Swain County Detention Center became a place of reunions and redemption during the last few weeks as inmates had their first chance in over two years to see their family members face to face. 

Glennon Doyle is a favorite writer of mine and currently hosts a powerful podcast called “We Can Do Hard Things.” Doyle says what screws us up the most is the picture in our heads of how things are supposed to be. From birth, we’re offered images, words, models and examples of the types of people we’re encouraged to one day become. 

By Bill Graham • Special to SMN | For Ed Herron, childhood at Lake Junaluska in the 1960s was idyllic. He loved it. 

Every year of our girlhood, my sister and I woke up early on Thanksgiving Day, sat at the kitchen barstools in our pajamas and helped my mom break up cornbread and biscuits so we could make my great grandmother’s dressing recipe. Throughout the day, the house would fill with smells of turkey, macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie. Sometime mid-morning, my grandparents would drive up from Travelers Rest, S.C., to join in on the festivities. 

Finishing up my scrambled eggs and black cherry yogurt, I washed the dishes in the small sink. Dried off my hands and took another sip of my coffee. Mosey over to my ragged desk in my humble abode, in front of a dusty window with a slight view of Russ Avenue in downtown Waynesville. 

When practice begins each year for the new high school marching band season, summer is still bearing down, the sun boiling high in the August sky as a bunch of confused teenagers take their first tentative steps toward learning what will eventually become an intricate show with about 10,000 moving parts.  

On Veterans Day, we commemorate the service of members of the armed forces of the United States, past and present. But for some of those veterans, the call to serve persists long after they take off their uniforms for the last time and return to civilian life. 

By the time you read this, my folks will be motoring through Southwestern Virginia, probably deciding whether to just keep driving back to their native Upstate New York via Interstate 81 or maybe east onto I-64 and Charlottesville to visit Monticello again. 

Being a mom is always hard, but there is something uniquely challenging about parenting an adolescent. For me, it felt like my 12-year-old morphed into a young man overnight. Within one calendar year, he grew six inches and three shoe sizes. I watched his pants grow shorter each day like he was a superhero molting into a larger, more powerful form. Suddenly his voice was deeper, and I found myself grasping for his little boy octave, the one without the baritone sound and crackly inflection.   

They say the weeks leading up to the anniversary of a loved one’s death are harder than the day itself. 

I’d say that’s true.