“A freshly red-painted train caboose had, for decades now, made its home on a green, little patch of the world outside of the one-room post office. Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose.”

“Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose.”

“His voice had this thick, Charleston accent, where every word had more syllables than ever intended, yet each word seemed as if it had been carefully chosen and presented in a way that only a man born and raised in the heart of the South could–distinguished and from a different time.”

“I had found him again, and with him, my world had become completely unwound. It was messy and impulsive, naïve and irrational, and somehow, right again.”

“The levee had always been my beach, the world beyond it, my ocean. That’s as close as it got here, anyway. No waves, no dolphins, no white sand, no sea gulls. If you were lucky enough, though, every once in a while you did get to see a crane, or a beaver.”

“She always used to say that the past is a relentless parasite in its quest, feeding off of the senses, looking for anything that will trigger a memory–forever there to complicate the present, forever there to remind us that it will always be a piece of us. I never had a clue as to what she meant, until now.”

“I could hear the crickets and tree frogs starting their night song in the small, wooded area behind us. A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.”