Monthly Essays

The Culprit

Recently I worried over a gnawing pain in my tooth. After a week of hot salt-water rinses, I called the dentist’s office and hoped someone was working the final Monday of 2024. To my relief, two hours later I was laid back in a dentist’s chair with a bright light above me. I feared an abscess, followed by an antibiotic and then a root canal.

The hygienist looked in my mouth. “Is your tooth sensitive to hot or cold?”

“No,” I mumbled around her probing instruments.

Then she asked the big question. “Do you eat popcorn?”

Oh, yes, I eat popcorn. I routinely buy giant bags of Skinny Pop or prop up my ancient Stir-Crazy Popper that’s missing a leg and pop Orville’s kernels. Many times, that’s my supper, but this time of year I treat myself to one of those Christmas-decorated tins with cheddar, caramel, and buttered popcorn.

This is not freshly popped from a gourmet popcorn shop in a city, but the type that is stacked a mile high in stores around here. Years ago, the tin was bigger and cheaper and filled to the brim, and the flavors were divided by a three-armed cardboard divider. These days, the varieties are sealed in three small foil bags so hard to open that I resort to scissors. I suspect they are hard sealed with all their preservatives because the popcorn was processed in July.

Once I cut the bags open, I emptied them into the tin because I like this special treat best when the flavors are mixed. I believe salt and sugar are meant to be savored together. The popcorn filled about two-thirds of that tin. Really, it was just too little to share. Even though family was in and out during the holidays, my selfish side never brought that tin out of the pantry. Instead, on evenings alone, I enjoyed this guilty pleasure in front of the TV. After a few days and furtive handful after handful, there was nothing left in the tin.

And now the hygienist was asking me if I ate popcorn. I felt as if I’d been caught with my hand in the cookie jar.

After she poked and prodded in the area that had ached for a week, she showed me a hard popcorn husk, a fourth of an inch long. It had buried itself between my gum and tooth, out of reach of my fingernail and toothpick and my last resort, dental floss.

Will I have learned my lesson? Come on! I imagine I’ll relent to the siren’s call of those Christmas tins next year, too. Why mess with tradition?

But for now, I’m looking forward to starting 2025 without that awful ache. And that’s what I hope for your new year. Besides no aches, I wish you the traditional big three: health, wealth, and happiness and if you’re really really lucky, some freshly popped popcorn.

A made-for-TV movie crew comes to Jasper!

Sam Rockwood, at 33 the youngest-ever sheriff of Jasper County, KS, knows Candy Malone’s parents misnamed her. Oh, she’s a blonde knockout and can probably dance around a pole, but she’s serious-minded, smart, and sensible—and she’s his sister’s best friend. She’s been a pain to him ever since she’s come back to town as a grownup woman, and not the girl-next-door (well, girl-at-the-adjoining-ranch) he’s known most of her 27 years. He shouldn’t be attracted to her in that way, so his solution is to avoid being alone with her.

Between running the sheriff’s office and managing the ranch, now he has to provide crowd control for the filming of the made-for-TV Christmas movie in sweltering July. His sister and Candy sign him up as an extra, and the filming and the chaos begin.

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Travel back to small town life in 1954 to meet the people who live on the Corner of Pearl & Moffet.

Before 33-year-old Josie Jameson takes the seat reserved for the widow, she glances around the old graveyard. Over three hundred people have gathered to pay their respects to her late husband. That is nearly the population of Ducane, Arkansas.

She had married Orville nine years earlier. That he was 43 years her senior hadn’t really troubled her, but there had been plenty of talk. She was a farm girl when she married and moved to the big white house on the corner of Pearl and Moffet. She didn’t fit the mold of housewife to the richest man in town. Now that he’s dead, she owns the Ducane Savings and Loan, The Station that makes more money from liquor sales than gasoline, his private ledger books with unofficial loans and repayment schedules, and the little brown books written in his tight scrawl that hold the town’s secrets.

When tragedy strikes, the good people of Ducane, who share each other’s joys and sorrows, who celebrate others’ accomplishments with pride, who take food to the bereaved and do chores for those who are sick, these same good people whisper, “This is Josie’s fault!”

Corner of Pearl & Moffet is a gripping tale of one woman’s struggle through sorrow and challenges to find her own life. Download your copy today.

2024 essay