Category Respect for Elders

They say the land remembers. Maybe that’s why I kept coming back, to the red dirt riverbeds, to the trails where cedar smoke used to hang like breath in winter. I didn’t grow up with a map of who we were. I grew up with silences. My grandfather, Wilson, was ...

I watched the nurse zip up my mother’s body from the other side of a glass wall. We were only supposed to visit virtually, but I fought for five minutes. Five sacred minutes. My mother was 89, a retired teacher who survived polio, integration, and three miscarriages. She taught three ...