When I wrote my second memoir, Turning Bones, I combined twelve years of research into my father’s side of the family with my imagination. These ancestors had left few documents behind, and furthermore, my family never talked much about them when I was growing up. My ancestors, then, were mysteries to me. They were, for…

Let’s start with the calla lilies. Cathy and I got home from a trip to Illinois late Wednesday night and found a box from ProFlowers, an online delivery service, on our front porch. A dozen calla lilies, complete with vase. Yellow calla lilies and white ones and purple ones and peach ones. Beautiful trumpet blooms…

Cathy and I enjoyed a weekend of company. First, a friend and former-colleague was our house guest. We all attended the wedding of a former student. Then on Sunday afternoon, a former student and her husband came out to the house just for some porch-sitting. What a vibrant weekend of connections with the dear ones…

This is my post for Memorial Day. Rather than reading my words, read these words from Brian Doyle, a wonderful writer and person, who left us much too soon. Last Prayer by Brian Doyle Dear Coherent Mercy: thanks. Best life ever. Personally I never thought a cool woman would come close to understanding me, let…

Summer Sundays, my thoughts turn to baseball and the way my father would “listen” to a St. Louis Cardinals game on the radio while he napped. Our house was full of stillness those days. After a week of labor on the farm, we slipped easily into rest come Sunday. My mother read the newspaper and…

This morning I find myself in my native southeastern Illinois on a day that promises to be summery: temperatures in the mid-80s and plenty of sunshine. In fact, I’m writing this from the public library that I used during high school back in the day when there was still something called a card catalog and…

One night, when I was in grade school, our landlord took me to a baseball game. It was the night of the second Clay/Liston championship fight, May 25, 1965. I was nine years-old. Our landlord was a man named Louie Hiskes. He lived in our small string of apartments in a larger one that formed…

My wife and I have a mallard duck—a hen—sitting on eleven eggs that she’s camouflaged well in our landscaping. You really have to know where she is to see her. On occasion, she’s gone, seeking food, I assume, although now Cathy has made that easy for her by putting out some cracked corn. Mostly the…

Richard Ford’s story, “Optimists,” begins like this: All of this that I am about to tell happened when I was only fifteen years old, in 1959, the year my parents were divorced, the year when my father killed a man and went to prison for it, the year I left home and school, told a…