Member-only story
Bringing My Daughter Back to My Mother in the Appalachian Mountains
When past, present, and future collide
You’re driving down a two-lane divided highway. The heat of an August day surrounds you; kudzu chokes the road, threatening to spill into your path. The wet air hangs from the sky. It’s Tennessee.
You’re singing along with your daughter and the radio. She doesn’t mind that you sing off-key, and you pretend it doesn’t bother you. Both of you forget most of the lyrics. Where did this CD come from anyway?
She fills in the words she doesn’t understand, singing about dinosaurs instead of diamonds and taking liberties with the rest. She is three, and her childish interpretation is both amusing and insightful at once — an incisive commentary about the world and your place in it, her place in it.
The cicadas are screaming outside. It’s a scream that comforts you and takes you back to an elusive place, endless moments in heartbeat time:
Standing on a rough wooden porch guarded by cedar posts, watching raindrops flicker-fall from the tin roof. When the rain is light, you thrust your hand into the stream over and over, testing laws of physics you know nothing about. The heavy rains send fountains endlessly downward into the pebbled dirt of your front yard. You place buckets beneath the streams, not…
