The written HERE

The night shift

The plant runs every hour of every day, which means somebody's shift never lines up with the holiday. These are the essays that come from that fact — Christmas, Mother's Day, New Year's, Labor Day, the clocks changing — each one written from the side of the calendar where somebody's dad, mom or spouse is still on the clock when the rest of the town isn't.

A turnaround day, start to finish follows one shift through a maintenance turnaround, hour by hour, from the 3:40 a.m. alarm to the drive home. Work has the practical version — what the jobs actually are, and what it looks like to come to Baytown for one.

None of this is a complaint. It's just an honest accounting of a town where the plant doesn't observe the calendar the rest of the country runs on, and a fair number of households run on the plant's clock instead.