” Of Fear,” flash essay, MacQueen’s Quinterly

…My son in my womb, I steered clear of the microwave, afraid I’d radiate his brain. I drank no coffee, ate no chocolate, so he’d grow, according to my dog-eared childbirth manual, into the size of an olive, a ripe peach. I wasn’t mystical, but I let old laundromat ladies tie my wedding ring to a string, and swing it above my abdomen, telling me what I already knew, his gender, which I kept secret because my husband wanted to be surprised. I didn’t. I let the obstetrician slip me a Post-it® Note, the word “male” written on it, and I kept the note in a secret compartment of my wallet for years after my son was born. Though I wasn’t musical, at week sixteen I drifted Chopin’s nocturnes into the amniotic fluid surrounding him, soothing and developing his hearing with soft and constant arpeggios. He was a kicker. I ran my hands over his arms and elbows rippling my stomach from within, reassuring myself he was yet alive while I took tepid baths, afraid that if I allowed the water’s temperature to rise above my body’s temperature, I’d boil him.

“Of Friendship,” flash essay, MacQueen’s Quinterly

…Back when I lived in the historic district of my South Carolina town, on a street inhabited by taxi drivers and mill widows, I had a neighbor who became my closest friend. Nearly eighty, Meg had buried three husbands and a child, a daughter who died of leukemia when she was seven. A retired librarian, Meg had become an armchair historian, filling her computer with photos and documents about her home place, a coastal town outside Mobile, Alabama, that no longer existed. She suffered an ocular disease, a blockage of her internal carotid artery, the one that oxygenates blood flowing to the brain and eyes. She could still see, then, but required large print library books. Despite her age and impending blindness, she refused to move in with her living daughter, claiming she didn’t want to give up her home or independence.

“The Dwelling Place” lyric essay, Still Journal

…Twenty minutes before dusk, a week before Christmas, I slip between hedges into St. Stephen’s Green, and run into a bust of James Joyce. His head looks bludgeoned by age. His poor eyes gaze inward, as if remembering the inkpot houses of his transient childhood, or the furious father who dangled him by the ankles over the low and dirty Liffey to make a man out of him. I circle the statue of Dublin’s famous son, the one who wrote his birth city from memory while exiled in Italy. I think, how like the kind Irish to rest Joyce’s weary effigy inside this quiet green, between a sensory garden for the blind, and a statue of the three Norns, Nordic fates that emerge from a great ash, Ydrisil, the tree of life.

“Silent Song,”  lyric essay,  Appalachian Heritage

…In Camerota, where the locals dance salsa every night for all of summer in a club called The Cyclops, I step into the butter yellow church in the piazza and find the most sorrowful Madonna I’ve ever seen. She stands on the right side of the altar, her eyes red-rimmed, her young face pale, haggard, shining with sweat. Wearing a brown gown adorned with a few rustic stars, she gazes wearily toward the heavens, a hotel hand towel draped over her right arm as if she’s laundered linens all day beneath Mediterranean sun. Her bare feet are bound by single black straps of leather sandals, and the sacred heart pressing down on her chest looks as heavy as the steering wheel of an ancient boat. Her crown appears as if it’s been tossed to the ground beside a patch of lilies. Plucked of their white blooms, the stems rise like ditch weeds from the rocky earth around her…

“The Peach Season,” memoir essay, Still: The Journal

…Beyond the turn off for the battlefield, we crossed the interstate and under a trestle just as a freight train bearing peaches rolled above us. We slowed as we reached a field of trees whose limbs opened like rows of green vases in pastures that sloped for miles on both sides of the road. The trees were heavy with blushing peaches. We rolled down the windows, letting the heady scent fill the car. When we reached a roadside produce market and peach packing warehouse, we parked beside a white picket fence below a sign that announced “The Sweetest Peaches Anywhere, U- Pick, We Pick, $10 a bushel.”…

“Following the Slow Black River,” travel essay, The Louisville Review

…The morning we arrived in Dublin, my husband, son and I stepped into the central atrium of the Guinness Storehouse, a room shaped like the largest pint glass in the world.  We stood in the middle of a holographic stout surging down the seven-story glass walls.  The smell of hops wafted in, familiar and welcoming, like the smell of boiled peanuts sold at farmers markets back home in South Carolina.  It was like standing inside a soundless, brown waterfall that churned and settled into the color of dark rubies mined from the center of the earth…

“Hell Broth and Poisoned Entrails; An Affair With Scottish Cookery,” food essay, The Book of Worst Meals, Serving House Books

…Sipping whisky from a coffee cup, I ate the unpasteurized cheese, a Scotch egg, a slice of sheep pie, the haggis, and cullen skink, (fish, potato and onion soup). Savoring a finger of shortbread with one last cup of whisky, I had several revelations: Collops in a pan were really just a variation of the Italian peasant dish, osso bucco. A clootie dumpling was quie similar to an Italian panna cotta.  Finally, I determined that Scottish cooking, inspired by French cooking, must have been born of Italian chefs 200 years ago…

“Appalachian Wedding Cake,” food essay, Connie Thompson Kuhn’s book and Southern cooking blog.

*Here is the recipe for the actual cake!