I am seventy-one years old, and until this past spring I believed I had reached the age where nothing new could happen to me. I want to tell you how […]
The first time Sutton Vance walked into the Bluestem, he wiped the seat of the corner booth with a paper napkin before he sat down. I watched him do it. […]
For fifty-one years I believed I was the daughter my mother tolerated and my sister was the daughter she loved. I was so certain of it that I built my […]
The first thing the new owner said to me, after he had owned the place for exactly four days, was that I should smile more. He said it the way […]
The morning Thaddeus Orsini told me a woman had no business running a row-crop operation, I was standing in his machine shed with manure on my boots and forty dollars […]
The morning Lorna stood up in the basement of Zion Lutheran and told two hundred of our neighbors that my brother and I had never worked a single day on […]
The first time I understood they meant to take it, I was standing in my own kitchen with a coffee cup going cold in my hand, watching a man named […]
For forty-one years my father stood behind the long oak counter at the front of Aldous Hardware, and in all that time I never once saw him let a man […]
The morning we buried my father, Dale Whitmer, the men who had worked for him for twenty years stood at the back of the funeral home in their clean church […]
For four hundred and eleven days I set two places at a table built for one widow. I counted them. That is the thing nobody tells you about grief, that […]