She Walked a Crooked Path

In my grandparents' house in Arkansas, we had a hodge podge of random dishes and plates. I guess, looking back, you could call the decor Depression-style, and I loved it. I had my favorites--the plate with the cracks under the glaze and tiny roses circling the outer rim, the spoon that had a similar floral etching and had probably been part of an elegant set when it was new, a highball/Collins glass with vertical irish green stripes. I would think about my grandfather's stories of our ancestors from the old country while I sat with my glass of milk, imagining that somehow they lived in those stripes on the glass. Kids... Sometimes if I'm a homewares store, I'll find myself absently scanning the glassware section for those irish green stripes, but I never find it. The remnants of my Arkansas childhood are all gone now. My grandparents, my childhood collections of rocks and sticks and bottles that my brother and I dug up in the back field, things I wrote from ...

I recently watched a documentary called Hillbilly , which was about a young filmmaker returning to her hometown in Kentucky to examine the roots of the stereotype, and how the people of Appalachia and the natural resources of the region have been exploited over a long period of time. It opened some thoughts for me, and I've tried twice to write this post because it's a rabbit hole I'm easily lost in. Throughout my childhood and most of my adulthood, I was deeply embarrassed to have grown up in Arkansas. There were, of course, the jokes about hillbillies--people who had no education, couldn't afford nice clothes or shoes or tell the sexual difference between a farm animal, a child, or a cousin, and were camouflaged by the dirt they were always covered in. I knew those jokes from a young age, and sometimes I told them.  When my parents divorced, my mom moved my brother and me to live with her parents in the home they had retired to in Arkansas. We went from living in a ni...

There is a jagged line of blue highways that runs between where I was born in northern Illinois and where I spent the better part of my childhood in northeast Arkansas. I first rode them as a 4 year old, sitting in the back seat of my beloved grandparents' car, on the way to spend a month with them while my father and my pregnant mother went away on a bowling trip. My memory of the trip is filled with love and laughter and too much strawberry shortcake and Dr. Pepper on a hot day. The next time I rode them, I was with my grandfather in a funeral procession of borrowed cars filled with sad, angry people and moving boxes. We went the wrong way on one of the highways and my grandfather made a wild, illegal u-turn in the median to get back on track. He had the heart of a rebel, and I loved that about him. After that trip, I came to know those highways every summer as the scenery of my heartbreak, with my father at the wheel unable to do anything but drive.  We passed through land once ...

I started writing stories when I was 11 years old. I loved the process of traveling in my mind to a reality of my own creation, and I dove into it with glee every chance I got. The response, at best, was little notes in the margin of my work in my english class folders every year from semi-supportive teachers. My rural Arkansas school district didn't have creative writing or drama classes, or any kind of theater program when I was growing up. I saw our guidance counselor in the hallways once in awhile, but there was no mentoring of any kind--not for kids like me, anyway.  I didn't go to college after high school. Not knowing anything about how the system worked, I was afraid that if I got a student loan, something would happen to it and I would have to move back in with my mom and her husband, defeated. After months of pouring through catalogs from different schools that showed bright adults-in-training enjoying their classes and dorm life, making lifelong friends in the quad, ...

The other day, as my wife was sending me calendar invites for several races she is running next year, I was thinking about why it is that I would rather eat nails than commit to a schedule of regular exercise and better diet. I have all the requisite information to know that it would be good for me and my longevity, and stupid not to do it--and yet, here I am, not doing it, not planning to do it in any measured way. If you asked Rainy what her new year resolution was, she'd probably tell you something about wanting to be her best physical self. If you asked me the same question, I would tell you about wanting to learn more about my lost family and finally settling down to write the book I feel in my heart. Conversely, if you told me to take a run to the bottom of the hill, I'd find some way to wiggle out of having to do it, and if you asked Rainy to watch a documentary about the history of coal mining, she would do the same.  I may have reached the million mark on how many time...

There's nothing like Christmas. We come out of our winter dens, drawn like moths to gaze with awe at colored lights hanging from trees. Our hearts are a little more open than they are most of the time, and we wrap hope inside happy envelopes and boxes to give to the people we love. Children make their best attempts to behave themselves so Santa will bring them all they wish for, and our pets bounce around, happy that everyone is home on a work/school day. There might be snow, if we're lucky.  I have a vague memory of celebrating Christmas in my Illinois childhood. If I part the fog that opens the gate to everything lost in my mind, I can see myself sitting on the living room floor unwrapping presents at Grandma and Grandpa Atherton's house. My parents are together, my aunts and my uncle and my 9-months-older cousin are there, and if I hot wire one synapse to another, I think I can remember Great Grandpa Mike sitting in his usual spot by the window.  My Christmas memories po...