Digging for Gold
Vincent was too busy excavating the ruins of his ministerial calling. I’ve been reading the letters of Vincent Van Gogh. Thinking about the courage of the artist to stand against the crowd, and yet remain soft enough to be vulnerable to life, to what is. And I remembered a concert I went to during my freshman…
“…hopes of putting down roots….”
An excerpt from my memoir The Edge of All the Light You Have. My family moved to Wake Forest, North Carolina, in 1966 so that my dad could attend seminary there. The small town clustered around the campus of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. The seminary sat dead center, and what little traffic there was flowed…
“…go to the limits of your longing.”
“It’s all I have to bring today…,” Emily Dickinson once wrote. Thank you, Emily. Because I have nothing of my own to offer on this end-of-summer morning. The days are shortening. The world is spinning off its axis. I am so, so tired. I send my bucket into the well, and all that comes up…
Coyote at the Crossroads, Revisited
He darted out of the construction site to my right into the middle of early-evening traffic. A large dog running wild. The SUV ahead of me swerved and braked, but nipped him in the back legs. The dog spun in circles, coming to rest in the middle of the left-turn lane for oncoming traffic. I…
The Art of the Meal
My husband can take canned vegetables, like green beans or spinach, and make you swear they were fresh when he started. While this is a skill you may never see celebrated on cooking channels, it sure enough works for us. Our plates are the orphaned lids of Tupperware containers. The cup that holds melted butter…
“Take my hand, precious Lord. Lead me home.”
This is the seventh in a series of excerpts from my memoir, The Edge of All the Light You Have. It follows “How can we be reconciled….” In January of 1970, a white man sat having a cup of coffee in the Baptist Building in Raleigh. He was perusing The News & Observer for articles about the shooting…
The Lynching of Noah Cherry
The intersections of infamy in our Southern history astound me. When I was growing up, no one ever mentioned that there had been a lynching in Princess Anne County, right around the corner from my grandparents’ farm. The first time I learned about Noah Cherry was in 2019, at the Legacy Museum of the Equal…
“How can we be reconciled….”
The Key to the Town of Wake Forest unlocked nothing. This is the sixth in a series of excerpts from my memoir, The Edge of All the Light You Have: a story across time and race (formerly From Where I Stand). In early June 1999, I found myself on the road connecting New York City…
“It could be my house tonight….”
This is the fifth in a series of excerpts from my memoir, The Edge of All the Light You Have (formerly, From Where I Stand). In the cartoon, a portly man, in clothes several sizes too small for him, stands in front of a church, a double-barrel shotgun stuffed under one arm. Above him is…
“…refugees from a war zone”
The fourth in a series of chapters from my memoir, The Edge of All the Light You Have (formerly, From Where I Stand). This post follows “This is our fight, too.” Two days after the shooting, it was Monday morning and back to school. After they dropped us off, Mom and Dad went with MaMaw…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Follow My Blog
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
