When I was growing up, people just showed up at your house.

I don’t remember anybody calling first. Half the time they couldn’t have called first because you were already on the telephone and there wasn’t another line.

You’d hear tires coming up the driveway, and somebody would look out the window and say, “Well, that’s so-and-so,” like this was a perfectly normal way for company to announce itself.

Mama might have her hair rolled up. Daddy might have a lawn mower torn apart in the yard. There might be clothes on the line and dishes in the sink.

Nobody cared.

You let them in.

If the house was a mess, you moved something out of a chair.

If you had coffee, you made coffee. If you didn’t, you probably had sweet tea.

And people stayed.

That’s the part I remember.

They stayed.

Nobody looked at a phone every four minutes. Nobody had anywhere terribly important to be. Grown people sat around the kitchen table talking about people I didn’t know, and we children were expected to disappear until somebody mentioned food.

Now, if somebody pulls into my driveway without warning, my first instinct is not hospitality.

It’s to turn the television down and see if they’ll go away.

I’m looking through the blinds with sweaty palms as if the sheriff himself is out there to arrest me.

Somewhere along the way, we became paranoid.

People can’t come over because we haven’t vacuumed. There’s laundry on the couch. The bathroom needs cleaning. The kitchen isn’t straight.

Heaven forbid it appear that people actually live in the home.

People did live there.

That was sort of the point.

I think we’ve confused visiting with entertaining.

Entertaining means you’re expecting people. You’ve cleaned the house and bought something to eat and probably lit a candle that smells like a baked good you have no intention of actually baking.

Visiting was different.

Visiting was somebody pulling up, coming in and sitting awhile.

I miss that.

I miss people who didn’t need an invitation and houses that didn’t need to be ready.

Although I should probably admit that if you’re reading this and thinking about showing up at mine, I haven’t completely overcome the modern world.

Call me first.

Not because I need to clean.

Because I have six different projects laid out, and I’d hate for anyone to get the impression that one day I might actually complete them.

And, in fact, I’m going to need enough time to put on a bra.

—Amanda Hargrove

SNAP stands for Snail Activator of PHLPP1.

I don’t know what PHLPP1 is, and I’m not fixing to learn before breakfast.

But apparently this little molecule may someday help donated organs last longer for transplant. They’re even talking about the possibility of putting astronauts into a hibernation-like state for really long trips through space.

Think about that.

We have spent billions of dollars trying to figure out how to send human beings farther into the universe, and the answer may have been crawling across somebody’s sidewalk at about three feet a week.

Apparently the snail’s approach to difficult circumstances is to shut everything down until conditions improve.

I’ve never related more strongly to an invertebrate.

If they ever approve this stuff for people, I don’t need to go to Mars. I would, however, like to be put under sometime around July 15 and brought back the first cool morning in October.

Maybe skip tax season too.

And the week before Christmas.

Come to think of it, I may need a prescription with refills.

The scientists are talking about organ transplants and space exploration, which I understand are considerably more important.

But if this research eventually proves that eating a little, moving slowly and sleeping through unpleasant circumstances extends your life, I know several us Southern ladies who are owed some back pay.

—Amanda Hargrove

https://www.ualberta.ca/en/news/news-releases-and-statements/news-releases/2026/07-jul/can-research-gleaned-from-a-hibernating-snail-save-a-human-heart.html

You lie still. You heal. You do what the doctors tell you, and you spend more time than you ever wanted thinking about what matters and what doesn’t.

And somewhere in all that quiet, you discover that not everyone who told you to keep writing was willing to wait while you fought your way back to the page.

That hurts.

Not because I expect anyone to carry me. I don’t.

But because when someone has been a mentor, a believer, and part of the reason you kept going, you assume they understand that sometimes the story has to stop for a while before the writer can begin again.

I’m back now.

Maybe a little slower. Maybe a little wiser.

And perhaps with a better understanding of the difference between someone who teaches you how to write and someone who truly believes you have a story worth finishing.

My daddy was a piddler.

I know this because his high school yearbook asked, “What is your ambition in life?”

He wrote:

“What ambition?”

That should’ve been warning enough.

I don’t get distracted.

I piddle.

There’s a difference.

A piddler can leave the house with one thing to do and cover half the county before supper.

We’re not lazy.

Our brains are busy.

Real busy.

We can cover more ground in a day than some folks cover in a month.

The trouble is, hardly any of it is billable.

I might step outside to put something in my car and notice the garbage can has blown over.

So I pick it up.

Then I remember the loose trash in the backyard.

So I take it around back and start picking up the trash.

Next thing I know, I’m cleaning a flowerbed, looking something up on my phone, contemplate taking down the pool, researching an old cemetery, and wondering why I came outside.

Daddy was the same way.

He could leave to check the meter at the barn, come back three hours later having sharpened the mower blades, inspected a tractor, moved a piece of valuable scrap from the North end to the South end of the barn, found something he wasn’t looking for, carved a set of praying hands out of a peach seed and accomplished everything but checking the fence.

That’s not laziness.

That’s piddling.

And piddling is hereditary.

The only real drawback is that nobody’s figured out how to make it pay.

If they ever do, I’ll be first in line.

Soon as I finish what I started yesterday.

Whatever that was.

The heat here doesn’t just surround you. It climbs on your back and goes wherever you go.

