One day I awoke with an image I had just dreamed. I saw my great uncle, an old Texas-German farmer named Alfred, cutting his neighbor’s hair. He tilted this man’s head gently to one side and carefully snipped off stray locks, like he was trimming flower stems. The neighbor’s young son watched and waited his turn on the steps nearby. I’d heard that Alfred used to do that—cut his neighbor’s hair—but the dream image was so clear it was as if I were sitting on the porch with them. I swear, there was a tenderness in the way...

I thought I was going to learn a little about dying. I’ve rarely seen anything die, and have never watched an animal be dressed out for eating. The deer my father brought home when I was a kid were, with a single exception, always already dead. The one time it happened differently, the deer had only been stunned by my father’s shot and when he opened the trunk of the car, the deer sprang loose into the yard. Blood was everywhere and I was so terrified that I ducked back into the house and hid while my father or my...

There are places around which the lives and imaginations of families and entire communities can revolve. The Laubach House, the country place (what I call the shack), and especially Honey Creek Church are some of these such places for my family. For at least four generations before me—my great-great grandparents, my great-grandparents, my grandparents, and my father and uncles and aunts—Honey Creek Church and its attendant burying ground has been a point of preoccupation. The Scheel family cemetery on the old Scheel place was disinterred and moved to Honey Creek after the property was sold. Gross-Oma and Gross-Opa...

For three days I’ve thought about doing this: riding my bike long after dark out to Cross Mountain at the edge of town, my squeaky chain waking the air with the howls of distant unseen dogs, the waning halfmoon faint and yellow as it comes up in the east. When I was in high school I used to walk in my neighborhood late at night, and sometimes, without seeking to pry, I would see into the lit windows of houses and glimpse storied fragments of those people’s lives. Tonight, as someone writing about this place, I am still doing this:...

This is how I wanted to be able to tell the story, how I wanted to be able to live my life:

The aimless, wandering young man discovers his roots in the rural place of his family’s heritage. He finds a way to live there, to support himself, his family, and to work for the health of his community. In his wildest fantasy, he even manages to buy the family’s original homestead back from the real estate developer who bought it and he turns it into a six-hundred-acre nature preserve with a working farm attached to it. He has many...