There’s a rhythm to the seasons that you can feel in your bones when you grow up in a place like southwest Arkansas.

Long before supermarkets swallowed up every bite of our food into cellophane and fluorescent lights, there was a time when what you ate came from the land, and you knew the taste of the seasons.

I grew up in the South in the 1960s and 70s, when a hot summer day might find us driving the winding roads around ...

English is a language full of leftovers. It’s like the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Filled with things we just can’t seem to toss out.

The difference of course is that at least with what we put on the bottom shelf of the fridge, we do throw that out. Eventually.

Conversation with my grandson:

Grandson: “Grandpa John, do you want me to scrape the rest of the food on my plate into the trash?”

Me: “Julian, in this house, we don’t throw out perfectly ...