When my parents tried to ferret out which one of us was in trouble for a wrong, my dad always told me in his most stern voice not to “tell stories.” In the deep South that was a polite way of saying “don’t lie.”
One week of solitude and my epic fail at freedom
So much has been written about making friends as we age, but no one gives you a How To Manual or instructions.
What we give up and what still grows
Sometimes unseen beauty isn’t physical beauty but the beauty of life circumstances. Sometimes beauty is unknown, like what saves us from tragedy.
I’m back!
Here I am, in April, finally waking up to the new year. Is it 2024 y’all? I didn’t realize. It’s like a hangover from a three-month binge except that I remember everything and have no good stories to tell from the experience.
Peep this! Christmas City cooks up Easter’s favorite chick confection
Peeps — the candy that made it to my Easter basket as a child, in my Alabama Methodist home — come from Christmas City, marrying the two biggest Christian holidays. Surely Jesus would love Peeps.
What we mean when we say we miss newsrooms
If my former newsrooms were people I would be attending many funerals. 2,500 newspapers in the United States have closed since 2005. The country will lose one-third of its newspapers by 2025.
Shifting gears: Teaching my autistic daughter to drive
I can tell you the day I discovered freedom because I remember every intoxicating detail of the moment I drove alone for the first time after getting my driver’s license. Now, in what seems like a single heartbeat of time, my daughter is learning to drive.
I Raised My Child in a Shopping Mall
The word “should” is the enemy of all good things. This is what I teach her. When someone says you should do something, question why. Question the value of the person who is telling you that. Question the word should, always.
On the other side of the tornado: 10 years later, we are still broken and also on the mend
I read somewhere that traveling is like coming home a slightly different person than the one who left. I feel the same way about the journey I’ve been on since an EF4 tornado upended my life, just as the earth felt moving below me, a real-world Tilt-A-Whirl as it loosened the foundation of my home.
My adult daughter was diagnosed with autism. It changed everything.
Nothing could prepare me for the unplanned beauty and fear of having an adult child diagnosed with autism.