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Walking Out

A peach-pickers’ strike, a crisis of faith, a paralyzing accident

Time in the Shape of Hills

My bones wake me up at night. It was my hips at first, then my femurs screaming. Now my ankles. But my doctor won’t listen. It started last year when my son and I walked the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route that runs through Spain. I’m sure that’s why my bones hurt—from all the walking.

Art During Wartime

In opposition to Vladimir Putin’s invasion, Ukrainian performing artists are reasserting their national identity. When I photographed the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, they were rehearsing the works of Stankovych and Barvinsky, Ukrainian composers who’d been banned during the Soviet era. This declaration of Ukrainian culture was considered so important that fighting-aged male symphony members were permitted to leave the country when the symphony took up residency in Germany.

Lost and Found

I want to be a good man, a good son, but that’s hard to pull off when it’s 100 degrees and feels like 115 because of the 90 percent humidity—current conditions in southeast Georgia. I’ve come home to visit my eighty-two-year-old mother and assuage some of my guilt for not being here fifty weeks out of the year.

Sunbeams

It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organized dust—ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable.

Mary Wollstonecraft

My Ghost Fleet

I have spent hours in attics, the kind reached by pulling a rope in the ceiling and ascending to a stagnant room. It was in attics that I found love letters tied with ribbons, and wedding dresses in paper boxes the size of coffins, and sepia photographs of uncles in uniform and children who’d died of scarlet fever. I sifted through images of wraparound porches and white chickens, three-legged dogs and men with cigars. I think there is a reason why the past collects in attics: heavily, above us.

Making Luxury Out of Flat Soda

I learned to breathe in my grandmother’s kitchen / despite life sitting on my chest. / Scent of cast-iron skillet seasoned by sunrises / and ancestors’ touch. Gospels of sizzling grease / and bubbling greens my uncle called hallelujah and amen.

Luxuries

A foreign sports car, a Hawaiian vacation, a glass of water on a hot day