Harper Lee and Truman Capote; New York Public Library Digital Collection Early this morning I finally opened the pages of my beautiful 1993 edition of To Kill A Mockingbird, the one Chef David so lovingly sought and then finally found in hardcover and gifted to me this past Christmas. It has been stacked atop the … Continue reading The Coming-of-Age Story of Stories: Oh, Harper
Descriptive Writing
Summer Gathering: A Memory
summer in Knoxville Let me tell you a story. It is a summer evening in Knoxville, Tennessee. The day has been hot, but the hottest part is over. It’s still sticky outside, though, and the cicadas are singing in the massive, centuries-old hardwoods all around the big house on the corner in this grand midtown … Continue reading Summer Gathering: A Memory
Evening Miniature 2.7.21
Cecily returned home after a long day in the service of others, thoroughly spent and ready for it to end, but the faintest streak of pinkish-azure light lingered on the western horizon still, almost mockingly; she could not appreciate the beauty of the moment in her tired-out condition. Later on, she would slide down into … Continue reading Evening Miniature 2.7.21
Evening Miniature 1.3.21
How peculiar the small things one remembers from an important or somber occasion, years or decades later. Cecily had long reflected on this curiosity in the intervening years between her father Cecil’s funeral and now, at age twenty-three. She had been thirteen at the time, mindful enough of the goings-on around her, impelled forward by … Continue reading Evening Miniature 1.3.21
Evening Miniature 11.22.20
The darkness would have compelled any visitor to stand quietly for a moment and adjust to it before finally getting his bearings, after crossing the threshold of this cottage, if it were only just: More precisely, this was but a room of four rough-hewn paneled walls, unfinished, with a shed-style roof fashioned of standing-seam metal, … Continue reading Evening Miniature 11.22.20
Afternoon Miniature 11.8.20
Lucy tugged at her skirt, which had ridden up over her bent knees in a funny way, and now its satiny lining had shifted, allowing the wool fibers to rub her skin uncomfortably. Her head swam with obtuse and acute angles, theorems and axioms. She glanced down at her open notebook and saw where her … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 11.8.20
Afternoon Miniature 10.25.20
The ancient truck’s open hood concealed her from the waist up as she bent over its engine; she rose a little onto her toes to get a better look at something shadowy and undefined. Try again now, she hollered to nobody in the cab, but all that happened was nothing, only the obstinate click-click-click of … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 10.25.20
Afternoon Miniature 9.7.20
Cecily could still hear the little fan whirring, a sound that somehow underscored the silence that morning, if she thought long and hard enough about it. For all but the coldest months in the last year, Claudia had kept it going on a small fern stand next to her reading chair, more or less in … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 9.7.20
Afternoon Miniature 8.2.20
It was twilight and Cecily’s bones ached. She stepped off the city bus and began the short walk to the home she shared with her mother, whose health had spiraled into a steady decline in the last year or so. She turned the key in the front door lockset and stepped inside quietly to the … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 8.2.20
Afternoon Miniature 7.19.20
Bran’s bedroom was all that remained to suggest the original vernacular architecture of her little cottage—the rest she had dragged grudgingly into the 1970s. A pair of authentic-looking casement windows just above the bed had convinced Lucy this might be true, anyway: They were large and lacked mullions, with handwrought iron fasteners that worked surprisingly … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 7.19.20
Sycamore Stories 