By nine in the morning, you can walk from the house to the car and come back looking like you’ve been doing yard work. Makeup has surrendered, your hair has made other plans, and whatever the deodorant promised on the label was apparently based on laboratory conditions.

Then there’s the humidity.

Humidity is just water that forgot how to fall.

People out West are forever proclaiming their “dry heat.”

Well, good for y’all.

Ours is wet. We get to experience boiling and drowning at the same time.

By August, nobody in North Mississippi is particularly attractive anymore. We’re just damp people trying not to touch one another.

Sunday morning may be the worst of it. You can leave the house looking perfectly respectable and lose most of your dignity crossing the church parking lot. By the time you reach the sanctuary, your clothes have attached themselves to places the Southern Baptist Convention never intended.

And somebody will still smile and ask, “Hot enough for you?”

No.

I was hoping the asphalt might soften enough to swallow my shoes.

Of course, you can’t complain about Mississippi heat around anybody old enough to remember 1980.

“This ain’t nothing.”

Then comes the story.

It was 117 in the shade. The ponds dried up. The corn gave up. Somewhere, somebody’s uncle fried an egg on the hood of a Chevrolet.

I have never met the uncle.

I have heard about that egg most of my life.

The funny thing is, we’ll spend all of August begging the Lord for cold weather. Then January comes, gets below freezing for two nights, and we start acting like Mississippi has been annexed by Alaska.

That’s just how we are.

But every year there comes one morning when you open the door and feel it.

Cool air.

Real cool air.

And suddenly coffee tastes better, porches make sense again, somebody starts talking about football, and everybody in Mississippi becomes pleasant for about three weeks.

Then somebody mentions frost.

And we commence complaining again.

I reckon contentment has never been one of our greatest talents.

But we can tell you a pretty good story about the weather.

—Amanda Hargrove

For whatever reason—boredom, curiosity, or just being a Southern child left unattended too long—most of us did at least one thing growing up that earned us a whooping.

Mine involved one of those old green permanent markers.

Not the kind they make now with the “low odor” label for civilized people.

I’m talking about the old-school kind that could’ve gotten the neighbors high if the wind was blowing right.

The Sanford’s Deluxe Edition!! That’s right!

The bad part is, I had to have been pretty young.

I can still remember what I wrote.

It started with a giant backwards G, followed by something that looked less like the alphabet and more like Greek symbols.

Apparently, I had no firm commitment to the English language yet.

And I didn’t just scribble one little mark and quit.

Oh no.

I was using that wall like a chalkboard.

In my mind, I was the teacher.

And class was in session.

My canvas just happened to be the north wall of our kitchen.

Now this was not some ordinary wall that could be painted over and forgotten.

It was made of intentionally unfinished cypress planks.

Beautiful cypress planks.

Every piece hand-cut by my father and grandfather.

So this wasn’t childish mischief.

This was me taking a green permanent marker to my daddy’s craftsmanship like I was preparing lesson plans.

And when I ran out of room at my eye level, I didn’t take that as a sign from the Lord to stop.

I dragged a dining room chair over to the wall, climbed up in it, and kept writing.

That tells you two things.

First, I was committed to education.

Second, I was absolutely unsupervised.

Now my brother was twelve at the time, which in those days made him the acting parent whether he wanted the promotion or not.

He was supposed to be babysitting me.

He did not write on the wall.

He may not have even known I had the marker.

Didn’t matter.

He took the hardest of the licks because, in a Southern household, being the oldest child on duty made you legally responsible for whatever idiotic thing your younger sibling dreamed up.

Kids today have washable markers.

We had permanent markers and permanent consequences.

Nobody sat me down to ask what I was trying to express.

Nobody praised my imagination.

Daddy took one look at that backwards G and those mysterious hieroglyphics stretched across his hand-cut cedar wall and knew exactly what I was expressing.

That if I was capable of teaching, then I was capable of learning a lesson.

Looking back, I still feel a little bad for my brother.

Because while I was apparently busy running a one-room schoolhouse on the kitchen wall, he was learning one of life’s hardest lessons:

Sometimes you don’t even have to commit the crime.

Sometimes all you have to do is be twelve years old and related to the criminal.

Every now and then a story finds you.

You don’t go looking for it. You don’t schedule time for it. You certainly don’t expect it to move into your house and refuse to leave.

It simply shows up.

For the last several months, I’ve been living in the spring of 1865.

My kitchen table has disappeared beneath old newspaper articles, military records, faded photographs, and more coffee cups than I’d care to admit. I’ve spent evenings following one footnote until two o’clock in the morning, only to wake up thinking about the same people all over again.

It all started with one question.

How does an event that forever changed thousands of American families simply… disappear?

The deeper I dug, the less interested I became in history itself.

I became interested in people.

The mother who waited.

The child who never understood why Daddy didn’t come home.

The preacher who buried strangers.

The merchant who quietly paid another family’s debt.

The ordinary people history almost forgot.

I’ve always believed the South tells its stories differently.

We don’t just remember what happened.

We remember who it happened to.

Maybe that’s why I can’t seem to leave this one alone.

There’s something about the Mississippi River that refuses to let certain stories die. It carried commerce, soldiers, hope, heartbreak, and generations of families. It has a long memory, even when we don’t.

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to take you with me.

Not to sell you anything.

