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A couple of weeks ago I went to the beach. It had been a while. It had, in fact, been too long. Too long since I had gulped salt air and embraced the breeze off the ocean. Too long since I had felt the graininess of sand on the back of my calves and the tingle of the sun on my bare shoulders. Too long since I had started the day without a to-do list. Fortunately, my friend’s invitation is a standing one and when I texted, “Is this weekend good?”, she texted back, “Come on down.” It was late morning when I crested the bridge in Darien and was greeted by the marsh rolled out like a carpet in the pale hues of toast and tea and young peas. The fingers of the Altamaha River lay flat and still. A dozen or so shrimp boats huddled together like a litter of puppies, their masts tilted at odd angles, their painted hulls flaking and faded. And as my tires trump-thump-thumped their way across the bridge, the tableau of water and marsh and boats jostled a memory, one from deep in that place where our brains save images that have no significance in the moment but which years later show up as totems, talismans, charms. My Uncle John was a shrimper. His arms were Popeye-thick and his skin, after decades of sun exposure, bore deep lines. One year when I was around 12, he and Aunt Jean invited us down to the Blessing of the Fleet. The local Catholic priest stood on the dock, his long black cassock fluttering just a bit as the wind licked its way across the river, and pronounced a blessing over the season about to begin. The only blessing I knew anything about was the one we recited before every meal, but even in my state of Protestant ignorance, I recognized that the moment was significant, that the gathering of the community to acknowledge its need for providential assistance as the boats set forth was, in fact, sacred. I took two or three deep breaths as the memory dropped anchor and slipped away, but I found myself wondering if that sunny April day was when I first felt the magnetic pull of the coastline. Did the blessing meant for the seaworthiness of the boats, the bounty of the catch, the safety of the sailors overflow onto me? And was that what has continued to draw me back all these years – a hope that my own boat might be found seaworthy, that whatever my catch it might be bountiful, that despite the storms I might be kept safe? For another twenty miles or so I followed Highway 17, past a fish camp or two, through road construction that felt as though it has been going on forever, and then up onto the Torres Causeway, the rainbow of concrete and steel that connects the mainland to St. Simons Island, where the live oaks fold over King’s Way like hands in prayer and the sea oats wave like every day is Palm Sunday. Over the next 48 hours, I would satisfy my craving for salt air and sea breeze. I would walk in the thin space where land and sea converge. I would hear a blessing said over breakfast in sight of the ocean and supper in sight of the marsh. And I would get to see the faces and hug the necks of one, two, three ... eight, NINE folks whose lives make mine better. The Sunday sun was still climbing the sky when I left for home. It wasn’t a long trip, but it was long enough. Long enough to remember why I came. Long enough to once again receive a blessing for my one-woman fleet. Copyright 2026

Graduation season is winding down and, having stuffed more graduation cards with Walmart gift cards this year than ever before, I found myself remembering the commencement address I delivered at Georgia Southern in December, 2015. I wondered if I still stand by the advice I shared in my five allotted minutes. After re-reading it, I found out that I do, so in the spirit of lifelong learning, here is that advice, slightly edited, for all of us: KEEP READING. Over the course of your college education you have read a lot of books. Reading is a good habit. Don’t break it. Keep a novel in your briefcase or a biography in your backpack. Keep a book of poetry on your nightstand. Keep pouring into your brain ideas that challenge your assumptions. Keep expanding the boundaries of your cerebral geography, stretching your intellectual muscles, and feeding your imagination with thoughts and ideas, with words and stories that make you exclaim out loud, “That is amazing!” Or “How can that be?” Or, best of all, “Me, too!” It is quite possible that civilization depends upon it. SAY, “I DON’T KNOW.” You’ve learned a lot since you arrived as freshmen, some of it about history and psychology and literature. A great deal of it about yourself. The true value of an education, however, is the realization that, despite all we learn, there is always going to be a great deal that we don’t