back until way later since she had accidentally shot her toe and had to go to the hospital.

Another time, we were temporarily living here and I was about to have a surgery to have tubes put in my ears and my tonsils and adenoids removed. The night before, my parents were out for dinner, so Grandma was babysitting us. One of my siblings were crying, so I tried to climb over the baby gate to get Grandma to help. I landed splat on my face and busted my eyebrow. I had to go to the hospital to get stitches, and I colored when they did that.

The list could go on.