Tobacco and Honeysuckle

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(I wrote this piece a couple years ago. As I prepare to teach a workshop on memoir writing, I am revisiting some of my personal essays.)

The scent of cured tobacco has the power to pull me back in time, back to my youth, back to my early teenage years, and leave me in the tall grass and weeds not far from a barn, stately and weathered, a place where I string tobacco gathered fresh from the fields, a place where honeysuckle grows wild and hangs over barbed-wire fences.

In this memory, I...