Family

It was 1994, a week before Christmas, when my not-quite-3-year-old spied a shopping mall Santa and insisted on paying him another visit. I tried to demur. I tried to deflect. His official Santa visit had taken place weeks earlier. This trip to the mall was just a chance to escape the gloom that is Nashville in December, to wear out those busy toddler legs in a place where it wasn’t raining and cold. (more….)

Whenever I’m nervous, I find some sort of amulet to drop into my pocket. A buckeye. A feather molted from a blue jay’s tail. The river rock my middle son always called a “worry stone.” The spent egg sac from a praying mantis. A seashell from my mother-in-law’s grave. I hold onto what’s in my pocket the way an anxious baby clings to a beloved blanket at bedtime. (more….)

My great-grandmother was a lifelong Baptist who spent the last four decades of her life worshiping with the Methodists because by then there was only one church left in that tiny farming community in Lower Alabama. Mother Ollie gladly attended Mass at my family’s Catholic church in Birmingham, too, but she never drifted from her quiet adherence to the King James ways of her Baptist youth. (more….)

The cover of my first book, Late Migrations, features a leaf-filled silhouette of a little girl’s face. My face. The original silhouette was made by an Alabama street artist in 1970. I was eight years old, and already I knew I wanted to be a writer. A nature writer. In an apparently preternatural understanding of the economy of nature writing, I also planned to be a large-animal veterinarian; I would deliver calves by day and write books by night. (more….)

I was 11, my brother and our cousin both 10, and we were old enough to go anywhere our legs could take us: the pecan orchard, the blackberry patch, the cemetery next to the church, the community house next to the cemetery, the store with the gas pump outside and the penny candy display just within its swinging doors. (more….)

Driving due south in spring is like speeding up time. My mother, who grew up on a peanut farm in Lower Alabama, believed that the growing season expands northward at the rate of a hundred miles per week. I thought about her theory as I was driving south last month, watching the new-green leaves near home fast forward into a denser, darker verdure. I had set off from Nashville in springtime, but when I arrived at my sister’s house near Birmingham, it was already full summer. (more….)