Pickles and Peanut Butter
I find myself eating pickles and peanut butter, as I’ve had a hankering for days. No, I am not pregnant. Far from it. Instead, pickles and peanut butter are an old staple I picked up from my days in the borderlands of Dixie, which is really just Dixie under a defensive name, in Kentucky. More so, the Maysville kids generally all know the simple joys of pickles and peanut butter. That town, a sleepy little one of about 9,000 along the Ohio River in northern Kentucky, has resonated in my mind’s eyes for nearly twenty years now. We lived there for two years of high school, but those two years—and not withstanding the total of nine states I’ve lived in—seemed to have shaped and marked me the most. Perhaps it was that I was in high school, perhaps it was that the kids did well on bringing me into the many folds, clichés, and complexities of Maysville. Perhaps . . . perhaps it was just the natural course of life, and the trials of existenc...