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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...

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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...

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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...

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THAT’s Creativity?

Creativity is the glue that holds my life together. This week in my creative life, I: re-explored Facebook’s Notes feature published a long, involved blog post put together a new outfit that I liked so much I wore it two days in a row did final edits on an essay before sliding it into the metaphorical drawer for its “out of...

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A Southern Woman’s Vocational Credo

I come to Deborah Koehn Loyd’s Your Vocational Credo: Practical Steps to Discover Your Unique Purpose (IVP Books, 2015) as a Southern female raised in the 1960s and 70s. The adjectives this statement evokes for me are “stricture,” “judgement,” “demanding.” Peering down the tunnel of time, I see a long line of women staring back at me,...

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What Can I Do-Part 3 (and probably last)

I thought I’d be shot. Dean Andy Andrews announced that, following the Wednesday morning service, he would be walking the neighborhood around St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral. He invited us to join him. I attended the Wednesday service, but I believed if I walked in the neighborhood I’d be shot. You need to know: Alabama...

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Just Rain

When we were interring Daddy in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery (x marks the spot, a shovel, and an urn), rain fell. We held umbrellas, but we were moving, digging and tossing dirt. The August rain dripped slow and steady—not warm, not cool, just rain—and even as it was happening, I knew I’d never act afraid of the rain again. No running...

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