Not to give you a history lesson.

Just to share the remarkable people I’ve been meeting along the way.

Some of them actually lived.

Some of them have lived only in my imagination.

By the time we’re finished, I hope you won’t remember dates nearly as much as you’ll remember names.

Because I’ve come to believe history isn’t really made of events. I’m grateful for the people who continue preserving the history of the Sultana and the lives connected to her story.

It’s made of ordinary people who woke up one morning having no idea they were about to become part of it.

The river remembers what it takes.

I’ve got a huffing problem.

I’ve had it my whole life.

Whenever something doesn’t go exactly the way I think it ought to, I suck in a breath and blow it right back out through my nose like a bull fixing to hook a fence post.

My daughters can tell how aggravated I am from the next room. They don’t even have to see me. They just listens for the huff.

It’s my body’s way of announcing to the world that I have become temporarily dissatisfied.

The trouble is, most of the things I huff about aren’t tragedies.

They’re blessings wearing work clothes.

Let me demonstrate.

When my air conditioner can’t quite keep up and it’s 102 degrees outside…

When Walmart delivers my groceries to the wrong house…

When my phone keeps informing me that my storage is full.

And then there’s the swimming pool.

Every fall I grumble because I’ve got to take it down, huffing the entire time because it’s not one of those fancy in-ground pools.

Overwhelmed by first World problems is understatement.

And God forbid I have to stop and put gas in my car.

I literally growl when I see that light come on.

But the one that finally caught me was three o’clock.

Every weekday, somewhere around 2:45, I have to stop working.

I have to save what I’m writing.

Brush my hair.

Find my shoes.

Get in the car.

Drive to school.

And wait in that pickup line.

It occurred to me the other day that I was actually complaining about having to interrupt my work-from-home job to go pick up my little girl from school.

What an astonishing thing to complain about.

There was a time in my life when I’d have given anything to work from home.

There are mothers tonight who would give anything to have a little girl waiting on them in a school pickup line.

There are parents who would gladly trade places with me just to hear one more “Mama!” as a backpack comes bouncing toward the car.

And here I was… huffing because I had to put on a clean shirt.

I reckon gratitude isn’t born when life gets easier.

It’s born when we finally recognize what we’ve been handed.

The quickest way to become ungrateful is to get used to being blessed.

So tomorrow, if my Wi-Fi is slow, my air conditioner runs all afternoon, Walmart delivers my groceries to the wrong house, my phone tells me it’s out of storage again, every warning light on my dashboard is glowing, and I have to stop and put gas in my car…

I’ll try to remember those are the kinds of problems my grandparents would’ve called miracles.

And if I have to stop working at three o’clock to go pick up my daughter…

I pray I never again mistake one of the greatest blessings of my life for an inconvenience.

That’ll change a person.

One thing I’ve learned is we spend an awful lot of time arguing about what happens after we die…

…to the body.

Should you be embalmed?

Should you not?

Should you be cremated?

Should you be water cremated?

Should your ashes be scattered over the Gulf?

Buried beneath an oak tree?

Turned into a diamond?

Divided among the children?

Or tucked into one of those biodegradable burlap sacks so you can spend eternity fertilizing a maple tree.

I don’t know much.

But I feel pretty confident the fellow inside the box isn’t nearly as concerned about it as the people standing around it.

Now don’t misunderstand me.

The funeral business is a fine profession.

I’ve met funeral directors who are among the kindest people I’ve ever known.

But I’ll tell you one thing.

It’s also a fairly lucrative business.

Where else can you walk into a place of business, offer them an arm and a leg…

…and they laugh?

I found it ironic that the whole point of the process is getting you six feet under…

…yet the price seems sky high.

Thank the Good Lord the cost of eternity has already been paid.

Because the cost of interment certainly hasn’t.

I’ve restored enough headstones to know one thing.

Dead people are the easiest customers I’ve ever had.

They’ve never once complained about the monument.

Never argued over granite colors.

Never questioned the invoice.

It’s always the living.

Truth is, we humans have a remarkable ability to complicate everything.

God gave us life.

We turned it into paperwork.

God gave us death.

We turned it into a catalog.

Sometimes I wonder what my granddaddy would’ve said if someone told him they wanted to be composted.

He probably would’ve taken a long pause along with big gulp of sweet tea and said,

“I reckon we have called that a garden my whole life.”

Truth be told, I don’t much care what someone chooses.

Vault.

No vault.

Embalmed.

Not embalmed.

Fire cremation.

Water cremation.

Tree.

Ocean.

Urn.

Coffee can.

That’s between them, their family, and the Good Lord.

Because after spending thousands of hours in Mississippi cemeteries, I’ve learned something.

The part that mattered…

Already left.

The rest is simply how we choose to say goodbye.

And I’ve never walked through a cemetery where love was measured by the casket.

I’ve never seen a headstone that told me whether somebody was embalmed.

I have seen plenty that told me they were loved.

I grew up in Myrtle, Mississippi.

We didn’t have four-wheelers.

We didn’t have video games.

Cable?

Are you kidding me?

We had one of those giant metal antennas bolted to the side of the house. Depending on the weather, somebody had to go outside and turn it while another person hollered through the screen door…

“That’s it!”

“Nope… you just lost Channel 3!”

“Go back a little!”

If the wind changed directions, so did the evening news.

