Summer was also once the space of afternoons that soared on forever, a place of dreams and strange, childlike spaces dangerous only in that such spaces allowed us to get to know ourselves too well.

A long time ago, the Ozarks tourism campaigns leaned into the whole “Ozarks as magic” thing, crafting a unique, hillbilly “other” with wild, folkloric ways and granny women and healing waters.

Somewhere on a spring mountain ridge, I stand barefoot on fine, sharp gravel, watching an orange sun’s glow set beyond the dogwood blossoms, characteristic spring chill at my back.

I pour myself a Styrofoam cup of “Extreme Caffeine” coffee and ask for a box of chicken tenders and wait in line behind somebody buying scratch-off tickets.

The old white rocking chair creaked and the morning sun slanted through the window, a long ago sun dappled by the leaves of the rain tree. For the first time in 10 years, I was reading for the fun of it and the book I chose? The classic paperback “Interview with the Vampire” by Anne Rice. The moody atmospheric violence was all-encompassing, and I pushed off responsibilities like dishes or laundry until I had finished. After almost a decade of worrying, hustling and creating S

The lightning bugs played around the edges of forest and the barbed wire edge of my world that strange June night some 30 years ago. Out in the distance, I could hear kids talking, laughing, playing and I wanted to be a part. The fescue and the wild carrot grew in abandon after all the rain that cold springtime and the wild strawberries were slow to ripen. Wild strawberries are tiny compared to their domesticated cousins, tiny and easily squashed and commercially useless and

The rain poured down just beyond the garage doors, dirty cement glistening in the late, dark summertime somewhere between light and dusk. Bare incandescent lightbulb shown over saws and level, hammers, screws, nails, fishing rods, my dad’s red hammer. Old 1960s’ refrigerator, stocked with beer and leftovers, with a freezer desperately in need of defrosting hummed. It was July sometime in the early 1990s. I paused. Perhaps the twilight made this moment profound, though if some

Saturday morning and the mountain humidity is mounting, fog burning off from river lake below, hot late spring sun peeking through night clouds clearing as the minutes tick by. I’m still bemused by old turn-of-the-century tourist brochures touting the Ozarks’ “cooling summer breezes.” It’s only nine o’clock in the morning and I’ve already sweated through my shirt, confident it won’t be the last time today. Saturday morning markets are a lot of work. Just one year ago, State

Night falls with the rain but the light in the room is warm and dim, the music moody, calming after an exhausting week. The sound of a baseball game echoes lowly. The dogs are making comfortable noises from rug and couch. As I sit at the kitchen table to write, again, the mind wanders. “I have an idea,” Dustin Burkett is saying. His earnestness is contagious, his talent inspiring. We are sitting at another kitchen table, cold winter light streaming, conversing about the Sta

It is best not to estimate the countless gallons of coffee I’ve drunk in, say, the last 35 years, but just the same, I know it’s a lot.

An interview with Joshua Heston with StateoftheOzarks Farmers Market.

Yellow sun and yellow willow catkins sway after the spring thunderstorm. Afternoon sun lights silver rivulets beneath. A burly bumblebee crawls over thick pollen, engrossed in something akin to happiness. Springtime is here in the middle of America, just as it has been uncountable times over. The willows are new and young and ready once more. The silver clouds are wings in the south night sky, clouds barely visible even as the rain clears, even as the rain wings eastward ag

A clearing sky. A blackberry winter, again. The moon is a timeless thing cradled in the midnight above. The hubris of the day slowly passes into night, into forgetfulness. The day is done but the night is alive with the dead. Too often the dead of past regrets, of half-remembered thoughts, of memories sweet and bitter all. Ghosts are troublesome things. They don’t exist, of course. Just the result of an overactive imagination. A bit of neuroses with that fragment of potato

Every day this past week, it seems, I’ve been bombarded by some opinion of “artificial intelligence.”

The old short bed Chevy blocks the way to the weedy gravel in front of the old repair shop. Tires are stacked against the old metal building, rims swimming with mosquito babies. A beat-up side door is blocked open and from inside comes the sound of metal on metal and occasional swearing. The big elms sway in a breeze somewhere between spring and summer. The sound of a Sawyer Brown song lilts from a cassette deck covered in cobwebs. Across America, a thousand-upon-a-thousand s

Old and worn highway winds next to the creek, a creek now obscured by green leaves and the falling dark. Frogs peep. The old town’s yellow street lamps cast globes of light in the creekside forest, illuminating clouds of flimsy Mayflies. The darkness is close, the water down below running over limestone. Springtime in the Ozarks is here. Heavy traffic whines on the big six lanes. Not long ago, the anachronists of the Ozarks would have stumbled over the idea of big road and

I’m flipping through the magazine, looking at pictures of a traveling circus, documented as it wound its way through the Upper American South sometime in the late 1960s. The photos are in color and a little grainy. The performers magnificent, but a bit worn. The photojournalist had been embedded, traveling with the troupe as they left their warm Florida winter quarters and made another arduous journey north in the spring, battling rain and storms and winding, rocky, mountaino