What happens here

This summer will take me to Texas and Oklahoma where I will research my family and all of the places they have lived in the last 150 years. Most of those years were spent on the land as tenant farmers. My great-grandmother, grew up all over Central Texas and the Texas South Plains. She died in Marlow, Oklahoma, where she is buried and no one visits her. I wonder what type of silk flowers I should get at the nearby Walmart or Dollar Tree. If there is something better I can bring her after so many years of neglect.

I do not have any pictures of her. No stories, save a few, and those have been proven faulty or downright wrong thanks to what little documentation I have of her: census records, marriages licenses, and birth and death certificates. If not for the children she had, I would know even less.

So, this woman I’ve never seen is taking me to Oklahoma, a state I’ve never much cottoned to. What’s more: I didn’t know what my grandfather, her son, looked like until I was in my twenties. I once wrote a poem inspired by a picture of him eating a melon. It was one of the first things I had published: “Paternal Grandfather” (along with another poem “Turbulent Earth”) in Chagrin River Review.

it has been a while since I’ve bothered to “blog.” This will be less a space for creation and more an accounting of how that work gets done. Research trips. Accountability. Maybe weekly. Maybe a few times a month. Maybe less. You are welcome here. I appreciate you.