On a good day, we got three channels.

On a bad day, we got snow.

But we did have one thing.

A wheelbarrow.

Apparently, that was enough entertainment to raise an entire childhood.

We cut ruts in the yard deep enough that summer for daddy to plant corn.

Looking back, I’m not sure what amazes me more, the fact that my mother let my brother push me all over the yard in that thing… or that I’m still here to tell about it.

Nowadays, I reckon a child would need a DOT-approved helmet, elbow pads, knee pads, a parental waiver, and three adults with CPR certification just to ride in a wheelbarrow across the backyard.

Back then?

Mama just hollered, “Don’t dump your sister” followed by a brief demonstration.

That was the entire safety briefing.

Judging by one of these pictures, my brother either didn’t hear her or considered it more of a suggestion.

The funny thing is, I don’t remember ever saying I was bored.

Not once.

A wheelbarrow.

A hill.

A brother with questionable judgment.

That was our version of Disney World.

The older I get, the more I realize we weren’t poor.

We were rich in imagination.

Nowadays, children have every screen known to mankind, and somehow they’re still looking for something to do.

We had one wheelbarrow…

…and enough adventures to last a lifetime.

Maybe that’s why I still love old photographs.

They remind me that in 80’s happiness never required much.

Just somebody willing to push…

…and somebody dumb enough to climb in.

I don’t.

I introduce people.

Sometimes they just happen to be a hundred and sixty years late.

I spend enough time in old cemeteries that my family has quit asking where I am. If I’m not home, they assume I’m somewhere in Mississippi talking to dead people with a pressure washer in one hand and a tube of stone epoxy in the other.

Truth be told, the dead are easier to get along with than most folks still paying taxes.

A while back, a man from Florida called me.

He’d never lived in Mississippi.

His daddy hadn’t either.

Neither had his granddaddy.

But somewhere up his family tree was a fellow named Bushrod Washington Gober who came here before the Civil War, married a girl named Irene, raised a little family, and got himself shot to death in 1863.

The caller wanted to know if I could restore Bushrod’s headstone.

I told him I’d go have a look.

Now, I’ve learned something about old cemeteries.

They don’t give up their stories all at once.

You have to earn them.

Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church sits on a hill in Union County that has seen just about everything Mississippi has had to throw at it. War came through there. Raiders came through there. Time came through there. Then in 1920, an F4 tornado came through there and finished what everybody else had started.

It didn’t just knock over headstones.

It picked them up like they were playing cards.

Marble that had stood through sixty years of weather suddenly weighed no more than a paper plate.

When the wind finally moved on, husbands weren’t beside wives anymore.

Children weren’t beside parents.

Pieces of people were scattered all over that hillside.

Bushrod was one of them.

When I found what was left of his monument, it looked less like a headstone than a jigsaw puzzle nobody expected anybody to finish.

So I cleaned it.

Piece by piece.

Crack by crack.

The funny thing about restoring marble is that somewhere along the way, you quit seeing stone.

You start seeing people.

I wondered if Irene stood right there crying.

I wondered who carried Bushrod up that hill.

I wondered whether those little boys understood why Daddy wasn’t coming home.

You ask yourself things like that when you work alone.

Then something happened I wasn’t expecting.

A few feet away, under a pile of broken stone that everybody had walked past for years…

…was a little girl.

Not really, of course.

Just her headstone.

Her name was Mary.

Bushrod’s daughter.

She’d died before her father did.

Nobody had mentioned her.

The gentleman from Florida didn’t know she was there.

I didn’t know she was there.

For all I know, nobody living did.

I brushed away the dirt until I could read her name.

Then I did what I had come to do.

I carried her home too.

When both stones were finished, I called the family.

They drove all the way from Florida.

I met them at the church and probably grinned bigger than I should have.

“I’ve got something I want you to see.”

We walked across that old cemetery without saying much.

Some places make conversation seem disrespectful.

When we reached the hill, there they stood.

Bushrod.

Little Mary.

Together.

White again.

Whole again.

Standing side by side for the first time since that tornado ripped them apart more than a century earlier.

The gentleman didn’t say much.

Neither did I.

Turns out joy doesn’t always have much to say.

Before he left, he placed a Confederate Iron Cross beside Bushrod’s grave.

I watched him kneel there between a father he’d never met and a little girl he never knew existed.

That’s when it hit me.

People think history disappears.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes it just falls over.

Sometimes it gets covered by weeds.

Sometimes it breaks into twenty pieces and waits a hundred years for somebody willing to kneel in the dirt and put it back together.

I still restore headstones for a living.

But every now and then, if the Lord is feeling especially generous…

He lets me reunite a family.

My grandmother, Rosa Lee Spencer Hargrove, was born during the Great Depression.

She practically raised her younger twin brothers. There was another brother somewhere in the mix too, but I don’t think he was entirely her responsibility.

My granddaddy cut lumber and worked with wood for a living. They never had much money. Looking back, I don’t reckon we were fancy enough to be sharecroppers.

My daddy and his sister learned to sit up as baby’s by being propped in the neck of a mule collar in the cotton field.

However,  Rosa Lee was queen of making  a little feel like plenty.

Every Sunday after church, she’d cook enough food to feed half the Methodist congregation if they happened to stop by.

Fried chicken.

Green beans.

Mashed potatoes.

