“I’ve been having a lot of anxiety about death lately,” my friend Kate said. It was early September and she and I and some others were crammed into a red leather booth in a bar that had once been a gas station. It was still warm outside but i…

Howard Finster was fixing a bicycle in his Summerville, Georgia, workshop one day when a smudge of paint on his index finger took the shape of a face, a face that spoke to him and told him, “Paint sacred art.” Finster, then in his sixties, …

For a while after college, one of my husband Joe’s best friends worked at a used books–and-CDs store in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where we all grew up. It was called McKay but everyone called it McKay’s—a tiny but somehow crucial distinction…

My first shift at the candy store was on the first day of October, my last just before New Year’s, but when I talk about it now, what I say is, “Last Christmas, when I worked at the candy store.” In the world of candy stores, and this candy …

“Close your eyes,” the man told us, and we did. “If you died today, do you know for sure if you would go to heaven? If you don’t, raise your hand.” When my hand curled slowly into the air, two strangers rushed over to me, kneeling one on ei…

In early February 1996, an ice storm smothered my hometown with a blanket of deadly frost several inches thick. It was magnificent, sleek, and treacherous, the perfect surface for my eleven-year-old self to hurtle headlong on my mom’s Flexible Fl…

Margaret Mitchell was on her way to see a movie when she was struck by an off-duty cabbie driving too fast down Peachtree Street one night in Atlanta in 1949. Her death five days later cemented certain facts of her life, most notably that her first…

My family’s annual Christmas Eve tradition of ogling holiday lights was cemented as soon as my younger sister and I were big enough to peep out of the windows of our family’s Dodge Caravan. Sucking down hot chocolate and munching sugar cookies in…