Southern Stories, Interviews, and Artifacts
This is part one of a two-part post. Although written in the middle of March Madness, it is as pertinent today as it was then. The only thing that’s changed is that in the summertime, the only one to meet me at the door in the afternoon is Paisley, and the irony is I miss the madness. […]
Daddy and I have always been close. Always. Until I was about fourteen or so, I had a healthy dose of equal parts fear of and respect and adoration for him. As I got older, there was less and less fear and more and more respect and adoration.
“Hey, I really need you to look at something.” I was loading the dishwasher when Jamie got my attention. At our house this sentence can mean one of about three things: 1) I need you to look at a really cool work something on my computer. 2) I need you to look at the unusually […]
From what Daddy has put together, my great-great grandfather William Thomas Morgan was twenty-five years old and a member of the field artillery fighting at Gettysburg when he got word that his wife and children were sick with typhoid fever. So, he left his battalion and walked most of the 844 miles back to Quitman, […]
When Ginny was five, she was preoccupied with roadkill. While traveling, she kept an eye out from the back seat looking for the tell-tale dark lump on the side of the road. It drove Mama crazy. Long before we got to whatever it was that had been hit, Ginny would ask, “Mama, what’s that dead […]
By the time I get home from work in the early evenings, I am starving. That is how I ended up in the kitchen last night double fisting Lay’s Sour Cream and Onion potato chips while, at the same time, searching my phone for a healthy kale recipe. The mouse that currently lives somewhere in […]
“What’s a terrorist?” Colin asks from the backseat on the way to school. He is bundled up under the big, thick, soft blanket that Ginny gave him for Christmas. On these hour long drives from home to school, he rarely goes back to sleep but sometimes he catnaps, usually eavesdropping on his big brother’s conversations […]
I saw lots of heroes on television last night during the Super Bowl. There were human-interest stories about players on both teams and the good they do with the notoriety they have; ads that gave patients an opportunity to thank their first responders; stories about folks who bought a Hyundai and inadvertently contributed to cancer […]
A year into our marriage, Jamie and I clearly had very different expectations. Things weren’t going well. At a very naïve and relatively sheltered twenty-three, I expected a 1950’s “Leave it to Beaver” episode. I’ve never asked Jamie what, if anything, he expected. In retrospect, it had to be something like “Porky’s” but with a […]
My children often ask what heaven is like. Jamie and I give the standard answers about angels and no pain or fear. His Baptist upbringing provokes him into throwing in a few mansions and crowns. I counter that with what our wise, old Presbyterian minister used to tell us about heaven being a walled off […]