Southern Stories, Interviews, and Artifacts
The Semmens wedding was the perfect excuse to celebrate surviving this hellscape of a year, and I was more than ready. John Semmens, the groom and now grown-up that I’d started babysitting when I was fifteen years old, was getting married. Although the Semmens had moved from south Georgia years before, our families had remained […]
I take showers in the mornings, a foggy stumble into the bathroom for a quick in-and-out of a hot shower and hair washing. In high school, I took a bath just before bedtime and had enough time for a little ritual. Balancing my little black boombox with a cassette player on the towel rack, […]
The back-to-school honeymoon we enjoyed in those fresh-faced few weeks of summer is clearly over. We are swimming in the deep-end now. We are in full-on homework agony. The scheduling squeezes of after-school clubs are putting a vice-grip squeeze on us now. The once sparkly-new, back-to-school tennis shoes have turned into worn-down stinkers that fill […]
Just like nearly every other woman I know, tonight after I got home from my full-time job, I started my second full-time job. On this particular evening, in addition to the typical routine: supper prep, supper clean-up, laundry, and homework assistance, I also peeled 8 pounds of russet baking potatoes. Loaded baked potato casserole is […]
When Ginny and I were around thirteen, Mama and Daddy started giving us someday house presents: a set of pewter candlesticks, iced tea glasses, a piece of silver. I romanticized the gifts, of course, and thought of them as a kind of modern dowry. When Jamie and I moved into our first apartment, I […]
When I was a little girl, Mama cleaned house by first opening all the windows to “air things out and let the sunshine in.” Then, she put a Broadway soundtrack on the record player. I was of the age that chores were fun and helping Mama made me feel accomplished. She taught me how to […]
Everyone has a sacred space. A place that allows time for quiet and adjustment, a reset, a place to listen for God. It’s a deeply personal space and can be found almost anywhere: a bedroom, broom closet, inside the car on a morning commute. Some can even create space in their own minds, no matter […]
When Nanny and Pops went to the camp, they most always took me. Pops built the camp in 1961 on a shady lot on the banks of the Itchuaway-Notchuway Creek in Baker County, Georgia. It was a joint purchase between Pops and four of his siblings, but he constructed and wired the house himself. By […]
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, […]