The Story
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Dancing in the 80s.
Every now and then, particularly when I’m feeling my age, I need to refill myself with some of my favorite music from my youth. Continue reading
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Some shade of gray.
When you have children, you set your sights on creating a perfect human being. After all, you have some idea of control – that if you shape them and mold them just right, they will turn out to be perfect (just like you?). You determine that you will do things right, because you have a… Continue reading
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Christmas 1989
As we approached the holidays in 1989, our daughter was 5 and our son was barely 2. We were living in Austell, GA, a suburb of Atlanta in Cobb County. It was the holiday season of 1989, the poorest Christmas I ever spent, but in many ways, it was also the richest. This time of… Continue reading
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Seattle.
My hands are shaking as I write this. It is about a chapter in my life that changed so many things, for better and for worse. Maybe I should take a page from Hemingway and have a stiff drink before I decide to write. But oh yeah, I don’t drink. When the urge to write… Continue reading
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My inheritance is sugar.
Life has a way of teaching you things you don’t want to know, especially when rebellion is a huge part of your nature. These lessons are usually things you know intellectually but feel don’t apply to you, or rationalize because of any number of excuses. The Surgeon General has been warning us for decades about… Continue reading
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A haunting on Nina Lee Lane.
Not long after I moved into the green room, the haunting began. At first it was only slight movements in the closet. Later, it came closer. Continue reading
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Melba’s ghost.
My extended family is very large. My paternal grandmother gave birth to ten children and saw seven of them into adulthood. So I have a multitude of cousins on that side of my family, many of whom I’ve never met, because they were all older than me. My dad was 40 when I was born,… Continue reading
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Still I rise.
I was supposed to see Maya Angelou on a cruise I took in 2014, but she was ill. She died just months later, but she did join our cruise by satellite video link to read some of her poetry and share some of her thoughts. One of my favorite Angelou poems is Still I Rise.… Continue reading
About Me
A writer and solitary soul in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
Poetic License 