Bonnie Blaylock's Blog

8 months. It’s 8 months until my debut novel is published and officially launched into the world. Less time than it takes to grow a baby but no less arduous. I should qualify what sort of baby. It takes a baby elephant almost two years to gestate, and this process has felt like elephant twins. […]

Here in the warm, fertile South, things grow. Our county fairs are famous for tomatoes, pumpkins, and melons of mammoth proportions. My grandma’s house in the Florida panhandle sported a sleeping porch that was all but taken over by philodendron vines that crept and spread, covering each wall. One night spent out there beneath the […]

Last night on the winter solstice, literally the darkest day of 2020, my son and I craned our necks skyward on the front lawn. “Can you see it?” I pointed. “Below the moon to the southwest.”  Just the day before, I’d sunk pretty low, feeling decidedly un-festive and weary of the yoke of fear, anxiety, […]

As a kid, our family of seven regularly folded ourselves into our hierarchical territories in the station wagon and took off on a road trip to a campsite or the grandparents. Car trips with young, restless kids are predictable: potty breaks, snacks, imaginary forcefields and demilitarization zones between sibling seats. And the common refrain of […]

What a Time for a Holy Week It’s Holy Week 2020, and I think we can all agree this has been an especially Lenty season of Lent. When I was a kid growing up in my big, Catholic family, Lent was something that set us apart. It began with having to explain to my friends […]

Lessons from the Birds and Bees We are hard-wired for panic. Good thing, since a ho-hum reaction to the saber-toothed tiger hiding in the bushes would’ve sent us the way of the dodo bird long ago. Fight or flight jolts of adrenaline get the blood pumping and spur us to action and, by design, safety […]

Families tend to be littered with characters, most of them ordinary–playing their vital roles and fulfilling their duties in matter-of-fact ways–and a few exceptional, the sprinkles on what might otherwise be a rather vanilla family cupcake. My mother’s younger sister was the sprinkle. I knew nothing of their childhood until I’d grown well past my […]

It’s a rare thing in our transient and fickle world to meet with the kind of steadfastness and constancy that spans decades. How could I have known that in my ninth year, when my greatest desire was to spend an afternoon with my nose in a book, that I would find my first real and […]