May 7, 2010 During the months before the storm, our Leiper’s Fork neighbor Rachael McCampbell, an artist, was working in her home studio on a commission for the Parthenon in Nashville: a dozen or more large canvasses depicting the lives of women in Greek mythology. It was going to be an impressive show.
May 7, 2010 My husband was off helping to coordinate city relief efforts. I was on my own, and it was too early to cope by uncorking a bottle, even by the permissive standards of our household. The sky was dark except for frequent flashes of lightning, but we had to get the hell out of the house.
May 7, 2010 Thirteen miles from my exit, the bottom fell out of the sky. The road seemed to disappear; drainage pipes spewed like muddy geysers. My sister called my cell phone in a panic, unable to reach our mother. “What about her cell phone?” I asked. “She’s forgotten how to use it,” she snapped. “I’m heading over.”
May 7, 2010 Whether it’s a sixty-dollar pawnshop mutt or a purebred collectible, for musicians, a guitar is like a pet. They chose it. It’s theirs. It fits their lap; it fits their life. They keep it because it comforts them, and—as much as is possible for an inanimate object—they love it.
May 7, 2010 Fortunate. Lucky. How many times have I said these words in the last week? How many times have I felt them as I clicked through photos of the devastation, feeling like a rubbernecker on the highway?
A friend of mine spent his childhood “playing church” and arguing over whose turn it was to preach and whose to be saved. And a relative recently attended a wedding reception where the centerpiece was a whole hog, smoking away in a homemade smoker on a trailerbed still hitched to the pick-up truck. When the owner got mad about something or other, he got in and drove away, pulling the smoking hog on the trailer behind him. (More potato salad, anyone?) These stories are true, and funny, and Southern. But they are also potential fodder for some bad Southern fiction.
