My wife is holding my hand to her stomach, gently gliding my fingers just beneath her ribcage where two small feet have been kicking against skin. She is thirty-two weeks pregnant with our third child, due in early December, an Advent baby. Sitting on our bed, she guides my hand as if across a globe,…

I remember my mother used to go to bed for the day. The blackness of her mood seemed to darken her room. I don’t know why she left her door open. Maybe she knew, even in her unresponsive state, that she needed to be able to hear us. Maybe she thought it would be less…

This post originally appeared at Good Letters on May 9, 2012. Dayne, my mother’s ex-boyfriend, spent his childhood in Tennessee, where he got his southern drawl and where his father, who drank, would stomp through the house and sweep his long arm across the crowded kitchen counter smashing greasy dishes onto the linoleum. It was…

In the back of the closet right, where I’d stowed it years before, I found the wedding veil I’d rescued during the final ransacking of my mother’s house before it was put up for sale. The closet was musty and midsummer-hot, and the cloud of folded tulle spilled off the shelf like a meringue off…

The moment is freeze-framed in my mind: My eldest, Milo, red-faced with anger, his eyes hard but wild, a look I know means he feels both out of control and desperate to re-exert it. The yellow light of the floor lamps casts dark shadows over the couch and his face. Shoot it in black and…

This post originally appeared in Good Letters on October 20, 2011 In the last few years, my school has made a huge push towards what our Global Studies’ Director refers to as “glocalism.” In essence, glocalism encapsulates the idea that we are all of us citizens of various communities, both local and global, and that…

On the phone, he says, Your mother throws me over her shoulder and carries me across the parking lot to the club house, the dining room. (She rolls his walker to a corner of the dining room where it won’t obstruct the servers and other residents who have come tonight for dinner.) His sense of…

My father told me that when he used to bird hunt through the Kilgore Hills in Northeast Mississippi, he would sometimes come upon a whisky still or two. This was back in the late thirties and forties, long after prohibition had ended, but the whisky makers were still easily spooked. Revenuers were still on the…

I am entering the Age of Subtraction. Almost as if there existed an imperceptible fulcrum I had to get over, and I’m now finding myself sliding on the downside. So much of adult life until now was about Addition—collecting experiences and perspectives—countries been to and books read, bands seen—and then a husband and family and…

One of the first official symptoms of pregnancy is an out of character desire to work story problems. If Eve is forty-one when she discovers she is pregnant, how old will she be at the infant’s birth, and when baby starts kindergarten, and when baby leaves for college? If Eve is sixty when youngest child…