Biscuits.

Pie. With a meringue to the sky.

All from one little kitchen with one sink.

Here’s what has bothered me for years.

There was never a dirty kitchen.

Never.

Not a sink stacked with dishes.

Not flour covering the countertops.

Not measuring cups soaking in greasy water.

Her apron stayed clean.

The countertops stayed clean.

Everything stayed clean.

Meanwhile, I can heat up a can of soup and my kitchen looks like the Health Department ought to condemn it.

Then again…

Maybe Rosa Lee had an advantage.

She only had one eye.

Eye cancer claimed the other the year I was born.

Oddly enough, I never thought much about it.

She was just Grandmother.

In fact, it wasn’t until nearly ten years after she died, while cleaning out their house after Granddaddy passed away, that I opened the top dresser drawer and found her glass eye.

I just stood there.

Somehow I’d spent my entire childhood with a one-eyed grandmother and had completely forgotten she only had one eye.

That tells you something about children.

We don’t see what adults see.

We see love.

By the time the nineties rolled around and I was getting off the school bus at her house, everybody else seemed fascinated with microwaves.

Not Rosa Lee.

She’d put a hot dog in a pot of boiling water.

Then she’d toast two slices of bread, butter one side, spread mayonnaise on the other, and lay that hot dog right in the middle.

I’ve eaten hot dogs all over this country.

None of them have ever tasted that good.

Then there were the tomatoes.

Every grandchild in our family learned to eat tomatoes because of Rosa Lee.

She’d slice one fresh from the garden and hand us what we thought was the salt shaker.

“Salt it like the big folks,” she’d say.

Only she had switched the sugar and salt.

By the time we figured out we’d been tricked, we already loved tomatoes.

She never forced us to eat vegetables.

She simply outsmarted us.

Now here’s another thing.

My granddaddy couldn’t hear much of anything.

My grandmother had one eye.

They never came to my ballgames.

Never came to graduations.

Never came to school programs.

Hardly ever went anywhere at night.

And not once—not one single time—did I ever think they should.

I never felt cheated.

I never wondered if they loved me.

I guess, even as a child, I figured they had more sense than the rest of us.

Why would two elderly people venture out on a cold, rainy Mississippi night, fighting traffic and germs, just to sit on a hard bleacher for an hour?

They’d already earned the right to stay home.

And somehow…

I knew exactly where they’d be.

The porch light would be on.

Supper would be waiting.

Granddaddy would have long been in bed.

Grandmother would be in that spotless kitchen.

Looking back, I think we’ve convinced ourselves that love is measured by attendance.

Rosa Lee taught me something different.

Love isn’t always sitting in the bleachers.

Sometimes it’s making sure there was a stick of gum in her purse during church.  I can still smell her purse to this day.

Sometimes it’s a boiled hot dog on toasted bread.

Sometimes it’s sugar in the salt shaker.

Sometimes it’s a kitchen so clean you still can’t explain it forty years later.

I’ve restored enough old headstones to know history remembers important people.

My history remembers a woman with one eye…

…who somehow saw exactly what her grandchildren needed.

And if I’m being honest, I still don’t know how she cooked Sunday dinner for an army, kept that apron spotless, washed every dish, and loved all of us so completely.

Maybe that’s because some things aren’t meant to be explained.

They are meant to be remembered.

Outside the Bible, I don’t know of a better place to learn history.

As it turns out, I don’t know of a better place to learn about life either.

For years, I judged complete strangers.

Dead strangers.

Not by the size of their monument.

Not by the epitaph.

Not by whether they fought in a war or taught Sunday school.

I judged them by the flowers.

Fresh flowers?

“Well now… somebody sure loved them.”

No flowers?

“Bless their heart… I guess nobody comes anymore.”

Imagine that.

There I stood making up entire family histories over two faded Dollar General carnations… sitting in a granite vase my own family may have sold.

The irony is, I hated fooling with those flowers.

Every time I’d pull one out to clean a headstone, something with eight legs, six legs, or wings would come charging out of that arrangement like I’d just interrupted a family reunion.

Truth be told, I agreed with most cemetery groundskeepers.

Flowers are overrated.

Yet somehow I’d made them my measuring stick for love.

Then one day, the cemetery corrected me.

My daddy would’ve thought I’d lost my mind if I’d brought him flowers while he was alive.

He’d have preferred a Camel non-filter and a light.

What if those children moved away?

What if there weren’t any children?

What if standing in front of that headstone still hurts too much?

And then I thought about old Aunt Betty.

The one who criticized everything while she was alive.

What makes you think she wouldn’t criticize any arrangement you might bring her dead.

That doesn’t make Aunt Betty a bad person.

It just means flowers may have never been how she measured love.

Maybe that’s been my mistake all along.

Maybe we Southerners don’t really know how to love people after they’re gone.

Not because we’ve stopped loving them.

Because everything we know about loving somebody requires them to still be here.

Down here, we don’t just say, “I’m thinking about you.”

We fry chicken.

We carry casseroles.

We sit all night in hospital waiting rooms.

We pray with people, not just for them.

We show up.

That’s how Southern people love.

It’s mighty hard to feed a dead person.

So maybe flowers are simply our awkward way of saying,

“I’d still be bringing you supper if I could.”

That changed everything.

Now I don’t judge the graves with flowers.

