In East Texas, where pine needles carpet the earth and rusted Fords sink into clay, we lived by ***** holidays. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving—days the schoolhouse shutters clapped shut, leaving us to roam dirt roads under a sallow sun. These were the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant markers, chiseled into the calendar like commandments. No Diwali lanterns, no Ramadan crescents, just the same bleached rituals, year after year, in a town where diversity was a word nobody spoke.

Christmas meant a cedar hacked from the back forty, strung with Wal-Mart tinsel, its glow pooling on linoleum. Easter was eggs boiled hard, dyed in vinegar-stink, hidden in crabgrass while we swatted gnats. Thanksgiving brought canned yams and a turkey carcass picked clean, the table loud with kin who smelled of Marlboros and sweat. ***** holidays, we called them, laughing, because what else was there? Just us, white as the salt in the shaker, poor as the cracked plates we ate from, making do in a place where poverty was the only creed we all shared.

I’d climb the cedar fence, stare past the horizon, wondering what other days lit up other lives. Back then, it was just this: potluck hymns, church pews, and the same three feasts, cycling like seasons. We were trash, maybe, but we wore it proud, our ***** holidays the only map we knew.