A Country Boy Can Surmise

The (Im)Perfect Word Writers are always looking for the perfect word, the perfect sentence. Put a bunch of writers together for a little while and you’ll most likely hear one of them declare “I love that word” in response to something someone has uttered. We are not normal (and don’t want to be); we actually discuss our favorite words. Mine is “gloaming”. A friend of mine prefers the word “Sabbath”. Another favors “diaphanous”. Writers are people who love words, plain and simple; that’s our craft, our job. Of course it is the sound that draws us in first. How can a person not appreciate a word like “diaphanous” if they say it aloud? So yes, we pronounce these words audibly, savoring them like fine chocolates on our tongues. We roll them around in our mouths, feel them taking flight from our lips. Yet it is more than that. We even love the way words look. Take another perfect word for an example: Appalachia. Not only is i...

Good dogs are everything that humans hope to be, but never have quite achieved yet.   When I think back on all my good dogs I had when I was a boy, I can't help getting a little bit sad. There was Arky, a little obese weiner dog my aunt in Arkansas gave me.  He thought he was a big, ferocious dog, and would bare his teeth to anyone who threatened me.  He sat right beside me when I propped my back against a tree to read a summer afternoon away.  There was Fala, a white spitz I named after FDR and Eleanor's trusty dog.  Every day Fala trotted out to Hoskins' Grocery where my bus let me off. Everyone on the school bus crowded to one side so they could see him sitting there patiently awaiting my arrival.  When the bus screeched to a halt there he'd wag his tail--three thumps on the ground behind him--then jump up to walk home with me.   Those were the two I had the longest, although there were others along the way.  I miss them every single one.   And now I have other dogs,...

Every morning the whole world gives us the opportunity to start our lives anew.  That's what I kept thinking as I drove the winding roads of Eastern Kentucky yesterday as the land came awake.  A thin mist breathed out over on the hills and hollers.  A white rind of moon in the struggling shadows of first daylight.  The sky burned purple and gray on the horizon.  I passed through Big Hill, Morrill, Clover Bottom, Sand Gap, Gray Hawk, Mummie, Elias, Traveller's Rest, Levi, and other little communities.  In each of these, the houses along the road were coming awake, too.  Yellow rectangles of light in the windows.  An occasional square of blue where a television flickered the morning news.   Best of all, the people stirred outside.   A woman sweeping her porch, her mind on something far, far away. Two women sitting on a bench outside the Little Angels Daycare Center, smoking and laughing. One of them threw her head back to cackle out; the other slapped her knee. A man stretching b...

1.  A homeplace, left to be devoured by the ironweed.  Once, someone lived there.   A family, maybe.  They had lives and loves and sorrows and most of all, they had their own stories.  In the cool of the day they'd sit on the porch and tell big tales and flies buzzed in the kitchen and the children ran down to the creek to play and a woman with weary eyes broke beans on the porch, so used to this work that her hands didn't even think about what they were doing.  One of the children--the last one--left when he was eighteen and looked back at the little house and remembered all the good and the bad and everything in between.  He had no idea that he'd never be back there, that he'd go off and forget who he was.  He had no idea that someday nobody would remember any of them and the house would sink down and down and down until it had been completely overtaken by the wildflowers, the weeds.  He had no idea that the only thing that kept the roof from taking flight was the gat...

An especially terrible headache is as big and endless and dark as the ocean, stretched tight across the globe, middled by black white-capping waves that chop at the horizon, a largeness and darkness like death.

The discovery blogs are temporarily on hold while Silas is briefly out of the country.  In the meantime, a reading from ELI THE GOOD...(double click to watch full-screen)

Once you stop dancing, you die a little.             I used to dance all the time.   In my early twenties, we were out at honkytonks every Saturday night.   I ran around with all of my cousins back then.   We never went anywhere without each other.   Even when we weren’t at a bar or a club, we’d find a way to dance. If we were in a restaurant that had a jukebox loaded down with good songs, we’d get up and dance.   Didn’t matter if there wasn’t a dance-floor.   We’d lean our heads back, close our eyes, and listen only to the music.   We danced on the lake bank, in our living rooms, on the wide front porches of our youth.               Once I settled down and had children, the only dancing I ever did was with a baby on my hip.   Some of my favorite memories are of dancing with my daughters.   I’d slow-dance them to sleep, drawing in that scent that can only be found at the nape of your daughter’s neck.   When they got older, I fast-danced with them.   We used to dance every single ni...