Tessie D

I moved to Brownwood earlier this month to work as the office manager on a small dairy just outside of town.  I worked on the same farm where I worked last summer and saved enough money to buy a car—a gold 1986 Ford Thunderbird. It’s the nicest car I’ve ever driven, and the guy who…

It’s been two years since I started this diary. Seven months since she died. I’ve had two birthdays. She would’ve had one. The days have passed into months, now years. The days will continue to pass whether she’s in it or not, and eventually, I’ll be lost, too.  I was an entirely different person, and…

Sorrow was creamated.  I still don’t understand what happened. She was here, we heard her crying, cooing, and laughing throughout the day, even the day before she got sick. The walls in our house are so thin that she could be heard in every room of the house. She commanded our attention at all hours,…

My baby died last week. She’s gone. She lived inside of me and out in the world for only nine months, and now she’s gone.  She started getting sick on Sunday evening, but I didn’t think anything of it. She was tired and fussy. She had a fever, but babies have fevers all the time.…

I went to town today and picked up an application for college. I’m going to apply and major in English. It’s too late to start for the fall but I can get ready to go in the Spring. Besides, it’ll give me time to get everything set up. I’m thinking that I’ll take just a…

When we first moved to Dublin, before Granddaddy bought the land and we moved into the trailer house, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment across the street from the Dairy Queen. Momma hadn’t started working yet and Daddy wasn’t getting any disability from the VA yet so I don’t know how we were making it.…

I went to the grocery store the other day with the baby. The sun was blazing hot at noon, the heat blaring down on us through the truck’s windshield, like ants burning up under a magnifying glass’s reflection. The cold air stopped working a long time ago, and we’d never fixed it. Instead, we rolled…

I saw Eric at the park the other day. I had taken Baby to the park in her stroller like I always did, right after dusk. Most everyone is home by then and for anyone who isn’t, it’s too dark to really see. The monotony of walking along the gravel path helps calm me down…

I didn’t go to college. I would take a year off to work and figure out what I was wanted to do. The summer was so hard between the heat and the depression that pinned me to the bed. It felt silly to care about college. None of it seemed to matter much this summer…

It’s the beginning of August. It’s been more than a year now.  I hate this month. It used to not be too bad because we’d be busy getting ready for back to school, but this year, I don’t have anything like that to look forward to. So, I’ll just be counting down the days until…