Breast Cancer Redux

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They gave us one day to adjust before beginning what people so eloquently refer to as a “journey.” No one ever talks about what happens when it’s not a trip you want to take. Or when you can’t find the map. Or when you find yourself without a guide. Or when you realize that the wheels have fallen off the car and you are perilously close to crashing.

No. They don’t talk about that in the lovely pink brochures decorated with delicate line drawings of roses. Making cancer pretty has become almost a cottage industry. There’s nothing pretty about saying goodbye to someone you love.

A barbed wire halo

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Death did not ride in with a thundering of horses’ hooves on a cloud of gun smoke, though no doubt Heaven is a bit more lively since Macedonia native Bessie Morton’s arrival April 27.

Missing: Mississippi family’s search spans five decades

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She left her clothes on the back porch. She left her gold, Hunt High School Class of ’56 ring on the dresser. She left her baby, Gloria, in her sister Betsy’s arms. And then, on a hot summer day in 1960, Lyrian Wyvonne Barry boarded a Greyhound bus bound for St. Louis and disappeared behind a cloud of Mississippi dust.

Blog: Define this

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Sometimes you are so outnumbered, you will not win, no matter how hard you fight. At 3 a.m., you’ll try, again and again, thinking this time, you’ll see your misstep and change the outcome. You will fail. The hardest fight is in the daytime, in ordinary life, where you must decide each day: fight or flight, run or stay, trust or fear, love or hate.

Blog: The Script

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November 2009. A late season hurricane, when the only provisions anyone had left were dusty cans of Spam and half-spent candles lying like forlorn soldiers in the bottom of the cabinet alongside roach traps and jugs of distilled water.

*A promise kept: Columbus native returns home to honor parents

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In the 23rd Special Construction Battalion, the officers were white and the seamen and steward’s mates — basically servants — were black. “I’m from Georgia,” an officer told them. “Where I come from, there’s only two kinds of niggers — a good nigger and a dead nigger. We don’t want no dead ones.”

The keeper of time

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In life, he was the keeper of history. Presidential photographs, letters, memos, campaign materials — nothing escaped the thin fingers and sharp eyes of the Columbus native who lived simply and died simply but touched time, leaving a signature of his own.

*Boys to Men: Local ministry takes youth under its wing

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The teenager turned, walked back to the pool, slipped off his shirt and slid beneath the cool waters. Maybe his curiosity had been satisfied. Maybe he knew that Edward Yeates, head of Father’s Child Ministry, takes a no-nonsense approach to mentoring children who lack, and crave, a father’s presence. He gives them freedom, and he reins them in. Mostly, he loves them.

An abiding faith

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The post office is gone. The school is gone. City Hall is gone. Most of the churches are gone. Nearly every building in Smithville, Mississippi is gone — or so heavily damaged they will have to be demolished. The devastation from last week’s F5 tornado is so widespread, so absolute, that it’s easier to tally what remains: The telephone company. Coker’s Han-D-Mart. And an unshakeable sense of faith.

With words and a bucket

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Three girls watch as the tall, well-dressed man strides down the cracked sidewalk, across the playground, through the weeds, past the swings, and toward a merry-go-round that might have once been blue but is now a tired gray. They seem wary here in the shadows of the housing projects and petrochemical plants that make up their world. Life on the west side of Port Arthur, Texas, is hard; street smarts come early by necessity.