parents
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I have a friend who moved to back to Memphis a decade ago, after many years away. She rented a house instead of buying, unsure of how long she might stay. The neighborhood she choose was a “good” neighborhood by neighborhood standards, meaning it was relatively stable, a combination of starter homes and rentals that…
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“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…
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“Women – particularly Southern women – can’t really come into their voices until they lose their mothers,” a writer friend said to me recently over lunch. This particular friend, who also was around 40 when she lost her mother and with whom I often discuss mothers and mothering, is the same friend who said, “you…
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Halls, Tennessee, 1986. At one point in her life my mother would have introduced herself as a musician who also had good writing skills. She had a considerable talent for music – primarily the piano although also, as she might have said, an adequate soprano choir voice. Her musical gift, nurtured and encouraged by her…