Like most southerners, Tolitha had fashioned a small and personal art form out of ancestor worship, and the authentic intimacy of cemeteries made her happy. She looked upon death as a dark and undiscoverable longitude encircling the secret geography of the earth. The subject of her own death filled her with pleasant reveries of journeys both imminent and surprising. Because my grandmother did not attend church regularly or openly profess a belief in God, it gave her license to embrace more exotic prescriptives of the spirit, more vivid distillations and tonics to add character to her view of
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