Endings come suddenly when you don’t let yourself think about them.

This year has given us all unexpected conclusions. How many lasts came and went without our knowing? And how many lasts slipped away?

We talk about that difficult year often now, turn its pages. For years we didn’t.

Soon, my daughter and I will begin the cross-country trip on a road we’ve never traveled: the one that will separate us.

Texas moves at a slower speed, and the only sign our world is changing is in the empty grocery store shelves.

In our memories, there are rooms we’ll always be standing in.

Maybe we go back to places not to ask questions, but to realize we don’t have them anymore.

In Jill Talbot’s ongoing series about her daughter leaving home for college: the long wait for the envelopes to arrive.

I’m on my way to the cemetery, silk red roses in the passenger seat.

The day I found out I was having a girl, I sat in my car in the parking lot of the doctor’s office and sobbed. Deep, ragged sobs.

A silver mixing bowl, that’s what I remember my mother handing me. I was five. My first snow ice cream.

Childhood is full of fictions, at least it should be.

I knew before I knew: I was already looking back.

My daughter made me promise I wouldn’t write about the ghosts. And I never have. Until now.

Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college.

Jill Talbot traces the moments in the last year before her daughter leaves for college.

Jill Talbot’s column, The Last Year, traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college.

Jill Talbot’s first essay in a year-long series on her daughter leaving home.

I was at the fountain drink machine, pressing my foam cup, when, suddenly, you were beside me, smiling, asking what kind of ice. Is it crushed?

Jill Talbot on the women she’s been, and the women she’s becoming.

Returns can betray our memory and reveal something new, a different image, a disappointment, a recital of disappearances.

I am driving west on Highway 51. It’s Tuesday, the day before Indie’s ninth birthday, and as I pass the city limits of Stillwater on my way to Oklahoma City, I switch from the Sinatra station, the one playing “I’ll Be Seeing You,” to the …

It’s unsettling how some stories come around again. When I was eight, my mother and I were in our garage in Lubbock, Texas, when she suddenly yelled, “GO!” and shoved me through the door. I ran to my parents’ bedroom. Suddenly, my mother was …