Tessie D

We set the date for two weeks from now. This seems a little prophetic that Momma and Daddy got married after two weeks, so maybe it’s a sign. I told Angel yesterday evening after work. He’d followed me home in his truck to drop off my car, and then we’d gone to get dinner at…

Angel asked me again this morning about setting the date. I will admit that I like the idea of taking his name — I could be a new person with a new family and new connections. We could move further south, further away from home, away from everyone who knew me before, and I could…

An ice storm came through this morning. Luckily, the pipes and tanks in the barn didn’t freeze up. The cattle huddled together near the barns and under the awnings. They looked like statues, standing still together to keep warm and conserve energy. The dairy was still, as if a white weighted blanket had been dropped…

Sometimes I wonder how Angel hadn’t heard anything about me. Brownwood isn’t far from here. People know me back home. They know people here. I keep waiting for some spark of recognition. Or that he overhears some gossip. I would probably be a bit relieved, that way I wouldn’t have to tell him.  Maybe he…

The weather was nice this afternoon, so most of us at work sat outside under the big tree in the backyard during lunch. “Did you hear about the youth pastor at Hilltop Baptist Church? The real big one on the outskirts of town?” one of the dairy hands, Jimmy, asked in between bites of his…

I told Angel that I didn’t know if I could marry him. It’s been sitting on my heart for the past couple days. I worry that he has a different vision for what our future might look like or that I’m not ever going to be good enough for him. We’d gone to the movies…

Angel came over for dinner last night. My roommates had gone to the bar, and I was going to be home by myself, so I cooked dinner for both of us. I am not great cook, but I’m not terrible one either. I’m certainly better than Momma, who doesn’t know how to cook anything other…

“It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make ti if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a siller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions ferment in the masses of…

“Be that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least in this; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. Let me…

Three years ago, when I was a senior in high school, we were assigned to read and write a response to Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.” I wasn’t all that excited to read it, to be honest. But I went home and started it that evening. I still remember feeling almost manic reading…