Can you smell it? That scent that carries you back to summertime. The one you can ride to that place, those scenes, even at the faintest whiff. Dappled memory, committed to the flesh. How grass and weeds and wildflowers become so sweet, I couldn’t tell you. But that’s the scent that catches me still—and assured me, each June, “you’ve arrived.”
Those are the opening words of a just-published essay I penned for The Bitter Southerner. It’s in print in their gorgeous spring issue (with Gillian Welch on the cover no less!), and you can find it online here.
The essay is about a magical, weird, fraught place—the Monteagle Assembly—where my family roots run five generations deep. Any time one of your favorite publications asks you to write something, the answer is yes, yes, one thousand times yes. But this was a particularly poignant invitation to remember, grapple, and imagine other possibilities.
As a city kid, Assembly summers gave me space to stretch into a summertime self—parts of me that felt different, bigger, unbound. But as I got older and my politics sharpened, I began to see the place, and the history around it, with thickening complexity. The freedom I’d relished as a child felt less and less free.
Many of us are grappling with questions like these, arising from our own contexts and experiences: How do we honor the beautiful inheritances of our ancestors, without giving tacit permission for all the rest? Can we tend the wounds honestly and still claim the good? How might we “neighbor” as a fumbling verb?
If you read the essay—and I hope you will—please drop a comment or send me a note. I’d love to hear what you think.
If you’re in/near the Twin Cities, Atlanta, NYC, Bedford, Boulder, Portland, OR, Asheville, or the wilds of the internet, I’d also love to see you at an upcoming Climate Wayfinding book tour stop. We’re a dozen events in, and they’ve been full of heart and community, both so needed right now.
Sending y’all Sunday love,
P.S. It was Independent Bookstore Day this weekend. If you haven’t preordered a copy of Climate Wayfinding yet, might I suggest you call your favorite indie and do just that? You’d make a bookseller’s day and mine too. Preorders = love 💛📖✨
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