Category: The Long Carry
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Enough
What’s it feel like to want? That question seems to visit me a good bit lately. It used to just sit in that list of things my grandad would say. Not particularly high up, either. Just one of those filler lines that bulked up the collection, not one I found much use for in the…
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Names
Army time runs early, and o’dark-thirty comes fast. I’ve put this uniform on for thirty years. In the predawn dark, muscle memory does the work. Service-T, boot socks, uniform trousers, web belt, boots. My hands make the adjustments without being told. Last, the blouse. Patches, rank, name tapes, precisely in place. Regulations matter. The process…
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One More Mile
Running eventually becomes an argument my body has with my mind. At first the body is cooperative. Breath settles. Legs find their rhythm. The road moves underneath without requiring much negotiation. Then something changes. Heat. A hill. A bad mile. The ordinary accumulation of distance. The body begins making its case. Slow down. Walk. Turn…
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His Order
Hamburger. Ketchup only. Small fries. That was my baby brother’s order. There was a stretch when I was fourteen and he was eight that we spent nearly every day together. The teachers in our school system were on strike. Our parents still had to work, and he and our middle brother fought too much to…
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Mostly Home
There’s a spot in the world where the boot of Ohio presses into the soft underbelly of West Virginia. A place where the Ohio River makes its way west and, having never met the Mississippi, still thinks itself mighty. So much so, in fact, that every so often it tries to wipe the people and…
