"I know you said you don't want any of this, but I think you'll actually want one thing," he said, dropping some folded papers on the kitchen table. It was a letter, five pages in long-hand, from my mother to my father, a few months before they married. When we had gathered the belongings from my mother's garage years ago, the letter must have slipped from a box into an adjacent pile.
Memphis, once known as the hardwood capital of the world, was built on a bluff, the Chickasaw Bluff, along the eastern side of the Mississippi River. The soil on the bluff, according to my limited understanding of it, is an interesting mix of loess (windblown silt), glacial gravel and alluvial deposits, good for filtering water … Continue reading Ever green, and orange and black.
For the past few weeks I've been in the good company of more than 200 million people around the world, all of us still hearing the lingering echoes of John B. McLemore and Brian Reed, seeing ghost images of clocks and sundials and tattoos, and a maze.... As you know either very well or not … Continue reading Not tedious, but brief.
I've been thinking about getting a tattoo. If we know each other, in real life, then this revelation may be shocking. If we know each other very well, though, then it's possibly not unexpected. I have been thinking about it, a tattoo, though not terribly seriously, for longer than I'll admit, even here. Tattoos, like … Continue reading The comfort of familiar things.
After her fifth or sixth miscarriage, my mother, resigned to the reality that a baby might not be in the cards, went with my father to the animal shelter and came home with a puppy. Without much debate they named the small, black-and-white ball of fur Happy, partly because the dog's mouth was shaped in … Continue reading Happy.
The third thing she told me was that life begins at 50. She said this just to me, out of earshot from my traveling companion, as she was tucking me back into the driver's seat, right before she said, "I love you," which is what she always said at the end. We had been together … Continue reading Life begins at 50.
If we were to start anew, we might do it all differently, bolstered by knowing. We might be less like first-time lovers or new puppies, fumbling between tentative and exuberant. We might first take stock in ourselves, be realistic about our imprinting. We might bow first, out of respect, thinking less about how each could … Continue reading This old house.
This story will be less risqué than you might fear, or hope: I bought myself, sort of by accident, a purple lace bra for Christmas. We were out looking for stocking stuffers and standard Santa fare, my daughter and I, trying to get it all done in one single open-air-mall expedition because I quite hate … Continue reading Warning. (AKA “the year I accidentally bought a purple bra for Christmas”)
