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I left my home and grew up, carrying my child self everywhere I went, full of longing and fear and memory.
All the things I loved, I had to leave.
Time stood still. The sound of his rage and her cries tore the leaves from the trees.
His fist beat her head and her back and the sun beat down the gravel road and lit our faces and their bodies, and the water glittered in the creek just steps away from where we stood, motionless.
I’ve come to believe that one of the defining moments of adulthood is the moment at which we recognize our parents as the overgrown children we all are, running around and reacting to each other as we learned to from our parents.
As the book unfolded, it seemed to illuminate the history of the region, the history of my people, in such a way as to account for the desperation that pervaded the water we drank, the air we polluted, the mountains we plundered, the love we longed for and withheld from one another.
Perhaps we all, to some extent, carry these infinitesimal burdens with us always, lifetimes upon lifetimes of history and pain and triumph embedded into invisible and weightless, incomprehensible miracles of creation or chance that drive us, blindly, into passion.
how do we know where the difference lies between realizing we could do bad things and choosing to do them? Where is that line?
Being poor in the holler—or anywhere—does not require cruelty or decay or drug addiction. However, that might be the logical end, after so much pain.
But the storyteller was always my father, the original unreliable narrator. Drunk, drugged, lost.
I had become the storyteller, that it was my story and that I had to tell it.
And even when my story isn’t pretty, or I wasn’t, the living itself is. After all is said and done, I can’t help but see the beauty we belong to.
When I sit alone at the end of the night, I realize this is my greatest triumph—to give my children the love and comfort I longed for, but which were not to be found in my childhood home.
