I opened my mail and saw the Kohls 15% off coupon at the bottom of the stack. That’s when I knew. It was time to buy some pajamas.

I needed winter pajamas, not my flimsy summer pajamas that keep me cool in the summer months. The pink hearts and polka dots are cute, but I needed pajamas that would keep me warm enough under the covers that I could turn the heat down to 60 degrees for the night. That’s because I am becoming my mother, a woman who kept the house at 64 degrees during the winter to save on heating bills so we could afford to pay the mortgage. (Hi, Mom!)

At the time, I was not happy that I had to pile on comforters when I watched TV and that I had to wear layers of sweaters to keep warm. I would beg to turn up the heat a degree or two, and she would usually oblige. But now that my electric bill is creeping up and the stock market has crashed down, I’ve [...]

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The biography of my early childhood was written in T-shirts touting my accomplishments. The white ringer tee with the calculator on the front was from the time I competed in Mathletes. The pink shirt with the panda bear was from the time I sold over 200 Girl Scout cookies to frat boys. The dark blue Floyd’s Fork Farm long-sleeved tee was from the high school camping trip where half the class got drunk and smoked pot and we got the trip banned for the next four years. My brother had gotten one of those shirts two years earlier and it confused me because I thought forks came from Bed, Bath and Beyond and not from a farm. I was gently informed that it referred to a farm near a fork in Floyd’s river.

When I was scavenging the Goodwill racks earlier this week, I found a shirt from someone else’s biography. It was a brown tee from the French Broad River Rafting Expeditions. I’ve never been rafting, nor did I know where the French Broad River [...]

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