My challenge was to pack enough so that Mom would believe that she’d live long enough to need clothes for warmer weather, but not so much that it seemed I didn’t believe she could go back home by the summer
Meredith McCarroll
Meredith McCarroll is an essayist and scholar from Western North Carolina. She is the author of Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film (University of Georgia Press, 2018) and co-editor of Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (West Virginia University Press, 2019). Her essays have appeared in Southern Cultures, Bitter Southerner, Avidly, and elsewhere. She teaches at Bowdoin College in Maine.