know, can’t know. And that’s okay. But because the world outside the academy can be a little perfectionistic, obsessive, and downright demanding about such things as knowing and certainty and being sure, it’s probably a good idea to start saying, “I don’t know” whenever, wherever, and as often as possible. Because, it should be noted, “I don’t know” is where curiosity is born and curiosity will feed you when nothing else will. TAKE SOME CHANCES. Not the race-the-train kind or the intentionally-stupid I-dare-yous, but the ones that push your out of your comfort zone, the ones that require you to recognize, articulate, and face down your greatest fears. The ones that come to you like the voice of Gandalf or Yoda or God. Take those chances with no guarantee that the result will be what you wanted or planned. Take those chances because otherwise you will waste far too much time, spend far too much of your beautiful, beautiful life having drinks with regret, a conversation that consists of little more than the endless repetition of the unanswerable question, “What if? REMEMBER FROM WHENCE YOU CAME. Yes, that means Georgia Southern and the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, but, more importantly, it means the place from which you came to get here, the people and places that formed your own personal history – the voices and the stories that were the soundtrack of your childhood, the lessons and experiences that were the foundations of your character, the people and experiences that form your cultural DNA. In an increasingly multi-cultural, cross-cultural world that knowledge is what will enable you to remain an individual and offer your unique contribution to society. And, finally, PAY ATTENTION. Because you know how to footnote, you know the importance of details. Because you know what a primary source is, you know how to sift through the chaff of information overload to find the kernel of wheat that is real nourishment. Because you know how to construct a real sentence – one with actual parts of speech and one that follows established grammatical and syntactical rules, one that other people actually understand – you know how to communicate. To connect. To share. And since you know how, your job from this point forward is to make sure that what you communicate is true and good and beautiful and eternal. So, pay attention. To everything. Beginning today. When you walk out of this gymnasium and go to meet your families, notice the color of your father’s tie, the scent of your mother’s perfume. When you pack up your apartment, take a minute to absorb its emptiness. Say something and hear the echo of your own voice. And do that every day from here on out. Paying attention is a skill that will make you a valued employee, a trustworthy companion, a nurturing parent, and a human being who will one day be able to say, like poet, author, and scientist Diane Ackerman, that you have lived not just the length of your life, but the width of it as well. Congratulations. And Godspeed. Copyright 2026

In the days before it rained, as the moisture evaporated from the soil and I stood at my kitchen window watching the landscape grow to look more and more like a prairie – tawny and tan – , I thought, of course, of the farmers. They wear drought on their faces, carry it in their voices, broadcast it to all the world in the empty fields that should have long ago been planted. I thought, too, of all the people I know for whom working in the yard (which is what we in South call gardening) is a particular joy, for whom damp dirt under their fingernails is evidence of a day well-lived, for whom the sound of a lawn mower and the smell of just-cut grass is magic. These folks, too, feel a specific ache when the clouds drift over unemptied. I am not much of a gardener myself, though I have tried – Lord, have I tried! Every so often I get the urge to give Sandhill what one might call a swipe of lipstick, but my efforts have been successful only about 50% of the time. I get discouraged at the impertinence of weeds and tend to forget to water. I think I planted five hydrangeas before I got one to live and I have yet to get a camellia to survive. I am like the music lover who can't carry a tune. However, a 50% success rate and whatever may have been passed along genetically from Grandmama Anderson, whose yard resembled a botanical garden in its bounty of native plants and who was one of the most centered and peaceful people I have ever known, is enough for this incurable optimist to keep trying and, as the dry days continued and the only yard work I could do was pick up the sticks that had once been branches and limbs on the trees in my backyard, I allowed myself to fantasize about what I might do if we ever got some