I sat in the doorway with a pistol I bought from one uncle and a pint of moonshine I stole from another. Thinkin for the first time, those first bits of thought that would turn into what I think now.

“She had that baby yet Lawrence?”

I heard my mother before I saw her. Coming up the holler. That long piece of road that didn’t lead to nowhere but me. Walkin like she does, with her shoulders as square as her head and her eyes fixed on nothin. People always said she had a sense for showin up when things weren’t right. Like she had some second way of seein ever since she lost the first kind…

I’ve been trying to get my head organised this week. Last night, when I slept, I could hear it beating against my pillow.

I’ve spent ten hours editing photos today. My bum hurts from sitting so much. I ate an ice cream sandwich, and two eggs. I haven’t been to the gym since Monday. I can tell. I’m exhausted. The only time I’m not exhausted is when I’m hitting the treadmill or the free weights every day. I wish someone would have told me ten years ago that the way to be more energetic is to be more energetic.

I was suppose to go to the Theatre tonight. But musicals and migraines don’t mix so well. I know because I once wore one through Les Mis. Glutton. Punishment.

I need to compartmentalise. I take on jobs that are too huge. Get overwhelmed by them and verge on panic when I can’t get through them soon enough. The key, or so I’m told, is to do one small task at a time. Feel good about yourself. Enjoy the calm. And then do another. Apparently you get there just as soon. Just not all frazzled and fried.

I miss being able to go to church when no one’s there. I understand ‘community’ but I don’t dig the politics. I understand my grandfather. Sometimes, I can handle a good sermon. Sometimes, I just want to be still. And it’s really hard to do that when a place is swarming with parishioners.

St. Paul Outside the Walls. At night. When the tourists have died down. Now there’s a place to be still.

Summer faded into fall and the leaves began to drop. To rot by the road and on the mountain side.

Old Man Bishop killed a hog. Invited the whole town out for pulled pork and revival. The place needed a soul cleaning and a man from Alabama was coming to do just that. In a tent down by the river.

We left Hutchinson Holler at the end of October. When the ladies auxiliary came out to decry the devil on his holy day. Momma tore up roots that never took and carried us back down to the railroad. Back to what she knew before she knew nothing.

The air lost its thickness when the gossip died down and the cool began to come.

Life went on. For most. But for me there was nothing left in the whole wide world but a boy and a grave and the man who put him there.

“Young writers often suppose that style is a garnish for the meat of prose, a sauce by which a dull dish is made palatable. Style has no such separate entity; is nondetachable, unfilterable. The beginner should approach style warily, realizing that it is himself he is approaching, no other; and he should begin by turning resolutely away from all devices that are popularly believed to indicate style–all mannerisms, tricks, adornments. The approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.”

- E.B. White

“I don’t see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. I have a correspondent whose letters are always a refreshment to me, there is such a breezy unfettered originality about his orthography. He always spells “Kow” with a large “K.” Now that is just as good as to spell it with a small one. It is better. It gives the imagination a broader field, a wider scope. It suggests to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of a cow.”

- Mark Twain, reported in the Hartford Courant, May 13, 1875

She didn’t have much in life - mostly - but she had this. Authority bought by age.

And she hated it.

Hated the pain and the rigidness and the way life seemed to have left her, a bit at a time, until now….now nothing was left but tired old skin. Deflated and hanging. Folded all around her life-remaining.

She use to be able to fill her own skin. Fill the outside person that she was, from the inside. And it depressed her and made her angry that she couldn’t do it anymore.

I feel like I’ve been run over by a herd of elephants. Kicked in the head for good measure. And I have moths. How do you even get moths? They’re eating holes through my cashmere.

Barring those smelly little balls that make your wardrobe reek of your grandmother’s mother…I have no idea how to get rid of them.

Help!

Sometimes I take photos. Some people like to snap the mountains and the lake and the sun setting behind a grove of really spooky trees. But I’ve never seen a landscape that made me want to run home and grab my camera. I’d rather sit and take it all in and look up at a sun that shouldn’t touch my face. And I’d rather photograph people.

A picture’s worth a thousand words but only if there’s a life behind it. At least that’s what I think. One of these days I’m gonna be brave the way I wanna be - and every time I see a stranger on the street with a story in his face I’m gonna ask if I can make an image of it.

Like the Indian goat farmer with the hand carved something on his back. Or the bald Briton staring up at the Acropolis. Or the old man from the coal town trying to eat a cheese burger.

I like people pictures. They intrigue me.

The sister and I were talking about style last night. Not the ‘Fashion Week’ type. The Tolstoy, Faulkner and Hardy type.

A family member once accused me of letting life pass by while my head was stuck in a book.

Clearly, said family member didn’t understand me. At all. The sister did.

Maybe it was because, as the eldest, I was able to force my will upon the younger sib. (There’s an article somewhere in Time about this.) And my will, at ten, was all Byron and Bronte and Pearl S. Buck.

Though I’m fairly certain the sister would have done it on her own, these days she’s the first to admit: “I was just seven years old when Buffy started making me read Dickins.”

I’m very glad I did it. I think she is too.