And I don’t judge the ones without them.

Because flowers don’t measure love.

Love isn’t always a bouquet.

Sometimes it’s a son who still can’t walk through the cemetery gate.

Sometimes it’s a daughter who still reaches for the phone to call her mama.

Sometimes it’s somebody who carries a person in their heart every single day and simply can’t bear to stand in front of their name carved in stone.

I’ve learned the greatest history lessons are carved into granite.

The greatest life lessons…

are learned by the fool standing in front of it.

As the summer of 2026 comes to an end I can emphatically say, children don’t know how to be bored anymore.

Truth be told, I don’t think adults do either.

The other day I found myself sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, and before I knew it, I’d reached for my phone before I’d even sat down. I hadn’t received a text. I wasn’t expecting an email. I wasn’t checking the weather. Apparently my thumb now believes it’s employed by Apple.

Twenty minutes later I’d watched a man catch a catfish with his bare hands, learned three facts about ancient Rome I’ll never use, and seen a woman make lasagna in a crockpot.

What I hadn’t done was think.

That used to happen in waiting rooms.

When I was growing up, a waiting room wasn’t something to survive. It was where your mind wandered off without you. You’d notice the squeaky ceiling fan. You’d wonder why doctors always had the same deer hunting magazines from 1987. You’d invent stories about the fellow asleep in the corner.

By the time the nurse finally called your name, you’d mentally solved world peace, figured out how to rebuild a carburetor, and decided your neighbor really did need to quit parking in your mama’s yard.

Now we just scroll.

We’ve become a nation that’s terrified of thirty seconds of silence.

Pull up to a red light.

Phone.

Stand in line at Dollar General.

Phone.

Sit in the pickup while your husband runs into Tractor Supply.

Phone.

Lord help us if the microwave has forty-five seconds left. We act like we’ve been handed unexpected vacation time.

Some of my best childhood memories came from having absolutely nothing to do.

We’d lie flat on the hood of an old car and decide which clouds looked like rabbits.

We’d ride bicycles until somebody’s mama hollered loud enough to echo across three pastures.

We’d throw rocks into a pond simply to see who could make the biggest splash.

Nobody called it mindfulness.

We called it Tuesday.

During the summer my daddy could sit on the front porch for an hour and never once say he was bored. He’d watch a thunderstorm roll across a soybean field like it was the greatest show on television.  In the winter he would sit in front of a wood burning stove and stare til the embers no longer glowed.

Back then, entertainment didn’t arrive through Wi-Fi.

It came with lightning bugs, screen doors, rain on a tin roof, and neighbors who never knocked because they were already halfway inside the house.

Looking back, I think boredom did something we’ve forgotten how to do.

It introduced us to ourselves.

That’s where imagination lived.

That’s where prayers started.

That’s where ideas showed up uninvited.

You can’t hear your own thoughts when you’re constantly listening to everybody else’s.

I’m as guilty as anyone. I catch myself checking my phone while waiting on the coffee pot to finish brewing. Evidently I can’t spend three uninterrupted minutes alone with my own brain.

That’s a shame.

Because somewhere between front porches and Facebook, we’ve lost the simple pleasure of watching the rain without feeling obligated to post a picture of it.

Maybe boredom never needed fixing.

Maybe it was quietly fixing us.

It taught patience before patience became a self-help book.

It taught contentment before somebody tried to sell it as a podcast.

It taught us that not every empty moment has to be filled.

The South has always understood something the rest of the world is just beginning to rediscover.

Sometimes the sweetest part of the day is doing absolutely nothing… while watching everything.

And if you don’t believe me, put your phone down this evening.

Go sit on the porch.

Watch the sun disappear behind the trees.

You might be surprised.

The person you’ve been too busy to visit…

…is yourself.

He had proudly served our country in Vietnam before losing his battle with brain cancer in 1991. As she talked about him, she pointed out the veteran’s plaque she had ordered years before. Even after all that time, you could still hear the admiration in her voice.

Then she quietly pointed to another headstone.

“Would you mind doing that one too?”

It sat just to the west of theirs.

The inscription read:

Stacie Pannell
1985

Before I thought, I spoke.

“Oh, Mrs. Judy… your daughter. She was murdered.”

She nodded.

No anger.

No bitterness.

Just the quiet ache of a mother who had carried the unimaginable for decades.

“Yes,” she said softly. “Stacie was beautiful. She had just started her freshman year at Northeast. She loved the Tiger Band. She was so smart… and she was happy.”

Then she stopped.

She never mentioned the woman who murdered her daughter.

Not once.

She simply turned and slowly walked back toward her car.

After Mrs. Judy drove away, I stood beside Stacie’s weathered marker and did what most of us do these days.

I pulled out my phone.

Like so many who attended Northeast, I knew the story. It had become part of the college’s history. I searched for it again, expecting to find information about the case.

Instead, I found page after page about the murderer.

Appeals.

Interviews.

Television specials.

Articles.

The woman who stole Stacie’s life had somehow continued to receive the larger platform.

Standing there that afternoon, I realized something that has stayed with me ever since.

For all the attention given to the crime, there seemed to be so little devoted to the young woman whose life had been taken.

Before I left that day, I stopped Mrs. Judy and asked, “Would you mind if I wrote about Stacie?”

