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There’s no getting around it this time. A couple of years ago, when COVID knocked me flat, I suspected there might be lingering effects. For example, most mornings I now wake up sounding like I’ve spent forty years chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes behind a truck stop. I bark, wheeze, and cough with such enthusiasm that the neighborhood wildlife probably assumes an elderly seal has taken up residence on the ridge. And the coughing doesn’t politely stick

Here’s a word for us: aphorism. Well, technically that’s not quite right, but stay with me for a moment. It’s the idea captured in one of those tidy little sayings about life—the kind that feels simple until it suddenly hits you square between the eyes. You know the one: the routine of everyday life feels endless, but the accumulation of those days—the years—somehow feels shockingly short. Monday stretches out like a long country road. Tuesday

There has been a great deal of grief in my life lately—some of it my own, and much of it carried by people I love. Because of my professional background, there is often an unspoken expectation that I should somehow know how to guide these conversations. That I should be able to “social work” my way through them—offering comfort, wisdom, or at least some kind of reasonable roadmap for surviving the pain. But the truth

We bought Two Rocker Ridge in the dead of winter, which meant our first real introduction to the foothills didn’t arrive until spring. And by “spring,” I mean the strange Appalachian preview event known locally as False Spring, which is sort of meteorological practical joke that arrives sometime in early March. The locals explained it to us with the kind of calm, knowing tone usually reserved for warnings about flash floods, black bears, or relatives

The minute we were finally able to get off the ridge again, we did what any sensible folks would do: we pointed the car west and declared it a road trip. Texas, no less. Land of cowboy legends, rolling hills of bluebonnets, and cattle with horns so wide they require their own zip codes. Neither of us had been through Texas in years, and we were primed for cinematic grandeur—dusty sunsets, grazing herds, maybe a