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Grow a Brain

One year at Christmas I took home a brain. On the drive up, we had stopped at a Cracker Barrel and amongst the clutter of all that Made in China crap, I found a brain kit. (This is a true story). The brain kit fit my budget—less than five bucks—and the checkout line was short enough to justify the wait, so I forked over my money and bought the...

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A New Blog by a New Writerly Friend

When I became self-hosted my reblogging abilities diminished, but I want to share a link to a new blog begun by a writer I recently met. She combines images and words. Her poetry fits my definition of a good poem, which is when I don’t know what the next word will be. Scroll through her entries and enjoy. https://mockmortality.wordpres...

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Grief: The Best I Can Do

My Daddy Joe was killed by a train when I was three years old. My older sister was four, and my mother was newly pregnant with my little sister. After the baby was born, my mother had what we would now call postpartum depression, complicated, of course, by the death. She thought to herself, Well, I’ve had this baby. The two older girls can take...

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Naming the World: My Advent Practice

Over on Facebook on my author page—Ellen Morris Prewitt: My Very Southern Voice— since the beginning of Advent, I’ve been putting into practice the concept I mused upon in this blog post about A Different Kind of Christmas. Feel free to mosey on over to the page and enjoy the posts. Here’s a free sample. Well, they’re all free....

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Vonnegut Birthed THE BONE TRENCH

When I was in high school, I favored the library located in the small strip center that also held the hardware store where I bought tomato plants, thinking them to be flowers . . . but that’s another story. The library was cozy, the line of shelves beginning as soon as you walked in the door. From my weird spatial perspective, the books...

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A Different Kind of Christmas

I am slow, behind. Your blog posts are going unread. My head reels with thoughts of sofas and chairs and what to do with the table in the kitchen? I am furnishing an entire beach house in my head (and on Pinterest). When these sortings graciously step aside for a moment, Jazzy and the Pirate rushes in, insisting on being finished. Finished—ha!...

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Barataria Hauntings

Barataria Imagine yourself on a flat-bottomed boat gliding through the Louisiana swamps of Barataria when you bump a log. Feathering the paddle against the sides of the pirogue, you slow and steer yourself towards the gap in the moss-draped oaks. A rasping causes you to pause. Wrong move. A claw shoots from the murky water, grasping the gunnel. Before...

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Making paper from sea oats

We begin with sea oats collected from the sandy beach: Sea oats from Ocean Isle Beach which we cut up and boil for a couple of hours then let stand in the pot for several days, soaking. Next we add some dryer lint Dryer lint to provide a binding agent–I made up this step because the fibers seemed coarse and might not hold together then...

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I’m Back!

Whew. My computer has been dead for almost two weeks!!! My fault. When we made a whirlwind trip to Memphis, I left my charger there. Then I did meticulous research on the charger I needed . . .  and ordered the wrong one. After a quick trip to the Apple Store, I unpacked the charger sitting in the mall version of Cafe Du Monde, not trusting that...

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