family

The Lovely Rain-Porch, or What happened to Wednesday?

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Somehow we lost Wednesday. It was Tuesday yesterday, but today proved to be Thursday. How do both of you lose a whole day of the week? I’ll tell you.

And maybe losing a day helped me understand how time really works.

***

Once a week, I try to go to my favorite coffeeshop in town, The Lively Iris. I pack up my computer, notebook, headphones, a book if I need it, and a bag of my tarot cards in case I need to do a reading.

Having a weekly cafe time gets me out of the house and into a cafe setting where I can guzzle a latte, scarf a pastry and a breakfast panini, listen to the classical/jazz/folk/easy rock mix in the atmosphere and the sounds of local people coming in and chatting with the staff. It’s a reminder of community for me, but also just a little hustle and bustle. In that hustle and bustle I can settle in to work sometimes. Other times, it is me chatting with staff and local people. Recently we have been talking about forming a writing group, and that’s exciting.

It was raining this morning, a lovely rain, as I drove to town. Outside my car windows lay the vast fields of this season’s unharvested giant marshmallow crop.

***

I live out in the forest with my partner about 15 minutes from town in northeast Tennessee. The houses get fewer, further between, and you get more forests and flood plains and the river. Soon, I’ll be approaching our driveway which is about 3/4 of a mile long through the forest. By the time you reach our place, you are deeply sequestered from most traces of city or people. You can see the occasional plane fly overhead. You can lose track of the world.

Which isn’t a bad thing, really, until you lose a Wednesday.

I don’t know if we had two Mondays or two Tuesdays this week, but I expected this to be Wednesday, and I went in to town to find my favorite coffeeshop and it was closed. At first, I thought someone had been sick, and I checked the posted Hours and, yeah, they’re only closed on Thursdays and Sundays, and I assured myself that this wasn’t Thursday.

But it was. I was wrong.

***

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Where is the Line?

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“Where is the line?” by Jerome Stueart, (11 x 15), watercolor, mixed media on paper, 1/27/2026.

This illustration comes after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by ICE agents, and after countless acts of violence and illegal arrest of citizens and non-citizens alike across the US. As an artist I don’t know how to respond to the violence happening now, but I appeal to those still supporting ICE.

Is there a line for you?

Asking for a country.

Family and Community in ZZ Claybourne’s “The Air in My House Tastes Like Sugar” (GigaNotoSaurus, March, 2020)

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Y’all, I read this awesome story, and I want to tell you about it. It’s about a mother and daughter who are witches, tired of having to move from town to town to hide their identities. They finally say, no, and decide to push back on all the rumors, fake stories, and prejudice so they can stay in community with the town. They’re happy there, to an extent, but negative rumors about witches and children and ovens are spreading in the city about them, so they have to take action. Mother takes her daughter into town to confront those rumors head on! And she is not someone to be messed with. Does she use witchcraft to get her way? She does not. She uses reason.

Along the way, she discovers a bigger secret hiding in the town, and must be the witch the town needs in order to survive.

I loved this story for many reasons.

Yes, it has a trope I love—family. I’m a sucker for brothers and sisters, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, any combo of family. So I’m already biased going in. Family for me comes with its own stakes already in place. In nearly every family story there is a question of “how do we keep the family unit intact?” How do we survive together? The characters are not just strangers, or friends, or a D&D Party (all good groups!), but have shared history together that an author can explore, and a familiarity with each other that can really aid a story. I think Zig Zag Claybourne uses all these positives to his favor in this story.

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