I have always loved the night sky. When I was fifteen, I saw a meteor shower forecasted on the news. The internet was in its infancy and social media did not exist, so when I glimpsed the headline on the evening news, I marked my calendar for the upcoming night when the sky was supposed…
heaven
Playing Home
When I was eight years old, my parents bought me a 35-millimeter camera, an oblong pink, plastic thing with the name “Barbie” splashed across the top in that neon lettering so characteristic of the late eighties. I loved that camera and the ability to grab a moment and memorialize it in printed form whenever my…
A Bit of Earth
We moved in with my grandparents twice during my childhood. The first time, I was five years old, and my mom was in a wheelchair for months after giving birth to my sister. We stayed with my grandparents in their small house in an old Memphis neighborhood for nearly a year, until my mom could…
More Than This Life Only
I checked the final item off my long to-do list the other day and felt a bit of euphoria when my pen made a straight, black line through the words “answer emails.” It had been a day full of work at my desk (which is really just the dining room table between meals), work in…
Home When You Cannot Find It
I was twenty-four when we packed up the U-haul truck on a blistering hot day in July. Sweat trickled down my back as we hefted the last of the cardboard boxes into the truck. We locked the front door of the white, 1920’s bungalow we’d bought two years prior. The for-sale sign still stood in…