Even when I’m not a walking stomach virus, I have always found funeral homes to be completely void of oxygen. They are suffocatingly hot or freezing cold and they reek of overlapping perfumes. The cemetery always felt like a breath of fresh, clean air. Maybe it’s because of my family’s bizarre yearly family reunions at […]
I couldn’t begin to count how many funerals I have attended. My parents never replaced dead pets or shielded us from dying relatives. Our extended family has always been close. Sincerely close, gathering together as a group for all day eat-athons multiple times a year while seeing each other in smaller groups every other weekend […]
Today I was going to whine about how much the paper charges to run a short, no-photo obituary. Yesterday, a man who was a friend and classmate of my grandparents called my mother to offer his condolences after he saw the obituary in his Sunday newspaper. The stories he told my mother about my grandparents, […]
“I’ve only been in the bath for 30 minutes so far. This is a quick bath.” The girl could blow away in a strong wind. Why can’t she soap herself in 15 minutes?
…and waiting for me to quit telling funeral stories. I promise I’m almost done talking about it.
How did people make 5 hour drives before XM radio? Why did we torment ourselves our children by making this trip without a DVD player? When seeing people you haven’t seen for many, many years, the process works something like this: You look at a woman approaching you and know that you should know who […]
A decade ago, my father’s side of the family had a family reunion in Martin, TN. While surrounded by delicate infants and fragile seniors, Sarah and Tommy developed red spots. Red spots that went from two to two hundred over a matter of hours. We probably caused the biggest outbreak of chicken pox that small […]
Have I mentioned lately how much I loathe daylight savings time? It is 7 p.m. and 70 degrees out and the sun is still shining brightly. My odds of getting the children to bed on time are somewhat less than slim to none.
… one of the only restaurants in town has no regular milk in the kitchen (“would the babies like some buttermilk?”) and everything on the menu, except the coleslaw (vinegar or mayo) is deep fried.
This is the landscape in the Natchez Trace area of middle TN. Trees and fields everywhere you look. In another season, there would be crops of feed corn here and there, but it’s still exactly as I remembered it. Trees and fields. The twisty 2 lane back roads still show the daily tractor abuse and […]