But by the time my father had lost his skunk-patterned hair and his fingernails yellowed, I had already found more trappings of eternity in poetry than in personified abstraction. It seemed to me that the only correct response was a slow-burning rage in which god, or an idea of one, did not factor at all, let alone anxieties about big-B Belief, a fact my father would probably lament but also understand.

On the day of his funeral—held at the same church in which holy water maybe beaded atop the head of Tricia’s casket—the dolorous organ seemed to enter me and vibrate within, as if trying to wake a part of me I’d long ago released.

We considered it an act of grace that every child we saw in Barcelona was wailing.

Sassy wasn’t her real name, and she wasn’t “sassy” at all. But as happens with many grandparents, the oldest grandchild names her—and the name sticks. I was that oldest grandchild. Her name was Sarah, which is what I’d hear the grownups call her. But when I tried, at age one-and-a-half or so, to say “Sarah,”…

Charleston’s poem is a piece of contrasts: youth and age, sugar and spice, consumption and generosity. Rife with gustatory description, the poem gathers crumbs of what it means to be home. Our speaker avoids establishing a setting directly. As we read, we discover location through a person and through food. “The pink lip of the…

This summer, I climbed the rotting steps to the hayloft of my family’s barn to look for a plaque honoring the use of emergent DNA technology in solving the Brown’s Chicken Massacre case. The floor was soft, dipping a little as I walked, and I looked in slow motion through my great-aunt’s things: frosted glassware,…

Mother’s house is not a house. Mother’s house is not a cave. Mother’s house is not a sacred text. Mother’s house is not an oven. Mother’s house is not a medicine cabinet. Mother’s house is not a song. Mother’s house is not a tree. Mother’s house is not an ocean. Mother’s house is not a…

We sang it, too. In 1961, Mr. D taught our fourth grade music class folk songs belonging to our American musical heritage. I still know all the tunes and most lyrics to “Shenandoah,” “Ol’ Dan Tucker,” “Erie Canal,” “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” “Barbara Allen,” “Red River Valley.” And the minstrel song, “Shortnin’ Bread.” Complete with…

I am chatting with a woman in a clothing store as our conversation moves from friendly small talk to the anxiety of raising children. My conversation partner, who is a few parenting years ahead of me, is lamenting dangers that now seem rampant for children, ones her preteen will face the closer she gets to…

A week before Christmas my husband and I hired professionals to install a wood stove in the fireplace of the 150-year-old house we just bought.  All seemed well at the initial inspection, but when they began the job they found a chimney full of rusted nails, crumbling tiles, and a funny flue. They sent a…

Every year after the clocks fall back, I read Lia Purpura’s essay “Sugar Eggs: A Reverie” from her collection On Looking. In the essay, Purpura is concerned with the space created when one looks into another world: the panorama built inside a sugar egg, a snow globe, a “horse’s scummy water trough,” cells massing to…