Julia Nunnally Duncan

1 month ago | chapter16.org | Erica Wright |Maria Browning |Julia Nunnally Duncan |Margie Sanders

When I was a teenager, I dreamed about living in New York City and having a cat à la Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I think about that fantasy as I stand in my Tennessee backyard in the middle of the night because my beagle mix Penny has eaten something that disagreed with her sensitive digestive tract. Probably an onion she dug up, but maybe a piece of decaying bird she managed to chomp while I wasn’t paying attention on our midday walk.

Sep 24, 2024 | smliv.com | Julia Nunnally Duncan

On winter mornings, the smell wood smoke in the air reminds me of my family’s wood stove. Our wood-fired cook stove stood in the dining room near the table. It was cast iron with white enamel trim and had several cooking eyes, a water reservoir, and a baking oven. Every year, my father bought a supply of oak wood; logs that had to be split with an ax and stored in our backyard woodshed.

Aug 27, 2024 | recorder.com | Julia Nunnally Duncan

After reading Doug Selwyn’s column Understanding trauma in the schools [Aug. 24], I still blame Democrats for keeping kids out of school for so long. Since Selwyn is the chair of the Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution educational task force (quite a mouthful), he and the Democrats he spoke with for his article don’t point fingers at fellow Democrats. Thankfully, Donald Trump wasn’t blamed in the article.

Aug 4, 2024 | smliv.com | Julia Nunnally Duncan

Years ago, my family and I spent a lot of time on Garden Creek Road in McDowell County, North Carolina, visiting my grandmother in the white frame house where my father’s family settled after they moved from East Tennessee to Western North Carolina. Across the road from my grandmother’s house was a hillside of woods. Occasionally my father would ask, “Why don’t we go on a hike?” I knew he meant a walk in those woods he’d known since boyhood, a terrain he loved.

May 27, 2024 | smliv.com | Julia Nunnally Duncan

During my early childhood, John was like a grandfather to me. Though he was a neighbor—the husband of my babysitter, Dora—I called him Grandpa and believed he was my grandpa, just as I considered Dora my grandma. Dora, a lady in her 60s, and John, in his 70s, lived at the top of the street where I grew up. Ours was a close-knit neighborhood, very rural then in the early 1960s. Many houses, including Dora’s, still had outhouses in the backyards.