We drove over five hundred miles to see the house where Mama was born.  “I’m sure someone else lives there by now,” Ainsley said.

“You’re an optimist, Sis,” I told her.  Mama and her parents abandoned the old place in the fifties, just walked away after the wreck. Even though it happened fifteen years before Ainsley was born (seventeen years before me), that wreck dominated the landscape of our childhood.

Granddaddy drove an Edsel in the days before they invented good taste. Mama said he loved that ugly old thing, but she and her brother thought the vertical grille looked like a sour faced aunt puckering up to kiss them the worst hello ever.… Read the rest