Keep Up with the Essay One Paragraph at a Time
A New Feature (Almost) Every Friday
We Are Now on Threads as well as Facebook
Learn More here
Sign Up for Weekly Reminders here
March 20, 2026
​
​
from “Twelve Red Grapes”
in Short Reads
by Jamie Etheridge
“He should be here with us, I think, and touch the empty spot on the floor beside me.”
—Jamie Etheridge
This week we return to the writing of Jamie Etheridge whom we featured in July 2023. This piece, which appeared in Short Reads on December 31, 2025 describes the lengths that Etheridge and her daughters go to have good luck in the new year—and why they desperately believe they need it.
You can read the entire essay here.
The Paragraph of the Week
​
We squat under the dining table, blanket spread beneath us. The dogs whine, anxious at this odd late-night picnic. Three glass bowls sit at our feet, with twelve red grapes, glistening wet and ripe, in each. At the stroke of midnight, my daughters and I are to devour them—a New Year’s Eve tradition circulating on TikTok, the official fount of knowledge and wisdom for teen girls. Twelve grapes for twelve months, twelve wishes for good luck in the new year. There are other rituals, too. Dollar bills stuffed in our pockets. My younger daughter wears a polka-dot shirt with a polka-dot tie around her neck. Her sister rolls her eyes but tucks pennies into her socks. All our downstairs windows are open; the back door, too. There’s a pot of black-eyed peas on the stove, and on the counter a lemon studded with toothpicks, meant to look like a pig. We’re all wearing white undershirts and red panties. I’m not sure what specific luck these are meant to bring, but we all agree we need as much as we can get this year.
—Jamie Etheridge
Commentary
​​
“The clock tocks down,” writes Jamie Etheridge. “Ten minutes to midnight.” She keeps bumping her head on the underside of the table they have crouched under for good luck. “Ow,” she says. “Focus, Mom,” her daughter tells her, but she hits her head again. Her younger daughter wishes that they “all stay healthy and live a long life.” The older, dutiful daughter who often tells her mother what she wants to hear, promises to “work out every day, stay away from the drama, and finish the year with A’s and B’s.” The reason they need as much luck as they can get is that the girls’ father died the year before. “Suddenly. Unexpectedly.” They are “still devastated.” So they try every superstitious trick they know to make the next year go right, including eating twelve grapes, one for each month, an idea that the girls picked up from TikToc. When Etheridge opens her cell phone to the picture of the girls’ father his “smile warms us,” Etheridge writes, “and I imagine him here, sipping from a flute of champagne, kissing the girls’ flushed cheeks, and stroking my lips with his fingers. He should be here with us, I think, and touch the empty spot on the floor beside me.” When midnight comes they gobble down their red grapes merrily and Etheridge bumps her head again. “The girls laugh and hug the dogs, letting them lick grape juice from their fingers.”
—THE
The Visible Speaking
​
Check out Kathryn Winograd’s new blog of words and photos called The Visible Speaking here. Read our feature of her book by the same name here.
~ ~ ~
Weekly Reminders from
The Humble Essayist
​
We are now on Threads and will begin posting weekly reminders there. If you are on Threads, please follow us there. We are still on Facebook as well. Due to the toxic nature of X we no longer promote our site there.
The best way to keep up with us is to add your name to our growing list of subscribers, and we will send free, brief, weekly reminders of our features with a link to the page directly to your email. Please click on the blue button to subscribe.
Unsubscribe Here.
~ ~ ~
​
Announcements
New Feature
The Humble Essayist Book Club
​
A book club for essayists? Yes! Several times a year The Humble Essayist will devote an entire month of features to a book by one major essayist or an issue of a magazine and we invite you to read along. Our first book will be George Orwell: Selected Essays (Oxford). We will run the features during the month of September and encourage you to comment on it online. More to come.—THE
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
​
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
​
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
​
See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
​
See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
​​
The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
​
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
