Got the latest issue of the Oxford American magazine yesterday. It is entitled "The Home Sweet Home" issue, and I am still eagerly slogging my way through it.

I must say that this publication has had an uncanny ability to rise from the ashes many, many times over. It has survived the exit of John Grisham as its publisher, a move to Arkansas, and now the embezzlement of its funds from a former employee that left it nearly bankrupt. May it continue to keep on keepin' on, especially when it publishes works such as this:

For so long, I have held that yellow house inside me. I have been at times shaken when it came to letting people near me because it would mean letting them near the unadulterated one, the real yellow house. I was a kid raised well (with class and hope but little money) and who grew up in a raggedy house. I never did need to be one or the other. I mean, who does not know that they are more than just a single adjective? But back then when I was eight, twelve, fifteen, I had no idea about the stupefying nature of dichotomy.

Or that, if one is able, one might, one day, return to stand facing everything you originally left looking for.

....Back home, I researched the demolition of our house, and found an article from the New Orleans Times-Picayune headlined: red danger list: 1,975 properties deemed “in imminent danger of collapse.” I scrolled down fifty-one pages before seeing it: 4121 Wilson Avenue, New Orleans, 70126, our old address.

Yellow House, I wonder how you felt to be bursting open, at last, your secrets out, proclaimed, free, falling this way and that, at least momentarily, before being obliterated, swept up into flying dust. Gone.

By Sarah M. Broom. Go read the whole thing and tell me what you think.