Nags Head is just such a place, and the memory of it pulls people to it like the tides.

But I don’t remember that as much I do the casualness of the time, filled with playing with whomever was around, napping on the sidewalk, and catching lightning bugs while the adults...

I grew up at 527 East High Street, five blocks east of the capitol, three blocks south of the Missouri River. This river was not made for swimming or boating, just commerce and cholera,...

Leslie’s loss feels like the worst kind of summer; like an oppressive, heavy, unbearably uncomfortable August; like you can’t breathe, like the bright sun isn’t pleasant at all, but...

My mama would say to kill a cricket is a sin against the night.

The week of the Dixie Classic became like a feast and holy festival, consecrating the idea of home, of where I thought I belonged.

The changing tides have always been a clock for me. The rising and falling waters, the exposed then submerged sandbars oriented our day outdoors as we floated on rafts at high tide or rode...

One might say ours was the most ordinary of southern residential neighborhoods, but as I reflect now, a half-century later, Samuel Mockbee and Virginia Shine Harvey made it extraordinary....

For a few days or weeks each year, this was our real world. We were learning real things, like how to make sassafras tea, how to identify poison ivy (and not to mistakenly brew tea from...

“It was the smell of the dirt,” I said, surprising even myself. “I missed the smell of South Carolina farm dirt. It doesn’t smell the same anywhere else in the world.”