A brochure at the Kosciusko, Mississippi Chamber of Commerce quotes Ms. L. V. Hull saying, “I never did care for no grass.”

Her lawn attests to that. After Ed and I drove to Kosciusko during a vacation to my hometown of Jackson, after seriously good plate lunches of pork chops, lima beans, and cornbread at a local café’, we stood dazzled in front of L.V.’s small white house. Brightly painted shoes perched like tropical birds on sticks stuck in the ground. Multi-hued hubcaps, spinning tops, plastic frogs and dogs, twirling mobiles, and a wooden cross painted with polka dots covered all that “no grass” on the lawn. Near the front door sat a polka-dotted television with bold blue letters painted on the screen—JESUS ON THE MAINLINE. TELL HIM WHAT YOU WANT—and, underneath, in red letters—SIT DOWN AND MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS.

(This essay is in celebration of the Supreme Court recognition of LGBT marriage.)

I did not ask for my first psychotherapy client. She was dumped on me over thirty years ago by one of the psychologists who headed the federal grant that paid me as a research assistant. The doc didn’t want to work with Christine. She brought little value to his publishing efforts and did not fit the criteria for a regular research subject. “Just meet with her a few times,” he ordered. “See how it goes.” And say what, I thought. My Master’s Degree in Social Psychology hadn’t taught me anything resembling therapy.

I had become comfortable with my usual duties—taking subjects’ histories, assessing their circumstances, examining their data. The subjects, classified as “Sexual Deviates” in the grant, consisted of rapists and sadists and men with fetishes (stealing panties from clotheslines or sniffing women’s shoes, for example). And, sadly, since this was the late 1970’s, sexual deviates also included transvestites, transsexuals, and gays, hoping against hope that some behavioral intervention would straighten them out, so to speak.

“The Farm,” as it was dubbed by the deep sea diver and his wife who owned it, was outside Prairie Ronde, Louisiana, which was outside Opelousas, which was a good ways from Lafayette, which was a real good ways from New Orleans, where my second husband, Warren, and I loved and fought for three sordid years before deciding we’d try out the pastoral life. The Farm wasn’t really a farm at all, just a rickety house on nine acres of scrappy land, with a well out back and noisy armadillos under the house and a front porch with a squeaky wooden swing.

Warren worked offshore for weeks or months at a time as a hard-hat deep sea diver, his pricey, patched-up diving hose a umbilical cord connecting him to the world above the water. I was another connection to that world, of course, but the home fires I kept, fueled by alcohol and angst, were not the comforting kind. Daily, I fired up my sixty-five Plymouth Valiant with the slant six engine, and drove the dusty Louisiana back roads, trusting my car to keep me moving and alive while I downed enough substances to halt or maybe kill a lesser woman.

(This essay is for anyone who’s ever been put down, minimized, or squelched around a creative endeavor. Thumbs up to keeping on keeping on.)

When I was eight, I wrote a poem. I lay on my stomach on my twin-sized bed, on the bedspread my grandmother made for me from squares of cotton cloth. A bonneted little girl was stitched on each square, a different color fabric and thread for each special little girl.

I wrote in my spiral bound notebook on wide-lined paper, with a number two pencil, so my words were bold. I wrote about George Long, my secret boyfriend, secret even from him. I scribbled and erased till I got it right. When I finished, I hugged my notebook. I had captured love with my poem.

That night, my parents had friends over for dinner. Betsy wore black pedal pushers and dark eyeliner. Her husband, John, had salt and pepper hair and a silver tooth that glinted. The grownups laughed and drank whiskey around the yellow formica table in our kitchen, and I hung out, listening.