water. And then it rained! Two inches on a beautifully gray day and that much more a few days later. In a flash of insight it occurred to me that while there had not been enough rain to replenish the water table or even make the fields amenable to seed, there had been enough to make it a little easier for me to pull some weeds. I started with the dandelion that had grown to at least three feet tall with thorns as sharp as a syringe. The shovel went into the dirt not exactly with ease, but with less resistance than I would have received just a few days earlier. I made a circle of curved divots and repeated the process three more times, each round a little deeper, the dirt yielding a little more with each thrust. When the taproot released with a most satisfying pop, I stood back, leaned on the handle of the shovel, and smiled. I found three more overgrown dandelions, performed the same surgical incisions, and decided that was enough for one afternoon. Not much actual work, but adequate satisfaction. It has been over a week and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the dandelion. A weed, a thorny weed, a thorny weed with no redeeming qualities as far as I can tell. A weed that managed to not just survive in a drought, but to thrive. A weed that has a lot in common, I think, with human behaviors like anger and pride and impatience, selfishness and prejudice and greed. Behaviors whose roots will give way only when the surrounding soil has been loosened by deep intention. I need to get back outside with the shovel. There are still weeds and they grow fast. Copyright 2026

The first time I visited Nahunta, which is in Brantley County and almost exactly two hours straight down Highway 301, was over 20 years ago. It was the weekend of the 4th of July and I went with a friend to pick up a piece of furniture. The weather was archetypally hot and humid, stereotypically muggy, the kind of wet heat that only those born and bred in the climate of South Georgia or similar locales have the ability to withstand without an inordinate amount of whining. That is, the air felt like an extra shirt, damp and clinging like Saran Wrap. The yard of the house where we were to pick up the furniture was full of azaleas grown large and wild and trees of various species festooned in Spanish moss hanging in absolute stillness in the heat. The house itself could have walked straight out of a Tennessee Williams play, white stucco etched on every side by vines in every shade of green. I half expected to see the front door open and Burl Ives walk out onto the tiled stoop, the stub of a cigar between his fingers. I don’t remember actually loading the furniture, but I remember my first look at Nahunta. And in the years since that first look – years in which I have attended funerals and wedding showers and birthday parties, ridden a golf cart in the Christmas Parade, celebrated Easter with homemade bonnets, and spent many an hour in deep conversation under those moss-draped trees – I have grown attached. It is understandable, then, that the past couple of weeks have made me anxious and uncertain and very very sad. What the meteorologists and firefighters are calling the Highway 82 Fire has grown, as I write this, to over 20,000 acres and is only 6% contained. Over 400 people are working to contain the fire. They will not be able to put it out. Only rain can do that. For fifty years I was a farmer’s daughter. For fifty years I watched him watch the sky, whisper softly, “we need rain.” But never did we have to watch helplessly as decades of work turned into kindling. I have been checking on my people in Nahunta and Brantley County. I have been asking what I can do and I keep being told, “Pray for rain.” On Sunday night I went to a community prayer service at my church to do just that. I cried through the whole thing. I am not one of those people who thinks that “everything happens for a reason,” that children die because “God needed another angel,” or that floods and tornadoes and wildfires are the manifestation of a vengeful deity. I am one of those people who thinks that we are put here to help each other, to hold hands as we make our way home, to respond to tragedy and destruction with mercy and compassion. I am one of those people who, in the midst of drought – meteorological or spiritual – will pray for rain. I don’t know what Nahunta and Brantley County will look like when rain finally comes and the landscape is quiet, but I do know there will be both sorrow over what is lost and gratitude for what remains. And in the duality, there will be hope. Copyright 2026 If you are interested in making a tangible contribution to recovery efforts in Brantley County and other effected areas, a recommended provider is MTN2SEA Ministries.

