Saints make wonderful grandfathers and lousy husbands.

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

Through sports a coach can offer a boy a secret way to sneak up on the mystery that is manhood.

Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.

To describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, 'There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood.'

Paranoia has a sharper taste if the danger is real.

Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.