Under the Southern Sky - Kristy Woodson Harvey Page 0,1

starts off in good shape, like it is in real life, largely because Daddy, my brother, Robby, and I can fix absolutely anything. I could paint trim better than any professional by the time I was twelve years old. Robby can fix a refrigerator, rewire a car, splice cable, anything you need. Even still, as a child I always had the feeling that the grand home filled with heirlooms—the mahogany dinner table where Washington once carved his initials, the gilded china, the monogrammed sterling silver—was falling in around us. The fading opulence seemed incongruous with the too-small dresses I was squeezing into for the third year in a row.

As Daddy washes his car in the driveway, Aunt Tilley walks out on the porch in one of her Victorian getups, complete with corset and parasol, which she took to wearing after she lost her mind, before I was even born.

Only, when I look up, it isn’t Aunt Tilley who is residing in the east wing now. It’s me. Old, alone, and crazy as a bat, with my beloved family home falling down around me. And Trina, my sister-in-law, is calling, “Amelia, darling.” That’s when I wake up, sweaty and cold.

Some people dream about losing their teeth. I dream about losing Dogwood.

I never told Thad about the nightmare. Now I was glad I hadn’t. Because, it seemed, I was destined to become the spinster aunt in the attic, the subject of many a good Southern cautionary tale. Just like my poor, dear aunt Tilley. She was a little unhinged, but she was still my favorite.

No! I scolded myself. I was not Aunt Tilley. I was Amelia Saxton, investigative reporter, award-winning journalist, seeker of truth and lover of righteousness. I tried to convince myself, as I walked out the door, completely unable to hear what Thad was saying as he ran after me, that this was better. This facilitated my life plan: Rise to the top of my game as a journalist. Check. Become executive editor. Check. Become managing editor. Check. Next stop: editor in chief. My husband, Thad, was an anchor around my neck. Of course, true love had also been a part of my life plan. That was when the tears began. He had been the one my heart searched for. He had been the one that changed everything. The thought split me in two: How will I live without him?

But I was a girl who had grown up huddling by the cast-iron radiator in my too-big room when we didn’t have enough money for the heat bill. I was a teenager who had replastered living room ceilings after a storm caused them to cave in. I was a woman who had discovered pay inequities in local manufacturing and exposed that the largest business owner in town was preventing women from exercising their legal right to pump breast milk at work. I was a warrior. I always had been. The dissolution of my marriage was nothing more than a bump in the road.

No use crying over what could have been, I reassured myself as I wiped my eyes, stood up straighter, cleared my throat, and dug around for my concealer. Modern Love, take two, equaled solitude. It equaled throwing myself into work. My writing had always been my only real safe place. By getting lost in someone else’s story, I could blissfully forget my own, at least for a little while.

And the interview I had scheduled that morning would lead to a story that I felt in the marrow of my bones would be groundbreaking. It had taken me months to get this interview in the first place, and I knew I could never reschedule, despite the fact that my entire life had just gone up in flames. Even as sure as I felt, though, I couldn’t have predicted how important that one interview would turn out to be.

But life is like that. Sometimes the nothing moments are everything.

Greer

JULY 21, 2016

I KNOW THIS IS THE last time I will be able to write, can feel the strength slipping from my fingers and the clarity slipping from my mind. There is so much to say when you are running out of time. It all feels so important, and yet also absurdly trivial. I am just one person. My struggles have so little bearing on the rest of the larger, wider world. At the beginning, I rushed, worried, finding people to take over my newspaper column and my Instagram account. I hurried to