Sasee Magazine

During my younger daughter’s freshman year at East Carolina University, she spent a magical, thought-provoking, life-changing weekend at a religious retreat called Chrysalis. She was already an active young Christian who devoted most of her free time at ECU to the Wesley Foundation, touring eastern North Carolina with the Wesley Singers. She had been brought [...]

I cried when my baby brother was born. There was nothing wrong with him or my mama, but when my grandma told me my youngest sibling was a boy, I burst into tears. I knew my mother and father would be happy because they had been hoping for a boy, but I was decimated. I [...]

My church has always co-sponsored a community Thanksgiving Eve service with the local Baptist church. For many years, I sang in the choir during the services when my church was the host, and I had simply thought of the service as part of the holiday routine. We sang the traditional hymns, “We Gather Together,” and [...]

“That’s Kim, all right. She’s got plenty of book sense, but she doesn’t have a lick of common sense.” “Where’s Kim? She’s probably got her nose stuck in a book!” These and other similar comments are a strong thread in the fabric of my childhood memories. My father dropped out of school in fifth grade, [...]

My husband and I have different concepts of home. To my husband, home will always be the family farmhouse, two-storied, white-framed, sitting on a hill surrounded by acres of cotton, corn, soybeans or peanuts. Wild turkeys strut across the field; deer nibble on soybeans near the edge of the woods. Outbuildings are scattered behind the [...]

I can no longer see the man’s face clearly, but I can still see my father’s. I hear my father talking softly to the man on the ledge, “Take it easy. Easy now. You don’t want to do this. Let me help you.” He eases up to the man, almost has his hands on his [...]

When I was a teen, I thought myself a poet, pathetically misunderstood by my parents and society. As a college student, I thought myself not quite as brilliant as at 15, but still intellectually astute, industrious and capable of great deeds. As a young mother, I thought myself one of the most inept women who [...]

I was a Campbell’s Soup kid when I was a young child. No, I didn’t have the ruddy complexion or the round face of the Campbell’s Soup Kids that I saw on television commercials. At the time, I never thought of myself as a Campbell’s Soup kid; I don’t remember thinking of myself as any [...]