The sand is the color of gas station paper towels. It bears the tattoos of at least a dozen different tire prints. Crossed at various intervals by the undulating swath of a snake of unknown venomosity, the road rolls out in both directions like bolts of cloth. My feet slap rhythmically over the low swells, tiny rocks catching in the treads of my shoes. This is me walking. Every day. It was thirty years ago this spring that I began. Chosen as a “Community Hero,” one of eight local residents who would carry the 1996 Olympic Torch through Statesboro on its way to the Games in Atlanta, I was both excited and afraid, excited to be a part of the event that had long held me in thrall and afraid that I would embarrass myself by huffing and puffing my way a tenth-of-a-mile down Highway 301. It was all the motivation I needed to hit the road. That first afternoon I locked the door of my little brick office anchoring the bottom of the hill behind First Baptist Church, headed up the steep angle of Sharpe Street, and turned left onto North Main. I walked until I got tired and then turned around and walked back. I did it again the next day. And the next. It is interesting what you can learn about the town in which you’ve lived your entire life when you slow down long enough to look at things. I memorized every crack in the sidewalk and timed the traffic lights so that I had to slow only minimally at the crosswalks. I chatted with people sitting on porches and knew when the azaleas at the Chamber of Commerce were blooming. I read the plaque on that big rock outside the library. The evening of July 13 was left damp by an afternoon cloudburst. Shallow puddles on the asphalt reflected the flashing headlights of the police cruiser that led the way as one torch bearer passed the flame to the next. The highway was lined with people we knew and I remember telling someone in the days following that everyone should have the opportunity to run down the streets of her hometown while her community cheered. The next day was a Sunday and I rested, but on Monday I was walking again. I stretched my route to encompass the Presbyterian church outside town. I watched football practice along the banks of Beautiful Eagle Creek and picked magnolia blossoms from branches hanging over the sidewalk at the Botanic Garden. I watched the seasons change. Eventually I changed offices, changed jobs. I left the sidewalks and streets for dirt roads and ditches. And I kept walking. What started as a singular endeavor became a discipline and the discipline became a routine, something I have done for three decades now without a lot of thought. But today is different. Today, passing the cluster of unmatched mailboxes tilting into each other at the corner of the field, watching Owen run madly through the underbrush on the trail of a rabbit, noticing the black lace shadows of pine trees thrown at my feet, I recognize that what I am doing is not a routine. A routine is a fixed program, undertaken so often as to become automatic, mechanical. A routine can be performed with little thought or awareness. Walking is far more than that. Walking is ritual. Walking – like communion, like baptism – creates, connects, illuminates. Walking, I undress myself of all the questions I cannot answer, the problems I cannot solve. Walking, I open my eyes to see the earth and sky in which I am enveloped. Walking, I participate in the profoundest of all rituals – the recognition of being alive. Behind me the sun begins to angle its light, pushing me back in the direction from which I have come, back to the spot from which tomorrow I will walk again. Copyright 2026

One of the last field trips I took with my father, just a few weeks before we found out that he was ill, was to buy a crepe myrtle for Sandhill. After numerous arboreal failures, sincere but unsuccessful attempts at turning my peanut-field-turned-yard into something lawn-like (Think dogwoods and camellias.), I remained optimistic about trying to bring some color to my environs. After investigation, I decided that the crepe myrtle might be hardy enough to withstand the benign neglect at which I was very good. Daddy and I, along with my brother, who is the one who had the truck, took off for town that early spring morning and, unable to find a crepe myrtle at the first couple of places we stopped, ended up at a nursery just outside town where a fresh-faced college student in khakis and a polo shirt led us out back to examine their stock. When she asked me what color, I said, “Not bright pink.” They had several shades of “not bright pink,” including a lavender that made me think of the satin lining of the academic hood I wore when I graduated from Wesleyan. I picked that one. At the suggestion of someone who knows a whole lot more about plants than I do, the spindly, slick-limbed tree found itself planted on the west side of the house, tucked in between the chimney and the bay window in the kitchen, a quiet little cove where the winds that regularly race across the field would be able to do little damage. Through the long living room windows I watched the thin branches bob in the breeze and, eventually, sprout hard round buds that suddenly one day burst into crinkled petals of pale purple that looked just like the crepe paper for which, I assumed, they were named. I learned that the clusters of flowers are called panicles. I learned that they are nicknamed “the lilac of the South.” I learned that they can grow as tall as 40 feet and they can live over 50 years. I was so proud. A few weeks ago after one of the multiple cold snaps that blew in after a week of 80-degree weather, I