Both the second and third houses on the list are less than a mile away from my mother’s house. I could walk to either one of them in less than five minutes. As a child, I rode my bike past both of them a hundred times. They are both small, and run-down. A small shed out back, a dirt driveway, sheets over the cracked windows. There are toys — a bicycle, a football — in the front yard. Both were raided in 2007, and though there are no signs of meth cooking now — no chemical fumes, no clandestine cars streaking in and pulling rapidly away, no furtive glances out the windows of the house — my brother, who has worked in the medical field for most of his life and now counsels teenagers, thinks of health first, of people living in a house where meth was cooked, chemicals soaking into walls and floors and carpeting and curtains. He thinks of children playing in rooms where poison was made.

“My god,” he says. “Those poor kids.”

He is more right than he knows. Thirty percent of seized labs have had children living in them. In some states, over 50% of children in protective services come from meth lab seizures. Even now, the long-term effects of meth on children are unknown. My older daughter was with my step-father when he found the flashlight with the meth hidden inside. When I walked down the road past the spot the day before Christmas, I could hear children calling to each other just a few houses away.

When I walked down the road past the spot the day before Christmas, I could hear children calling to each other just a few houses away.

The fourth house on the list is gone, as is the fifth. They are both empty lots, the fourth a few houses down from my best friend’s grandmother’s house, a house we used to go to after school to watch cartoons we were too old to be watching. It is two blocks from the elementary school, the library, the school superintendent’s office. The church bells ring again. Clouds pass overhead. We hear a police siren in the distance and look at each other, both thinking the same thing. The fifth house is across the street from a church. It is three houses away from the woman who baby-sat my older daughter before we moved to North Carolina. It is across the street from the baseball field where I played Little League, where bats veered through the park lights over the center field position where I stood on so many summer nights, listening to my parents and friends and friends’ parents cheer from the old wooden bleachers.

The last address is two houses away from my grandmother’s house, where she has lived for close to fifty years. Like several of the others, the house is no longer there. From the empty lot my brother and I can see the rest of our family gathering at my grandmother’s house.

My mother came home from work one day to find the propane tank on her grill stolen. The tubes had been cut. The policeman told her it was stolen to cook meth. He told her of rolling labs, where the backs of trucks are used, especially dangerous because of the jostling as the truck turns, as it bounces over shaky roads and the chemicals spill into one another. He told her cookers will set up in the middle of the woods and cook for a few days, then dump all the chemicals, where they seep into the groundwater, into creeks where people swim in summer.

“It’s everywhere,” he said.

I keep coming back to numbers. Over 10,000 drug lab incidents in 2011. Most of them in Missouri and Tennessee and Oklahoma and Arkansas. Almost 12,000 in 2010. 13,000 in 2005. The numbers dropped slightly — only 6,000 incidents reported in 2007 — after the 2005 Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, but the numbers have risen again.

And these are the small operations. Home-cooking accounts for about 15% of total meth in the United States. The other 85% comes from super labs supplied and operated by Mexican drug cartels. They get ephedrine and pseudoephedrine — which the 2005 Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act made available only with a prescription — from rogue manufacturing plants in Eastern Europe and distribute it everywhere.

Near the center of town, on the wall of a closed-down car dealership now owned by the First Baptist Church, a twenty-foot high mural lists the Ten Commandments. Across the street, near the courthouse, the Methodist Church, which is the tallest building in town, is missing a stained-glass window, plywood covering the hole like an empty socket.