memories
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Aunt Dinny’s Hair
When Aunt Dinny stood with her bun undone, her wavy auburn hair hung down to her ankles. As a child, I once watched as she sat at the vanity in her bedroom dividing the long tresses into segments and brushing each one vigorously—her bedtime ritual. Between segments, she took dainty bites of a cucumber finger Continue reading
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Kitchen Table Talk
Aunt Dinny sat at Mother’s kitchen table snapping green beans for our supper. I sat across from her, shucking ears of sweet corn to be steamed, cut from the cob, and frozen. Mother had bought the fresh produce from our neighbor, who had a vegetable garden in his backyard. Looking down at the beans as Continue reading
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Family Photographs
After my mother died, a box arrived in the mail. I didn’t go back home to Cumberland, Maryland, to attend her funeral, despite the fact that I was her only child. She had a brother and several nieces and nephews who took care of the arrangements. They cleaned out her house and disposed of her Continue reading
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My Parents’ Hearts: Fragments from a Maybe Memoir
Grandma Swayne said that when she made my mother, she started with an oblong stone. She found it at the edge of Sideling Hill Creek by Little Orleans—the area of Western Maryland where my grandfather was born. She took that stone, smoothed by the creek’s ambling waters, and around it wove the flesh of the Continue reading
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My Hillbilly Parents: Vignettes from a Someday (Maybe) Memoir
I didn’t know it when I was a child, but my father was what some people might call a hillbilly. Daddy was one of the many Wilsons from Cameron, West Virginia, south of Wheeling. One of the few of them who left their birthplace, he escaped the poverty and isolation of his mountain home to Continue reading
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Hands
Daddy’s were beautiful. At the table, holding a piece of buttered bread. Cutting meat, lifting his glass to his lips, water droplets on its surface wetting his fingertips. When he looked behind him before backing up the car, he reached his right hand over the front seat. From the backseat, I stared at it. Continue reading
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