Reckon Review

Category: Wind & Root

  • Country Craft – Let’s talk: An Approach to Writing Conversations

    By Stuart Phillips Late summer we transplanted thirty hosta from our front walkway, wheeling barrowsful to more welcoming spots in the shade. As my wife and I planned the new plantings, we went round and round with competing combinations before we realized that what she really wanted was a lavender hedge, and what I really…

  • The Pie Was a Final Draft: Good Grief

    By Michaella Thornton Lately, it’s been harder to gather my resolve and joy to bake or write much. I won’t lie; I’ve been struggling through a slow-moving season of pain and endurance, and that’s okay, too. My focus lately has been on: Of trying so hard to remember good enough is great, Rome wasn’t built…

  • Outsider Perspectives, Insider Narratives: In Defense of Omissions

    By Mandira Pattnaik In the Summer of 2020, peak-pandemic times, I received my first writing solicitation. The topic was to write a micro-memoir. I had never written such a thing before, and like the way I am, the challenge itself made me accept the offer. In near impossible times, we had become more nostalgic. With…

  • Buried Nitrogen: A Metanarrative About Peonies (And Chatbots)

    By Sandra K. Barnidge The week of Christmas, the temperature dropped to a low I’d never felt before in central Alabama. It hit near single digits with a clear sky, the kind of cold I grew up with in Wisconsin and thought I’d left behind when I moved south. There’s a name for what happened…

  • Flexing My Creative Muscles: Running from Zombies, My Apple Watch Overlord, & My Health

    By Melissa Llanes Brownlee I run. Not fast, not far. I can run 5 to 10 kilometers without dying. If I told my teenage self that I would run by choice in my 40s, she would be laughing her ass off. In 2018, after my yearly health exam in which I got Cs and Ds…

  • Soundscapes: Abiding with Birds

    By Erin Calabria It is a clear, mild day in October, my first time home in nearly three years. All the leaves are glowing, suspended in translucent tiers of colored light, just on the brink of letting go. My brother turns off the road, parks, then leads the way into the woods. Almost as soon…

  • Artful Academics: Calling My Energy Back

    By Brandy Renee McCann I light a small candle while nodding to my grandmothers whose faces smile out of framed pictures displayed on the table that serves as my home altar. Words of prayer and whispered gratitude are my offering along with some candy. Also on the table are nature treasures given to me by…

  • A Parental Reckoning: Cutting Cords

    by Amy Cipolla Barnes Twelve wall lizards cut my son’s umbilical cord. I imagine they chew through it while emergency Duramorph in my soft spine closes my eyes and slash-opens my swollen belly. I listen as the lizards whisper parenting secrets while my pumpkin-colored son sleeps under grow lights and gets his heel cut every…

  • The Fractured Mirror: Winter Solstice, Christmas, and the Axes of Time

    By Edward Karshner In the volumes written about the folklore of Christmas, what gets lost is that Christmas, like its cousin winter solstice holidays, is about the restructuring of time. We never really stop to consider that time, like folklore itself, is a construct orienting us to a world that seems, in the words of…

  • Healthy Habits: When Disciplines Meet

    By Valerie Peralta Every morning when I open my eyes, I know I need to exercise. A three-mile walk, a HIIT workout, and some stretching or yoga. But my running shoes sit in my closet. My workout clothes remain in their respective drawers. And I don’t know exactly when any of this physical activity will…