A few years before my birth, Mama and Daddy, stringing a lot of pennies together, managed to build a brand new but tiny brick ranch house. This was the end result of a journey that started in a one-room apartment in an antebellum home to a house with no indoor plumbing to one with a bathroom and, finally, to a nice little cottage on a piece of land they bought. It was several acres of shade trees and a meandering, large creek that curved its way through what would become pastures. When Mama died, ten years after Daddy made his way to the Lord, I bought that little house in which I had grown up. When words won’t find me elsewhere – not by the sea, or on the back porch or in the barn where I placed a comfortable, cushiony rocking chair – they will find me in the little home built by the workings of their hands and the prayers that fell from their lips. It is there, I see Mama step out the back door and onto the porch where she calls, “Ronda! Supper’s ready!” And I remember how I closed the book I was reading, stood up under that awkward maple tree, dusted off my shorts and headed, bare-footed back to the house.