SOURCE: "If the Doorbell's Ringing, It Must Be Home," in The New York Times, September 18, 1997, p. F20.

[In the following essay, adapted from his memoir, All Over but the Shoutin', Bragg relates his mother's lifelong yearning for a home of her own.]

All her life my momma had lived in other people's houses. Sometimes through cheap rent, sometimes through charity, she had lived beholden. The closest thing we had ever had to a home of our own was a small trailer we lived in for only a few months, when I was a boy.

Through it all, my mamma never said she wanted a house. She never even hinted. But if you could have seen her face when we rode down the rural roads of Calhoun County, Ala., heard her talk about how this house is an A-frame and that one is a Victorian, about how this one...