Hi, it's Major. The slowdown is on a break right now, but we'll be back soon with a new host.

In the meantime, we're bringing you some of the best episodes from our archives. Today, we

revisit an episode from Tracy K. Smith's time at the helm. Enjoy.

I'm Tracy K. Smith, and this is The worn path. Deep ruts eaten into earth make up a road. But there are additional roots,

footprints and wheel grooves, and grassy straits few have traveled.

The myth of a central history of America is damaging to those whose stories have been left untended, overgrown,

and it is damaging for those who believe the one heavily trafficked road is the

only road. It has become clear to me that the work of survival for this fraught nation is the work

of stopping to listen to the many divergent narratives of America.

Today's poem is Leaving Tulsa by Jennifer Elise Forrester.

Four Cossetta.

Once there were coyotes, cardinals in the cedar,

you could cure amnesia with the trees of our back 40.

Once, I drowned in a monsoon of frogs.

Grandma said it was a good thing, a promise for a good crop.

Grandma's perfect tomatoes, squash. She taught us to shuck corn, laughing,

never spoke about her childhood or the faces in gingerbread tins stacked in the closet.

She was covered in a quilt, the creek way. But I don't know this kind of burial. Vanishing toads, thinning pecan

groves, peach trees choked by palms, new neighbors tossing clipped grass over our fence line,

griping to the city of our overgrown fields.

Grandma fell in love with a truck driver,

grew watermelons by the pond on our Indian allotment,

...