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Buried Nitrogen: On Sharks and Spanish Daggers—and Publishing a Novel
By Sandra K. Barnidge Lately I’ve been feeling caught in an undertow. Too many deadlines crashed in at once this spring, while I also juggled the ever-constant code-switching between “writer” and “mother.” The most important of the writerly commitments was revising the novel that’s officially slated for release next June and sending those revisions back…
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Buried Nitrogen – Dead Wood Falling: A Snow Moon Noir
By Sandra K. Barnidge Our Leyland cypress died. All at once, it seemed, almost overnight. One week, the evergreen branches were soft, supple, and verdant — it had been our outdoor Christmas tree, and we’d decorated it with shiny colored balls and a pinecone topper. But last summer’s drought had weakened it, and a fungus…
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Buried Nitrogen: Carving a Villain from an Old Oak Tree
By Sandra Barnidge I happen to live in a historic neighborhood in Alabama known for charming Craftsman-style homes and soaring oak trees. When we moved into our house, the inspector said the canopy of three particularly majestic oaks above us would “cause problems” over time, but we waved off the warning, unconcerned, too in love…
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Buried Nitrogen: The Parallel Plot of Pawpaws and a Local Park
By Sandra Barnidge I have become the proud keeper of an orchard. A real, living orchard. I am so thrilled about it I can barely breathe. Begrudgingly, I can admit that perhaps my orchard is not yet especially picturesque—in fact, when I show images of it to friends and family, I sense the concern for…
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Buried Nitrogen: The Venus Vignettes
By Sandra Barnidge There’s a new ice cream place in town that’s located conveniently (dangerously) close to both my daughter’s favorite playground and a plant nursery. Every few days, we make a loop that starts at “the bumpy slide,” then passes through the nursery, and then—if you’re good, if you don’t fuss while Mommy looks…
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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…
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Buried Nitrogen: The Parable of the Persimmon
By Sandra K. Barnidge The persimmons on her tree were still green, but Cheryl the Neighbor told us to go for it anyway. “Before the critters get ’em,” she said. Possums had been spotted on a neighbor’s persimmon tree the week before. A raccoon family was prowling the neighborhood, too. It was now or never,…
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Buried Nitrogen: The Tragedy of the Brussel Sprout
by Sandra K. Barnidge It all went wrong because of the barbecue pit. Not because of the pit itself, a Texas-style brick barbecue built in the 1950s, but because of where the pit is located in my backyard: under the twin shades of a mature camellia and a scraggly dogwood. You see, the pit has…
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River Dolls
Fiction by Sandra K. Barnidge At first it was just branches, lots of branches, big ones that stuck out of the water, a few leaves clinging desperate to dead black tips. When the big branches hit the shallows in our bend of the river, they snagged on each other and clogged up into a dam,…