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Constructing Life

The boss man wasn’t there today. That’s what the worker told me, standing in the great room of our half-finished house. He was sanding. I was inspecting. He thought the homeowners might want to talk to the boss. I wanted to talk to him, the man guiding the sanding machine, the one who would rub the stain on the floor. The man who...

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The Path Less-Traveled

We were tramping through Couturie Forest in City Park along the well-mulched trails, and I noticed an option. The Couturie Forest contains the highest point in New Orleans, Laborde Lookout. The mountain—their words, not mine—measures a daunting 43 feet above sea level (or 53 feet, according to some sources, or 46 feet above a 3 feet-below-sea-level...

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Don’t Thumb Your Nose at the Spirit

I hate the Holy Spirit. Okay, hate is a strong word. But I have issues with this Spirit that constantly tells me to do things that embarrass the hell out of me. Take the recent prayer vigil I attended. A friend of mine was to be a featured speaker at the vigil. She is one of the authors of Writing Our Way Home: A Group Journey Out of Homelessness....

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How to Display Millions of Kids’ Photos

I call our apartment in New Orleans our “grand baby apartment.” We never would’ve leased the apartment and begun spending half our time in the Crescent City but for the presence of our grandson in the city. Consequently, I knew I wanted a way to display photos of the boy. I also knew the boy would grow, and I would want to display...

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In Honor of 2016: 16 Things Easily Lost

Names of acquaintances not recently seen My temper when someone I love is being bullied Anything being transported between Memphis and New Orleans How to spell “wierd” … um, “weird” Me, driving anywhere My glasses, which I rarely wear and when I do, I take them off and on, off and on—now where are they? A race against Evangeline,...

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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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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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