She would never have said anything if her coach hadn't talked to her about why her time had gone up a minute and a half the first week and almost two minutes the second.

In her sophomore year she got up before dawn for a three-mile cross country race and broke her toe against the bedpost as she stumbled around in the dark. She ran the entire race, practiced every day for a week, and finished the next race before admitting to her coach that her toe hurt.

I imagine that the Battle of Armageddon will be louder and startle folks more, but only by an increment or two.

and I heard the full, elegant voice of her good friend Bertha Potts filling up that simple space where the pews and the floorboards cracked like gunfire every time someone shifted their position.

For a moment I heard my grandmother playing an old piano with a couple of keys that didn't work quite right

Their struggle with something I've already struggled with enough to have developed a false sense of mastery makes me go backwards in years.

It's simultaneously unsettling and invigorating to explore texts I've taught ten times and make discoveries with people who are reading them with fresh eyes. I wish there were a way for me to tell them how much I love it without sounding sappy.

it's the same rhythm she stepped off
as she taught you to hear
the voice of the woods.
Listen.
You bring the woods joy
when you're here,
you cause the woods to reminisce
about a time 
when this was your community.
Listen.
You
are a heritage speaker
of a language without words.

Listen.
She's here;
if you're silent,
as quiet as you were 
when she strolled beside you speechless,
you can barely pick it up, 
but it's here,
the beat of her heavy dime store shoes
is just under the long phrase the wind pronounces
through leaves
and the sincere remarks one bird makes
to another;

anything that would make them
miserable all day
like my grumpy neighbor who
after all those years,
now wants to chat
every 
single
time 
he 
sees 
us 
in the yard.

bottle rockets, he surmised,
set off by teenagers who were pieces of shit
and would grow up to be bigger pieces of shit
if some parents around here didn't 
require them immediately to work
forty hours a week during the school year,
preferably in roofing or blacksmithing,

Choose the courses, we say, that will challenge you and stimulate you, not those that will put the fewest obstacles between you and your leisure. Then the advisee leaves our office and many of us turn to our laptops where we make choices that, I'm afraid, aren't very brave.

It was unnecessary then to call him President George H.W. Bush because the other George Bush was obviously not presidential material.

The ridiculous word questions in the third-grade math book would later confound most of his friends but Paul had already been working them out for more than five years by then.

Will you be closer or farther away from being able to buy the bicycle? There are 800 acres on Opa and Oma´s hill. Opa and Oma have four children and you have one brother. How many acres are yours?