The Stories We Inherit

My grandmother’s recipe box sits on my desk—not because I cook her recipes (though I do), but because it reminds me that stories come in many forms. Between the index cards for cornbread and collard greens, there are notes. Marginalia of a life lived.

“Too much salt for Harold’s blood pressure,” she wrote on one card. “Sarah’s favorite” on another. Each annotation a small story, a thread in the larger tapestry of family narrative.

I’ve been transcribing these lately, not just the recipes but the notes, the stains, the worn edges that tell their own tales. It strikes me that this is what we do as writers—we preserve not just the events but the texture of living. The coffee ring on the card for chess pie speaks as loudly as any paragraph I might craft about Sunday dinners.

In South, Towards Home, I tried to capture some of these inherited stories, the ones passed down not through deliberate telling but through gesture, habit, and yes, through food. The way my grandfather arranged his tools in the shed. The particular rhythm of my mother’s morning routine.

These are the stories that shape us before we know we’re being shaped. They’re the South I know—not the grand narratives of history books, but the accumulation of small, daily acts of living.

Tomorrow I’ll share the cornbread recipe. It’s too good to keep to myself, and besides, recipes are meant to travel, to adapt, to find new kitchens and new annotations.