With Bears in Winter
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: The experience of holding an infant bear in your arms, and feeling it snuggle under your coat for warmth, is unforgettable.
Essays
Fans Take to the Roadshow
Antiques Roadshow, the PBS TV series that for 25 years has revealed the history and occasionally breathtaking value of collectibles was coming to Nashville, and I had tickets. From there to stardom seemed what Bertie Wooster would have called a stone-dead cert, if ever there was one.
Fall Diptych
I want to notice the moment everything changes, like the subtle shift in daylight, when what was impossibly bright is now a smaller, deeper dark coming on.
Flight to Balad
Medics flung open the cargo doors and deposited an Iraqi man whose drawn and lined face exposed a life well acquainted with war and hardship. Shouted instructions to “Get him to Balad!” — the site of the big American trauma hospital — sent us on our way.
Brushing the Divine
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: The Celts believed heaven and earth are three feet apart but even shorter in these thin places. Are such locations where we’re able to brush up against the divine? Sometimes writing feels to me like a brush with the divine. Maybe that’s why places like Rugby call out to those of us who write, putting stories into our heads and almost demanding that we set them down on paper.
The Leiper’s Fork Way
We were a community then, and Tommy remembered.
