Carolina Potter might just be the prettiest girl I ever saw.
The first time I laid eyes on her, she was standing at the counter at McGee’s General Store trying to sweet-talk the poor sap behind the counter out of a ice cold Sun Drop.
“Come on, Dale. The old man’ll never miss it. It’s not like he’s gonna go in the cooler and count at the end of the day.”
Day-uhl. Cow-unt. We call that talking country. And there was more country in her talk than I’d ever heard.
She blew a big Pepto Bismol-pink bubble, popped it, then twisted the remnants around her index finger and studied it. She shrugged and stuck it back in her mouth, unimpressed. Continue reading A Girl Named Carolina →
Apparently the dead mule is the hallmark of good southern literature. Don’t believe me? A professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill spent the better part of fifty years arriving at that conclusion. He read, analyzed, cataloged and then announced, with great confidence, that a dead mule within the pages was essentially a guarantee of top-notch work. Don’t believe professor Mills? Rick Bragg said it too. In my world that’s proof enough.
Let’s assume for a minute that a story with one live mule is half as good as a story with one dead mule. So one live mule equals half a dead mule. Couldn’t we also agree then, that TWO live mules equal one dead one? By now you probably see where I’m going, right?
My story has two lives mules. Continue reading Everybody Loves A Parade →
I’m not sure about everyone else, but the majority of my memories, especially those from my childhood, are like snapshots inside my head.
It takes no effort at all on my part to see clearly the treehouse in front of my dad’s shop at our old house on Savannah Highway. I can’t remember for the life of me how we got up there but the rough edges of the pine planks, dotted with peepholes (which were, in hindsight, not intended to be peepholes; they were simply holes where the pine knots used to be) are clear as the Alabama sky. More effectively, we could peer out the windows by swinging open the small squares of the wall Daddy had carefully cut out and hinged back on. When it came time to properly fortify our little hideout, we slipped our tiny uncoordinated fingers beneath the dark red vinyl straps he had fastened into handles. Continue reading Snapshots →
… learning to dance in the rain
damaged calm 