Sit a Spell: A Conversation with My Nanny
Pull up a rocking chair. Nanny's porch is open.
On a wraparound porch in the foothills outside Nashville, a boy who wore masks everywhere else could finally set them down. His Nanny read him The Monkey and the Crocodile, laughed when he cheated at rummy, and always kept a chess pie cooling on the counter. Years later, after addiction, a daughter's midnight birth, and a coming out that shook his family, she told him the words he carries every day: "God made you exactly who you are."
Now, from a swing on a hill in the Kentucky hollers, Dr. Ryan Joseph Allen tells their story, and Nanny answers. Each chapter pairs a memory with a message from her, from beyond, on love, faith, grief, belonging, and the masks we wear.
Inside you'll find:
- Twenty chapters of family stories, from Easter prize eggs and Christmas scavenger hunts to the quarter jar, the coming out call, and her last winter
- A message from Nanny at the close of every chapter
- "In Nanny's Own Words," her handwritten journal to her grandson, transcribed with her spelling kept as she wrote it
- "Nanny's Kitchen," her recipes for white beans, chess pie, pecan pie, Sock It To Me cake, and boiled cookies
For anyone who misses a grandmother, anyone still waiting to be loved just as they are, and anyone who has ever needed a porch to land on, Sit a Spell is an invitation to slow down, remember the matriarchs who held you, and let yourself be loved.
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