Essays

It’s been more than 10 years since I took those tentative and unwitting steps toward a part-time career as a “professional writer,” a label I never would have dared apply to myself until Margaret Renkl gave me permission.

“I can certainly use these for Poetry Month,” I’ll say to no one in particular, as if strangers might look askance at a person buying five books of poetry but not at a woman talking to herself.

It’s Georgia law that sex offenders register with the state each year, but in Blue Ridge, the local paper also publishes current and former offenders, with their name, age, and photo. And there was Harold, with his big, bumpy nose and kind eyes.

My museum adventure is an antidote to the emotional numbness that has set in during the pandemic, an escape from an endless Monopoly game of boxes that isolate and bankrupt emotionally.

My father loved his fruit trees, but unlike my mother and grandfather, he took no interest in growing vegetables. One day, a few years before his death, I learned why.