Tag: Process_ON_Storyworth
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Pack’s Market
In about 1967, the Summer Of Love elsewhere, we moved to a leafy city block in a new town. I was 11 and always barefoot, even when running down the gravel alley to the little grocery on the corner. I was proud of my calloused soles. I could sprint that sharp, white, hot gravel all…
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Daisy (2009-2022)
(January 17, 2009 – May 21, 2022) Daisy went to sleep yesterday. I held her head as she faded, first from the anesthetic then as her heart stopped, invisibly, from the second syringe. I last saw her from above as I stood up to leave the veterinarian’s exam room. She was stretched out prone, chin…
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Clocks Stuck In 1937
On the front wall of each classroom, above the teacher’s head, was a large clock framed by carpenters into the plaster wall. There were a couple dozen classrooms in the building, all with identical clocks, and all their black hands were stopped on white faces at the same clock time. We were told they were…
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Christina Fawn
March 25, 1952. “Christena” Before me, my parents had a daughter, Christina Fawn. Christina lived a few hours, then was gone. She is buried near her mom and dad’s grave, on the knoll above Rockhouse Holler, under a simple headstone befitting a baby. On the stone is carved her simple name. I can’t really miss…
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California Coast, And Other Beauties
Isaac, you asked: “What’s one of the most beautiful places you’ve ever been?” One is hard to choose. But… You’ll remember when we drove the California Coast, in bright June, when you were not yet a teen. We flew 5 hours to San Francisco, grabbed a rented car, and took off northward into the Marin…
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Crawdads
About two hours after you put the crawdads in the bucket they start to smell. They can’t survive out of the creek. They need to crouch under a flat smooth rock in steady current. None of us had a plan beyond the plop in the bucket. It wasn’t holding them or even looking at them…
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Will You Be Planting Dahlias?
For my mother. Yes, you are in my bones,as matrix for the matrix of my marrowand my cells are busy building on your scaffoldthere, where bloods are born. On certain autumn midnights I would ridemy dreams against your sleep.You localized my life, assured yourself that I was fine,then turned upon your side. But now you…
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The Cross of Blue Flame
You’d be walking home after Sunday evening church. The road goes through the holler and has never been paved. A few minutes past the golden hour, to the mauve hour, when the sun shafts are gone, but the sky is still lighter than the tree trunks. Woods on the right, the creek down the hill…
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Pine Bombs
With pine sap and flat sandstone rocks you can make an explosion in the woods, and when you’re 13 you really really want to. This gives indescribable joy to teenage boys, who like loud noises and seeing how things break or blow up. Flat rocks. Build a little rock house out of these, on the…
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The Girl Who Summons Owls
When I was a young man I read a love story in which the boy exclaims “…a girl who loves owls!”. They’d go out on the lake in the canoe and she’d be all wistful at the sound of owls and his soul would leave his body at the thought that he’d finally found Her,…