Sweet Tea Talks Vol.14

Reflecting on a milestone day.

Last year, February 19th fell on a Monday and I posted a piece called, Superstitions. It’s a really good essay and I don’t mind saying so myself. The craziest thing about writing regularly? Reading your old work and wondering who in the hell actually wrote it.

I did?? I wrote that? Huh. Was I better back then?

Anyway, you should check it out. It’s free and contains more visual aids than this post which will only have the absurd collage down there above the paywall.

Today marks the anniversary of several events paramount to my personal history.

1. Seventeen years ago, my grandmother, Grandmommy Dorothy, matriarch of my paternal family and the woman responsible for most of my personality, passed away.

2. Five years ago, I packed up my 2008 Honda Accord with messily thrown together boxes and an actually psychotic terrier named, Scraps, and began the cross-country driving portion of our cross-country move back to Georgia.

3. Four years ago, the aforementioned terrier, living up to his name, nipped at my face and nearly took off the tip of my nose leaving me with 12 stitches and ultimately leading to my decision to stay in Atlanta and a build a life here.

It’s a day I marvel at. How funny and magical that so many “happenings have happened” (to quote myself) on this particular date. According to my essay, I used to be pretty weary and scared, superstitious of what might happen. February 19th, 2025, I am reflective, grateful and full of hope.

After moving back to Atlanta, now five years in, feeling at the same time both completely different and exactly the same, here’s what I’m pondering.

this is a scrapbook collage: me in my grandmother’s hat, me with no nose, me and scraps at a hotel in memphis a day before arriving in atlanta, the car we drove cross country, grandmommy’s favorite quote, scraps depressed about harming me, scraps and his stepfather, alan, all set atop a photo of scraps looking out the window pondering the journey of his life.