Everyone remembers THE 9/11. If you were living that day and old enough to retain memories, you know what you were doing at every life-altering moment of that day. 8:46 a.m. — American Airlines Flight 11 hits the North Tower of the World Trade Center. A few minutes later, the breaking news is announced on the radio station I listened to while getting ready for work. I race to my living room and turn on the TV. What a horrible accident! A plane has flown into one of the Twin T

I went to Harris Teeter in the middle of the afternoon on Labor Day. Silly me, I figured everyone would have done all their shopping the day before—burgers, hot dogs, beer—and that today they would be on a boat, by a pool, or gathered with friends. I’ll pop in and right back out before the partiers stop on their way home from the festivities of the day. Insert sound of a wrong answer on a game show here. Because boy, was I wrong. The store was packed. Bumper-to-bumper-on-the-

September brings a different kind of new beginning. Between fresh school supplies, familiar routines and blank pages waiting to be filled, maybe fall isn't about starting over. Maybe it's simply a chance to start fresh.

What is it about spiders that can make a fifty-year-old woman run through her house screaming like a three-year-old? That can cause such fear that, had I a flamethrower at hand, I would indeed destroy the very roof over my head just to make sure those long, creepy legs curled into its body upon death? According to an article I recently read on the Verywell Mind site, “If you find a spider in your home, you may react in one of two ways: either screaming and running away or fre

Sunday mornings meant church beside the lake. Sunday afternoons meant Mur and Granddaddy’s house—family dinner, cousins, cicadas, feral kittens and, if I was lucky, The Wonderful World of Disney. Some childhood memories fade. Others remain so strong you can still hear the doors squeak and remember exactly what Sunday smelled like.

“The world is too much with us.” William Wordsworth wrote those words almost 220 years ago. He lived in England's Lake District during the Industrial Revolution, so yeah, he had a little bit to complain about. His beautiful home was being ravaged as factories found new ways to produce goods. Trees fell, and smokestacks belching noise and smoke rose up like greedy monsters. Products that had once been made by hand in quiet rural villages were suddenly being churned out in mill