Great Plains. One man grabs a calf’s hind leg and lifts. Another seizes a front leg and heaves, flipping as easily as possible the two-hundred-pound animal. Then each man pulls hard to keep it still.
English is a treasure trove of words, each with a precise meaning. It is also a source of confusion and frustration, since so many of those words have subtle connotations and refuse to stand still.
You schedule the U-Haul for a weekend when your husband plans to be in the woods. You do not repeat your argument that camping isn’t medication or therapy. That it cannot, in other words, fix him. You make him a sandwich for the drive to...
The house my mother grew up in burnt down in ’85. I hope y’all never experience something like that—losing everything, Mom told my brothers and me when we were too young to understand.
He was doing the dishes, midmorning, when he noticed the white car drive by, and drive by again. A quiet street, on the way to nowhere. At eleven, the school bus would show up, to deliver lunches to the children who couldn’t go to school...
