
It was late summer of 1967 when my twenty-year-old parents and five-month-old brother moved from Satellite Beach, Florida to Houston, Texas. Almost out of the Florida panhandle, they stopped to fill up their red ‘65 Chevy Impala. “Where you all headed?” the station attendant asked…

Every March we await the coming of pairs of yellow-crested night herons that build their nests and breed in our great Houston Heights live oak trees The day they fly in allows us the privilege of being present at the painstaking labor of building a nest the laying of pale blue…

Each Houston summer, I experience this deal I call Reverse SAD. You might have just read that and thought, Oh, this dude gets happy in the summer. He must like ice cream, and the feeling of burning sand between his toes, and swamp-ass. But no,…

A vacation trip, no matter where we go, how far, or what we do when we get there, can energize and refresh us. I’ve found that the key to this benefit is a change from everyday normality, taking a break from jobs, houses, cars, and…
Summer Stories is a collection of poetry and essays written by local Houston writers. It is a creative non-fiction expression of living–eating, sleeping, breathing–over the course of one hot summer, in this place we call home.