the long road

planted 2026-07-21 · last tended 2026-08-03

Down here the roads go straight until they don't, and the heat makes a mirror of the asphalt. You can drive for an hour and pass three churches, two abandoned, and a sign for a town that folded in the seventies. The South keeps its ghosts close and feeds them quiet.

why it stays with me

Memory in this place isn't linear. It loops. A song on the radio pulls a whole summer out of the ditch. A name said in church brings back the smell of rain on a tin roof. The garden is built the same way — notes that reach backward and forward, not in a row.

how to tend it

• Write the unglamorous truth. The ordinary is where the holy hides.
• Let one note point to another. Footpaths, not fences.
• Leave room for the thing you don't understand yet.

“everything good dies, and we dress it up and call it memory.”— a note to self, halfway down a county road

links out

Related: planting roots.