Rebecca Long Hayden

Tuesday in Texas Rebecca Long Hayden

The word memory evokes a visceral response, deep in the heart, in the mind, in a singular place, different in all of us. There's a barren patch between fact and fiction, a place where we toss out seeds and something grows, something made of memory and truth. Why do we remember things a certain way? Why does someone who shared the same experience remember it so differently? Memory has much to do with truth and little to do with fact, and as for fact? As time goes by I trust that word less and less. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said "The life of a person is not what happened, but what he remembers and how he remembers it." I invite you to visit a time and place, Texas in the '50s and '60s. Texas is the geographic love of my life, and it makes me happy to write about growing up there, when it was beautiful and simple. Or is that just how I remember it?