1. The temptation is there. Every time my daughter rubs her elbow against it, the sliver opens underneath like a tomb. I did that. I cut the plastic that covers our table, and through the tablecloth itself. I did it earlier, right before dinner as I was cutting my basted quilt pieces with the rotary…

My heirloom cookbook was born during a Washington D.C. snowstorm in February of what was then called “The Year 2000,” in my final months of singlehood before I was to be married in July. That storm barely registers in the city’s memory now: it was neither the Blizzard of 1996, with its eight-foot-high snowbanks, 2003’s…

We’ll have to go back to the gun shop today. There’s no way around it. It seems that the barrel with the modified choke got left there when my mother placed the twenty-gauge up for sale sometime before Christmas. But since there weren’t any takers, we went back to the shop to retrieve it when…

I stood in the security line at the Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans wondering if I was going to be detained, and taken for dangerous. Hell, I didn’t know, was this something for which I could be arrested? Maybe I should’ve let my brother talk me into sending the glossy, fitted wood box on ahead via mail—though that would have been exorbitant. Plus, I didn’t want to let it out of my hands.

It’s evening and I’m about to meet my older sister in baggage claim. Trained by years of overseas travel in my twenties—and having lost enough luggage along the way—I have taken very little with me on the trip: my carry-on, my diaper bag, and my nine-month-old baby.