Category: Memoir
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Mexico, My Mexico
The woman, in her fifties, had draped a black, webbed veil over her head. Her dress might have been from Sears, bought at a thrift store, but the scarf around her neck was from a thousand years of Nahuatl stitching. Her skin was Oaxacan-brown, with the native folds in her cheeks. She clenched her hands…
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The First Journal
Her name was Nancy. She was beautiful. Light auburn hair, slim build, hazel eyes and a smile, oh that smile. She was new to Knoxville Catholic High School, somewhere from the north. Her family had moved to Tennessee that summer, so she didn’t have our accent. She came to us in her senior year. All…
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The Ache for Narrative
I’ve spent a lot of life looking back. This wasn’t always the case; Michelle reminds me that, in our twenties, I was the guy who said “Fuck the past, I’m all about the now!” We were living exciting lives. It was the 80’s. Central America and Ronald Reagan were in the news every night. Michelle…
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A Part of Appalachia Dies
My father was born a sharecropper, lived most his years as an auto mechanic, and retired from the coal mines of Kentucky. Sharecropping meant living in a shack of another man’s property, cultivating the man’s corn and tobacco, and living off a small percentage of the crop’s yield. A mechanic meant long periods of…