On the day I most want to remember, I’m wearing a strand of jet-black beads and a peasant dress that whips around my ankles in a late-spring wind. I’ll wear that same dress months later, after I’ve given my son away, but on this day I’m pregnant and I’m happy and no other time exists but now. I’m with my best friend, Roslyn, and Mary Pat, a girl in junk-store overalls. Roslyn calls her “pure hippie,” which is somewhere between disparaging and complimentary. Mrs. V., Mary Pat’s mother, has come with us, and we’ve all driven down by the river...

You say that any story about motherhood should begin with our first definitions of love, our own mothers, their faces near ours as we drink from their breasts. What I remember is not my mother’s face, but her hands. I have photographs that show these hands. Hands on her hips. Hands holding on to me as my father photographs the two of us on a picnic by a lake. Hands holding a bottle of Pepsi-Cola to my lips. Hands leading me down a sidewalk with the two of us wearing our Sunday best. The photographs show my mother’s hands as...

My dreams of Dwale are like this. My mother and father and I are asleep in the four-poster bed in the bedroom off the living room when my father says, “It’s her.” It’s Granny, my mother’s mother, who has come in to wake us up, like she always does.

“Morning, this morning,” she says. “Fine morning this morning.”

The intrusion makes my father angry. “Privacy,” he says. “Can’t get a bit of it.” But from the kitchen there’s the scent of breakfast. Biscuits from an iron skillet, with a dab of butter to mix with cane syrup. Fried taters and...

Don’t we all lose? you ask. Lose our past desires, our childhood selves? In my memory, I have lost nothing. Those late summer afternoons are as real to me now as when I was eight or nine. In my memory, my father is still gone to visit his own family in the next county and my mother and I are still in Dwale, with that grandmother. Afternoons, my aunt Ruby and I often walk up the road from Dwale to the country store where we buy peanuts and Co-Colas to put them in. The road goes to town in one...

What I remember from 1972 is one luscious drug dream. Drug dreams come with taking curves on back roads to the tune of “El Conquistador” and “Spanish Eyes.” Drug dreams come with surreptitious exchanges in bathrooms and public parks. They come with paraphernalia, head-shop pipes and bongs made of hand-blown glass. By the time I’m fifteen I’m wise, a sage, an old pro. I’ve held consecrated wafer of pure acid on my tongue, had my skin anointed with the sweat of my first lover. I’ve done speed a dozen times, acid a dozen more, and mescaline, to my regret, only...

It was the only real trip I took anywhere west for a long time, that trip to Mammoth Cave. My celebration of love. I still have the paraphernalia to prove it. “See Mammoth Cave,” it says on a plate I bought my paternal grandmother as a souvenir. In a box of letters and papers and postcards from over the years that I’ve never been able to throw away, I recently found a brochure showing a mother and a father and a cavern and a tour guide. “Born 350 million years ago,” the caption reads. Mammoth Cave is ten degrees south...

The greatest tragedy, I will come to believe, is emotional and ethical suspension. That complete inability to move forward or backward, to accept or decline, embrace or relinquish, our belief in a future. When I left the hospital in the summer of 1973, I believed in nothing at all. My body felt emptied and stretch-marked, and who I had been, that thin girl, was changed forever. My jeans with the suede triangles in the legs wouldn’t zip, and the shorn hair between my legs bristled and chafed. I was wound tight, folded into myself. I was paper and on me...

Art, you tell me, is the only true opening. Art is a dark hallway with a light at the end. Art is soul. It is a red convertible under a starlit sky on the road to forever. It is breath and blood and sex and a stranger’s touch in the aisle at a country store. Through art, you tell me, we reach ether,quinta essentia,the miracle that holds together fire and earth and water and air, holds together our selves. But in the months and then years following my son’s relinquishment, I do not understand this. Two years later...

At her moment of quickening, your mother is trying to learn to drive. She’s sitting in the car’s front seat and your father’s hand is on hers, guiding her along unfamiliar streets, taking her through the motions. There’s no real chance she’ll learn to drive, or keep her waitress job at a local diner, or be anything besides what the high-school yearbook predicted—in a nice little home in the West, right beside the one she loves best. This is Kansas, a whole new world, and it’s all she can do to navigate, to see through the dust and down...

My mother’s family believes in magic, or superstition, as your definition goes. Cats suck breath. One gray hair pulled sprouts three more. Immersion in a body of water means salvation. A great-aunt I never knew, whose name was Stella, was odd-turned. Does that mean insane, or tending to believe in magic? I’ve only heard family rumors, but I’ve imagined a crazy girl who heard chimes hanging on the front porch and believed they were rung by God.

Is it magic that gave my grandmother, my mother’s mother, a fear of deep places, water holes and wells that smell of sulfur?...

Come fall 2001, I have been reborn, in ways I never expected. I have chosen who I will love and who I won’t. I’ve learned to say no to lovers who fail to see me, or who hesitate to see themselves. I myself have chosen, John, a Monacan council chief from the heart of Virginia, a lover who becomes my best friend as well. I have come, at last, to trust that writing is my vocation, if not my profession. By day I teach, this fall at a small liberal-arts college in northwest Georgia. These students, and the ones I’ve...