The Grass Will Show Itself Again, I Know It

Many a foot of dusty snow here in County Floyd in Eastern Kentucky, but the icicles hanging from the eve are dripping just outside the window and so the sun is coming with purpose and determination. Grass will again be seen, sprouting, striving, continuing, those blades of pure and beautiful, a sensibility of always and forever.

Wrong Tree Review's second issue, online this trip around the mulberry tree, seems a success. So grateful to those who have visited the site and of course to those who contributed. Jarrid Deaton will continue to do good things with this journal, and I will always be proud to have been a part of the beginnings of WTR. I still believe in it as a venue for work just a bit different than the average story, the vision Jarrid and I have always held to in regard to fiction dating back to our earlier adventures together in publishing. Again, a drink and make it a double for WTR!

I'm moving again tomorrow. Nomad. That's the word. A close guess would place me living between 50 to 150 different places since I was knee high to a grasshopper. Most of the time those moves were never more than a county over. I lived in more than 20 places in one county at one point. But this move is different.

For about seven years my brocuz Gary and I lived with our grandparents. Seven years. That's the longest I was ever in one spot. After Sunday, I'll be living there again. It's as close to a homeplace as I have. I'll be tending to my grandmother (who I, and everyone else calls Mother). I look forward to it, to say the least, and if at all possible I'll die there in that house, either two years from now or seventy. Whichever.

Well, the sun got scared and went behind the mountain, or maybe a cloud. But the icicles are still dripping and the mountain roads will be clear tomorrow, in time for moving. Before I go, I'd like you to indulge me in giving a list of things I'm reading at the current time:

Kentucky Straight by Chris Offutt
Airships by Barry Hannah
How They Were Found by Matt Bell
Dogs of God by Pinckney Benedict
Various (and amazing) online work from writers and friends honestly too numerous to name.

Okay, cats and kittens. I'm going out to check to see if the snowplows have salted and laid blade on the secondary roads, see if the roads out to the marketplaces are passable.

Dang.