I think it unlikely that I will post a public chronicle of my days spent in Arkansas, for reasons that are abundantly clear in the private entry posted directly before this one, but there is one story that I wanted to tell. It was not for what I did, but for what I chose not to do.The dead cross daily with the living in Tull; it is a place in which your memories and your past confront you even during the smallest of errands.

Several times this year I've promised friends that when I went back to Tull for the Christmas holidays, that I would take pictures. Most of them have trouble imagining a reality of a place like Tull, because few places like it still exist.

So, this year, I went home for Christmas and brought the camera.

This is where I grew up.

I am thankful for kitty purrs and coconut-milk desserts and dinners with friends. I still love the feeling of driving over the I-55 bridge over the Mississippi River, and I still am secretly thrilled when Jeff approves of something that I do. I still can't remember the name of all the reindeer without singing them, and I think it's funny that this year is the first year, ever, that my father has put Christmas lights on his house.

Call it a night to share a secret or two. Some things are better left not unsaid.

My thoughts about Rustina (see 'No Antecedent Necessary') have put a different spin on thoughts I deal with every year—the death of my grandfather. But, in this case, not so much about the death itself, but about the reinforcement of life that came with it.

Tonight: absolution through quiet sadness. Tonight is one of those nights that I damn the human mind's capacity to remember, especially of things that should have been let go many years ago.

A few nights ago I had a dream about Rustina. Rustina Wear, gone these fifteen years, gone one year less than she lived—the girl who was my sister's childhood best friend. I would make expected and pithy statements about how her untimely death in a freak car accident was one that affected us deeply.