The First Toilet I grew up in a house with four toilets—two upstairs, two down—but as a young girl, I cleaned only one. My sister and I took turns with the toilet we shared. My mother cleaned the …

In the final hours of daylight, he refuses to stop throwing his football against the chain-link fence. His arm aches from the relentless throwing, and the fence rattles as if the boy could drive a …

The big square pills or the small bullet pills make our old dog Sequoia thirsty. She laps up so much water I have to refill her bowl twice a day. I joke that she is doing much better than me—I am …

I understood my daughter would leave, at least in the abstract. I really did. I knew it was coming, and I prepared myself. I read all the blogs, and I knew enough to be ready to pick up a couple of …

It was the year that Atlanta police charged Wayne Williams with the murders of two black males, and my father announced he was going to be on TV. It was 1981; I was thirteen, a white kid, in a …

Winner of the 2012 Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, selected by Jenny Boully Saddlebacked       Two women. One has a pair of matching pocketbooks, slung over a forearm and clenched in a fist, and …

Everyone asks what it sounds like. It does and does not sound like a freight train; it rumbles, but the high notes of the rails are missing, the click and clatter and screech. It does and does not …

I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, on a narrow spit of land between two lakes. The actual word for this land formation is an isthmus, but no one who is not a crossword puzzle champion or a resident of …

I’ve got to talk fast if I’m going to get through this, through enough of the history behind all of this that maybe you’ll understand what this is about. I am doing the plank—a yoga position …

1969 Honda CL 125 Scrambler, maroon and chrome, an on-off road bike with a high exhaust and skid plates: my dad’s last motorcycle and my earliest memory. He took the helmetless kids on the block …

Two deer emerged out of the thick upper woods of my parents’ farm, a place my father and brother called the Slashing. For two weeks, I had waited for this moment. Since the cold opening morning of …

One boy, Nyson, was moon-faced and dull-eyed and never closed his mouth all the way, his slug of a tongue perpetually protruding. He arrived early to my classroom and lingered in a wistful, patient …