I believed in Santa Claus for a lot longer than many of my peers did. This was due to a potent combination of two factors: my mother did a superb job of hiding gifts and maintaining the Santa Myth, and I never wanted to know the “truth” behind any myth. To this very day, I am one of the only people at my office who, when we do the Secret Santa thing at this time of year, emphatically does not want to know who drew my name. Likewise, I never reveal whose name I drew. What fun is there in knowing such a thing in advance? I have been told…

We never had extra cash when I was a child, but my mother made every holiday very special. Even minor holidays like Saint Patrick’s Day and Veteran’s Day saw some preparation in our house, but Christmastime was the main slice of the year. Sometime after Thanksgiving, on a weekday when my sister and I were at school, Mother would decorate the house. She would string garland from corner to corner in the living room near the ceiling, and drape icicles on it. She would cover our battered coffee table with gift wrap and place upon it a thorned limb on which she would stick gum drops. Also on the coffee…

My wife and I are both what Ray Bradbury called “October people.” We revel in the pyrotechnics in the trees, in the tangy air, in the numbed nose and cheeks, in the lighting of fires in the wood stove, in the blanket of early darkness in which nature wraps us in this too-short season. While we do not share our neighbors’ obsessive fascination with Halloween decorations, we do enjoy the approach of the holiday most churches abhor and try to drown out with their silly Reformation Day activities, the staginess of which reminds me of Kwanzaa and Earth Day.  We live too far out in the sticks to be visited…

She would have been 98 years old today. No one like her in the wide, wide world. A tough little thistle of a woman, humble and quiet all her days, self-effacing when she probably shouldn’t have been, displaying her fierceness only if someone or something threatened her children. “Y’all are my whole world,” she used to say, and she proved it with her life. We never understood each other, but we had some fine, fine times together. I have her eyes, and she has my devotion. I miss you so much, Mother. And I believe we will see each other again. Happy Birthday. I love you so. ~ S.K. Orr

To get to work, I drive down a mountain highway, a stretch so beautiful and so panoramic that I am often in danger of driving off the side of the road while gaping at a sunrise or pockets of mist in the hollows or clouds ablaze from beneath. My head is forever swiveling to watch for deer or even bears, and sometimes red-tailed hawks will startle me by flying out of a ridge-line directly across my path. Yesterday, I passed a little fawn, smaller than my dog, lifeless in the center of the road.  She lay in a tight curl, her chin on her back legs, as if sound asleep…

When I was a very small boy, on a summer Sunday afternoon, I was playing outside our little house.  As children do, I was sitting in the dirt, using the dirt to make pies and puddings….and mountains and lakes. I had a plastic margarine bowl full of water, and was sitting next to a large sewer cover next to our gravel driveway. The sewer cover was larger than a regular manhole cover. Its texture was smooth, and it had a handle set into the middle of it. I don’t recall ever seeing any workmen go in or out of the opening, but it seemed to be an important fixture at…

I can trace my earliest memory of rain back to me sitting on the floor before the screen door of the little house in which I grew up. Two roots from a catalpa tree snaked out in the front yard, forming in their above-ground wandering a neat triangle. It had been raining for most of that mostly-forgotten morning and the triangle of roots held a pool of the sky’s water. Drops fell into the little pool, and it seemed to me that each drop created a splash-shape exactly like the little ballerina atop my sister’s music box, narrow legs below a tutu, with tiny arms raised above her head, frozen…