The Tally Book Part One: The Sandhills If you’ve never seen the Sandhills of Nebraska, it’s hard to explain them. Twenty thousand square miles of grass-covered dunes, rolling like a […]
Ninety-One Thousand Five Hundred Pennies Part One: The Buckets Dale Heckert tipped the last bucket at four o’clock on a Friday. I heard it before I saw it. A sound […]
The deadbolt clicked shut while my four-year-old son was still crying. For one frozen second, I stared at the oak door. Warm yellow light glowed around its edges. On the […]
The Porch on Third Street Part One: 3:40 The school bus squeals to a stop at the corner of Third Street every afternoon at 3:40. I can hear it coming […]
Eleven days after I closed on my new house, I was four hours away when my security system sent me a notification. Person detected in driveway. It was 10:14 on […]
The Moon on His Pocket Part One: The Cold Courtroom The family courtroom in Knoxville, Tennessee, felt colder than the January morning outside. I sat at a narrow wooden table […]
“My dad didn’t choose you by accident. And it wasn’t for my sake.” I stared at Georgia. We were sitting in my uncle Frank’s car in the parking lot of […]
The thermometer on my truck’s dashboard said nineteen degrees when I pulled into our driveway at 11:40 on a Wednesday night. There was a strawberry birthday cake sitting on the […]
The Green Notebook Part One: The Tractor Grandpa lost most of his hearing in the fall of 2019. He was working on an old John Deere 4020 in the machine […]
The night before the championship ceremony, my fourteen-year-old son sat on the edge of his bed staring at his football jersey. It was clean and folded, lying next to a […]