LITMIR.BIZ

       Preface

      At Great Mamaw’s house there was always a pone of cornbread on the kitchen table. And maybe if you were lucky some buttermilk biscuits leftover from breakfast. At Great Mamaw’s house there was always something to eat fresh from the garden. And there was always something to read, too. It was heaven on earth for a fat little hillbilly word nerd.

      There were back issues of National Geographic stacked up in the corner of the living room. A basket of trashy romance novels with seething, sultry, shirtless men overflowed next to Great Mamaw’s recliner. There was a Kennedy biography and a beat-up, flea market copy of Profiles in Courage displayed on the side table right next to her commemorative presidential plate. The family Bible squatted solemn and thick and reverent on her nightstand with its gossamer-thin pages at rest and not to be disturbed by the grubby, clumsy hands of young’uns. Out in the rusty little camper where she stored all the scrap material from her quilts, she also stashed the racy True Detective magazines I was never supposed to find.

      My favorite book was her favorite book. The one she made good use of and referred to most often. The book that Great Mamaw kept tucked in her apron pocket or laid out within reach, easy to get to on the crooked little coffee table—The Old Farmer’s Almanac. My Great Mamaw lived her life by the signs. She knew when the moon waxed and waned above her little holler and she knew what its moods meant for the soil her roots were planted in.

      This collection is inspired by and written for my Great Mamaw, Lovel Blankenbeckler. It was my honest-to-goodness honor to care for her at the end of her life, and many of the following poems were written during that time. My Great Mamaw taught me her ways, those ways forgotten and buried in the pages of the almanac. She taught me to look up at the sky, to feel the stars move through my body and right on into the ground. She taught me to know when to plant and harvest, and she taught me to know when to bloom.