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Table of Contents
Three Deadbolts and a Female Socket
In This House We Are Not Separate
The Bread Man Still Stops in Osierfield
ALSO BY JANISSE RAY
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood
FOR MY FATHER
AND MOTHER,
Franklin Delano Ray and Lee Ada Branch Ray,
AND FOR
Susan
You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me.
Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE,
“God Speaks to Each of Us”
Introduction
Many years after I left the place I was born, I returned to the family farm in rural south Georgia, hoping to find there a home I had been looking for all my full-grown life.
These stories are from those years on the farm. All of them relate to coming back and making a life in a place that held my past, a place that as a young woman I had gladly left behind. In this book I rejoin with place, land, kin, history, and neighbors in an attempt to gather