Nostalgia

[RiverNotch]

This piece is just so....weird. It reads like a slightly more childlike, slightly less drug-induced version of Penny Lane. I like it.
From a bench on a bluff in a park off a street
with a school and a church and a mill that ground wheat,
there’s a view of a lake that’s so grey and so bleak Although this "so grey and so bleak" does kinda stretch it. There's got to be something better for this!
that I’d sit and pretend I was looking at feet. Heh, cute.

There’s a field by the shops where the children would play Maybe "we children"? It was a little weird seeing the speaker suddenly mingle with these kids in the next line.
with our baseballs and bats ‘til one mother would say
“All you kids should go home, or there’ll be hell to pay” I'm kinda missing punctuation here.
but my dad was a drunk, and could not be waylaid. Drunks, in fact, are the best people to rob -- oh wait, you meant the other thing. xD

There were folks in the town that were folksy and sweet "Folksy folks"....trippy, man, trippy.
like the butcher’s wife Joan who would package our meat, Yeah, reading this with a dirty mind is delightful.
who opined with a smile that our cut was unique Feels like "opine" could be replaced with something more, I dunno, childish -- or at least sweeter sounding. The piece does have a saccharin feel to it, but I think that's a lovely point, especially considering the hints of darkness peppered throughout (disgusting industrial lake, drunkard dad, butchers, meat from a...
having been the hind leg of a stillborn black sheep. ...wait, meat from a stillborn black sheep? Is that, like, a legit thing? Eew! Okay, now I know this piece is shitting on me -- in the most delightful way, of course. I wonder if there's a deeper read to this -- one that I probably won't pursue, I find the whole so delightful. Like reading a violent fairy tale. Lovely work.

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*ooh, I failed to read that late response. I guess you were successful with the mood, at least for me -- and now I'm gonna look up "Flannery O'Connor".