A few heart-lifting bits on the horizon, which I’ll update once they’re confirmed, but related and unrelated (and everything is relative), deus ex machina once again, which explains my calm.

Even though her genes were half Southern, they had mixed with Midwest German amazon to make her taller and fuller than those teeny Southern thangs, a glaze of heat and sweat and barbeque couldn’t hide that. Her hair was a shock of black in a sea of flax. Her voice calm, clipped, an npr commentator among the poetic trills of the East Tennessee accent. Her northern torment, worn as casually as a fuzzy cardigan in the north, seemed out of place, blasted out by copious sunlight. Her Catholicism was a novelty, even though there was a nearby town called “Maryville”…they pronounced it “Merville”, though, and Our Lady once again took the backseat.