She looked at me with tears in her eyes and quietly said,

“Please do. I don’t want anybody to forget my Stacie.”

I’ve never forgotten those words.

Murder stole Stacie’s future. Time should never steal her memory.

I’ve restored enough headstones to learn one thing.

Granite can weather.

Bronze can tarnish.

Even names can fade.

But only if we let them.

I’ve spent all the words I’m willing to spend on the person who stole Stacie’s future.

From this day forward…

I’d rather spend them remembering the young woman who should’ve been allowed to live it.

Now before anybody starts throwing red Solo cups at me, let me explain.

I grew up Mississippi enough to know every back road between Myrtle and Oxford.

But LSU has taught me many things.

The most expensive being Creative Writing.

The football addiction came free and has been life long.

Now, the weekend LSU rolls into Oxford somewhere around the Lafayette County line, common sense will politely pull over and let tailgating take the wheel.

By the time half those folks hit I-55, they’ll already have enough jambalaya, bourbon, and purple beads to start their own Mardi Gras parade.

Getting into Oxford on football weekend is like trying to pour a gallon of syrup through a coffee straw.

It’ll eventually happen.

but nobody’s gonna enjoy the process.

I scoped out the route yesterday.

From the Lafayette County line to the Grove, I couldn’t find a straight road if somebody paid me.

Mayor Tannehill has apparently decided the answer to every traffic problem is another roundabout.

I counted somewhere between twelve and seven hundred fifty-eleven.

I lost count after the third circle.

By the Monday morning after the game, there’ll be more insurance claims involving Prevost buses, Newmar coaches, Tiffin motorhomes, and fifth wheels than there are Ole Miss touchdowns.

Bless those GPS voices.

Even Siri finally throws up her hands and says,

“Y’all just figure it out.”

Now I will say this…

If New Albany ever wants a few of those roundabouts, I’d gladly take two.

Not twelve.

Just enough to keep folks from treating Bankhead Street like Talladega and get rid of the blessed triple red light at Walmart.

As for me…

I live twenty-eight miles from the stadium.

My neighbors are renting their homes left and right for $750/night.

At this point. I say, leave Kiffen in Baton Rouge and bring in Kim Mulky.

At least she knows when to quit going in circles😉

I refuse to be amongst the chaos. But I may park at the light department on Molly Barr and listen to the game and watch the road.

Because if you’ve never watched somebody pull a forty-five-foot motorhome while towing a Suburban…

…through an Oxford roundabout…

…you’ve never truly appreciated prayer.

Simple pearls.

High heels a shade darker than my hemline.

Lipstick to check the mail.

Mama raised a Southern lady.

Unfortunately, my brain showed up dressed as Huck Finn.

I know exactly how a Southern woman is supposed to act.

You write thank-you notes.

You don’t show up empty-handed.

You return casserole dishes.

You don’t interrupt people.

Then there’s me.

I interrupt myself.

I still believe Southerners were the last people in America to surrender to cell phones.

Not because we didn’t want them.

Because we didn’t need one more thing to keep up with…

Or another accessory we couldn’t monogram.

The more advanced technology became, the less advanced my brain felt.

This is no new onset.

The first time that Nokia rang unexpectedly, my blood pressure would spike so fast I’d start seeing flashes of light.

Now we’ve gotten so technologically advanced that we plug in an Apple every night and wake up to a newer one every morning.

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to remember the password to the last one.

My phone has calendars, reminders, alarms, notes, voice memos, grocery lists, maps, passwords, and seventeen apps I’m terrified to delete because I don’t remember what they do.

My granddaddy carried one pocketknife his entire life.

I carry a thousand thoughts in my pocket and can’t find a single one when I need it.

I’ll open my Notes app to write down something important, and thirty minutes later I’ve researched whether dragonflies migrate, ordered dog food we probably didn’t need, looked up cemetery maps from 1887, and somehow ended up watching a woman survive alone in Utah inside a camper the size of a dog box that’s cleaner than my living room.

The note?

Gone.

People think my brain is scattered.

It’s not.

My brain’s like a junk drawer. Everything I need is in there somewhere.

I just have to move three extension cords, a ketchup packet from 2019, and a screwdriver to find it.

That process repeats several times until I find a phone charger with proper fittings.

The older I get, the less I apologize for it.

Because that same brain that loses my car keys notices a forgotten headstone nobody else sees.

It remembers family lineages long after everyone else has forgotten them.

It finds a two-hundred-year-old little girl buried beneath a pile of broken marble.

It sees stories where other folks just see rocks.

Maybe God never intended for me to think in straight lines.

Maybe He just wanted me to notice what everybody else walked past.

Now, my grandmother would’ve looked me square in the eye and said,

“Amanda, an excuse all dressed up is still an excuse.”

She wasn’t wrong.

But let’s be fair…

My grandmother never had to pull onto Highway 15 at five o’clock on a Friday with three young’uns in the backseat, passing chicken over her shoulder, hollering, “Don’t make me pull this car over,” while Siri kept interrupting to announce she’d found a faster route.

Truth be told…

I’m still trying to figure out whether I’m a Southern lady…

…or just Huck Finn wearing pearls

I’ve spent thousands of hours restoring headstones across Mississippi, and somewhere between the lichen, the marble, the fire ants, and the occasional snake with an attitude, I discovered something.

