A February moment, bone chilling, hedged gray and parallel to the unusual sentiment that colors me in that vagueness between black and white. Simultaneously this town reveals itself in the same hue as I consider its own rich history. Standing alone on the curved edge of the side walk, elevated, almost six-feet vertically, yet as deep and entrenched in thought, as I am in Dixie. Just to my back, is the bookstore he pointed out to me yesterday, alleging that Gresham still visits this town Southeast of Memphis, hand signing his name to hardback covers in reverence for roots. I believe it to be true as I sustain myself against the wind, hair blowing around and blocking my sight, trying to regain some focus, but for now, it is only through the lens of my camera, filling empty with a fetish for remembrance.

Ten minutes ago, I was driving out of town on Route Six, back to Florida via culinary diversion at the Port of Call in New Orleans. In the space of a mere moment, your life can change. There was something missing, some thing hollowed me, I had to leave with something. He let me take pictures of him yesterday, but I needed another photograph that might be beautiful in its stillness. A memory of this place that has nothing to do with him. But this place has everything to do with him now. Settling because I choose to, on a souvenir of this – I was here at this clock-dome literary juncture, chilled in a haze like the dome’s, amidst a season’s steeled stone hue. I snapped a shot of the clock. Its black face set against the naked and stark white dome, veiled behind thin limbs, shrouded in knowing, winter’s wise branches uninspired, silent before the promise of Spring.

Several years ago, five to be exact, I was drawn to this bantam town for its literary bricks, thick built upon the foundation of Faulkner, this city’s name alluding to a place across the “big” pond for higher learning. I wanted to be right here in the midst of fiction then, escaped, inspired to write, in and by a community of writers. Release something, but I was too afraid to write about what I knew. Less than a year ago, it occurred to me that there really is no fiction, what is written is somehow innate and intimately known. Writers twist our own truths, the truths of others perceived and promise them to others in artful expression. At that time, I thought this place to be too far from my son. In retrospect I have been further from him living in the same household.