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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, […]