Outside the Bible, I don’t know of a better place to learn history.

As it turns out, I don’t know of a better place to learn about life either.

For years, I judged complete strangers.

Dead strangers.

Not by the size of their monument.

Not by the epitaph.

Not by whether they fought in a war or taught Sunday school.

I judged them by the flowers.

Fresh flowers?

“Well now… somebody sure loved them.”

No flowers?

“Bless their heart… I guess nobody comes anymore.”

Imagine that.

There I stood making up entire family histories over two faded Dollar General carnations… sitting in a granite vase my own family may have sold.

The irony is, I hated fooling with those flowers.

Every time I’d pull one out to clean a headstone, something with eight legs, six legs, or wings would come charging out of that arrangement like I’d just interrupted a family reunion.

Truth be told, I agreed with most cemetery groundskeepers.

Flowers are overrated.

Yet somehow I’d made them my measuring stick for love.

Then one day, the cemetery corrected me.

My daddy would’ve thought I’d lost my mind if I’d brought him flowers while he was alive.

He’d have preferred a Camel non-filter and a light.

What if those children moved away?

What if there weren’t any children?

What if standing in front of that headstone still hurts too much?

And then I thought about old Aunt Betty.

The one who criticized everything while she was alive.

What makes you think she wouldn’t criticize any arrangement you might bring her dead.

That doesn’t make Aunt Betty a bad person.

It just means flowers may have never been how she measured love.

Maybe that’s been my mistake all along.

Maybe we Southerners don’t really know how to love people after they’re gone.

Not because we’ve stopped loving them.

Because everything we know about loving somebody requires them to still be here.

Down here, we don’t just say, “I’m thinking about you.”

We fry chicken.

We carry casseroles.

We sit all night in hospital waiting rooms.

We pray with people, not just for them.

We show up.

That’s how Southern people love.

It’s mighty hard to feed a dead person.

So maybe flowers are simply our awkward way of saying,

“I’d still be bringing you supper if I could.”

That changed everything.

Now I don’t judge the graves with flowers.

And I don’t judge the ones without them.

Because flowers don’t measure love.

Love isn’t always a bouquet.

Sometimes it’s a son who still can’t walk through the cemetery gate.

Sometimes it’s a daughter who still reaches for the phone to call her mama.

Sometimes it’s somebody who carries a person in their heart every single day and simply can’t bear to stand in front of their name carved in stone.

I’ve learned the greatest history lessons are carved into granite.

The greatest life lessons…

are learned by the fool standing in front of it.

Mississippians are some of the kindest people you’ll ever meet.

They’d never dream of interrupting a woman working alone in a cemetery.

They’ll just call the sheriff and let him check on her.

I’ve learned this from experience.

If you’re looking for peace and quiet, I highly recommend a cemetery.

Nobody bothers you.

Nobody drops by to chat.

Nobody asks if you’ve “got a minute.”

Matter of fact, people would rather drive ten miles out of their way than pull through a cemetery gate to see if you’re okay.

Calling 911 is apparently much less awkward.

Southern people would rather explain to a deputy why they called than explain to a woman why they stopped.”

One afternoon I was restoring a headstone in a little country cemetery.

It was 103 degrees.

I had on blue jeans, long sleeves, boots up to my knees, gloves, and a hat big enough to shade a mule.

Beside me sat a pressure washer, two thirty-gallon barrels of water, a shovel, and a shotgun slung over my shoulder.

Now before you get excited, spend one afternoon alone in a rural cemetery with a dog the size of a yearling calf that thinks his family owns the place, and you’ll understand the shotgun.

The deputy pulled through the gate, got out, looked me over, looked at the shotgun, looked back at me, and finally asked,

“Ma’am… are you alright?”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

He said, “We got a welfare check called in.”

I looked around.

“For me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Heck sir, I’m the only one out here that’s still alive.”

He couldn’t help but laugh.

“So… nobody wanted to stop and ask?”

“No, ma’am.”

I pointed toward the pressure washer.

“I’m just cleaning a headstone. I promise I’m not hunting ghost officer.”

He nodded.

Then he pointed toward the water barrels.

“What’s all that water for?”

I said, “Believe it or not, Officer, cemeteries aren’t exactly known for plumbing.”

He chuckled.

I’m still pretty sure he drove away convinced I was one biscuit short of a church supper.

Then there was Memphis. The city limits of Memphis.

I’d spent all day in a cemetery and looked like I’d personally tried to break up a fight between red clay and July.

I pulled up on a traffic accident, and an officer walked over to my little by all appearances clean white 10year old BMW.

He looked inside and not only found my disheveled, overheated, soaking wet self but a pressure washer…

A shovel…

Empty water barrels…

And a loaded shotgun lying across my lap.

It was the last thing to go in. Where else was I supposed to put it.

All of the above mentioned was covered in dirt and mud might I add.

He never asked for my driver’s license.

Never asked for my insurance.

Never even asked about the shotgun.

He simply looked at me and said,

“You say you’re headed to Myrtle. That road behind you to the right will take you straight to Highway 78. It’ll get you home quicker.”

I guess he figured if I was crazy, the best thing to do was point me toward Mississippi.

People ask me all the time if I’m scared to work in cemeteries alone.

Honestly?

The dead have never bothered me.

It’s the living that’ll go behind your back and send the sheriff