There’s something about the way the wind moves through moss in the South. Not the Spanish moss tourists photograph, but the kind that hangs heavy and grey, like ghosts caught mid-sigh. It drapes itself over tree limbs like sorrow that’s settled in and made a home. The quiet here doesn’t feel empty. It feels like a story that’s halfway told.
I’ve always been drawn to places like that—soft, rotting, still. There’s a pull in the hush. I’ve walked across old wooden bridges that creak like they remember every foot that’s ever crossed them. Underneath, the swamp water doesn’t reflect anything. It just swallows light and memory alike. It’s a kind of reverence, I guess. The land remembers everything, even if no one else does.
The trail always changes past the bridge. The gravel gives way to dirt, and the trees grow close. The light dims. The air gets thick. And somewhere along that path, I start to quiet down too.
Then there’s this picnic table—one of my spots. Tucked away like a secret. The wood is dark and worn down, edges splintered just enough to remind you time passed here. It faces out over water, and yeah, it’s pretty in that wild, untamed way. But I don’t come for the view. I come because I can breathe here. I can hear myself think—or stop thinking. Whichever it is, it helps.
I’ve got a handful of places like that scattered around Northern Alabama. I call them hidey-holes. Some are tied to memories, old houses, people I used to be. Some just showed up when I needed them. A clearing. A rusted fence. A place that hums without a sound.
The South does that. It holds things. Pain, beauty, rot, wonder. It doesn’t separate them. It doesn’t make sense of them. It just is—messy, tragic, holy in its own strange way. A place where stories grow out of the dirt and drip from the trees and cling to your boots when you walk away.
People ask how the South influences my work. The truth is, I don’t know how it couldn’t. It’s in the bones of every story I write. Even when I think I’ve left it behind, it shows up—on the rim of a glass, in the silence between words, in the shadows just outside the page.
To some people, the South is a place you escape.
To others, it’s where you return.
For me, it’s both.