realized that the crepe myrtle, just days before covered in shiny green fronds, had gone completely brown. The toothpick-size branches and the pea-sized buds were the color of strong coffee. Not a hint of life to be seen. I was bereft. That Sunday at church, as the prelude spread across the sanctuary from the organ’s belly, my frequent pewmate Kim and I were, not surprisingly, discussing the weather. Still shivering from my walk across the parking lot, I whined about the hesitancy of spring to come and stay and the next thing I knew I was telling Kim how sad I was that my crepe myrtle had not survived the latest freezing temperatures. Kim is an excellent gardener. She was also, for many years, a labor and delivery nurse. She has maternal skills and instincts I can admire, but never replicate. “You might,” she spoke softly as the prelude’s last notes gathered momentum and came down to rest gently on our shoulders, “just wait. I’ve found that sometimes things come back.” She said it in a tone that suggested she might not be talking about just crepe myrtles. This past Saturday, after a long week of traveling and less than restful sleep, I went outside to take deep breaths and watch the sunset. The last golden rays spilled across the landscape like a spotlight, falling into the corner where the crepe myrtle stood, covered in bright green leaves. My back to the sunset, I stood and stared, not in surprise but gratitude – for wise friends and the willingness to wait. Copyright 2026

One day last week I had lunch with three of my longtime hometown friends. Two of them I have known since we started first grade at Mattie Lively. The third, who attended Sallie Zetterower, we met in sixth grade when the populations of what were then the only elementary schools in Statesboro merged into the now long-gone Statesboro Junior High School. It is difficult, when we get together these days – days that pull us ever closer to our 70th birthdays – not to think of the hundreds of days we spent together in hallways and gyms and biology labs, in sleeping bags spread across living room floors, in station wagons and pick-up trucks. We talk about the present, but always through the filter of that shared past. Long after we share parking lot hugs and drive off into traffic we could not have imagined in 1974, my thoughts are periodically interrupted by unexpectedly vivid images – the wet cold of a rainy February Saturday outside the Piggly Wiggly selling March of Dimes balloons for Y Club, the sticky sweetness of lunchroom cinnamon rolls, the smell of Herbal Essence shampoo and Jean Nate’ cologne, the treble notes of trumpets and trombones floating through fog across the football field. I can hear with strange clarity the scratchy recording of “The National Anthem” broadcast over the intercom and the feel of the rounded edge of the frayed bus seat against the back of my thighs. The girls and boys peopling those memories are all gone. Have been for a long time. None of us, we have often proclaimed, would go back, would be 16 again, but ... still ... And, then, another memory surfaced, one from only a few years ago, not decades. It was a balmy afternoon, one festooned with cotton ball clouds in a pale blue sky. I had set out for an amble down my dirt road, a book opened in my palms. I was already deep into the fiction of some other life in some other place when I reached the break in the fence that surrounded my parents’ house and saw, just out of the corner of my eye, my father standing at the threshold of the front door, delaying his entrance to stare at me as I approached. I closed the book over my finger to hold my place and called out, “Hey, Daddy!” “Hey, Doll,” he responded with the slightest of nods toward the book in my hands. “You ain’t changed since you were seven years old,” and he turned to walk inside. The corners of my mouth curled up and a deep sigh rose from my chest. I felt seen and known and loved. I had, of course, changed since I was seven, in ways both irrelevant and essential, but what my father saw and knew and loved – the girl so often essentially described as “walking around with her head in a book” – was still there. It occurred to me, then, that I had been wrong about the other boys and girls, too – the ones writing term papers and solving equations, making lay-ups and jumping hurdles, taking their first tenuous steps toward the future and toward themselves. They are not gone; they didn’t disappear. They (and I) just experienced for ourselves that really big word we learned in the third grade classrooms of Mattie Lively and Sallie Zetterower: metamorphosis. We just became – no, we are just becoming – exactly what and who we were always meant to be. Copyright 2026

For weeks now, the predominant notes floating through the dense morning air at Sandhill have been those of the mourning dove. Often they have been the only sound coming from the branch, an aria written in a minor key. On other days, they have been joined by a chorus of wrens or a choir of mockingbirds, but the predominant melody greeting me in these waning days of winter has been their haunting coo-coo-coo. I missed them when I had to be in the big city for a couple of days last week. There was business that needed attention and I stayed with some friends from law school who are also excellent hoteliers and bird lovers. We were sitting at the kitchen counter catching up and about to start supper when my phone rang and a quick glance at the Caller ID confirmed that it was the call that I had been both expecting and dreading. A man who called me family (though we shared no DNA or legal ties), a man with whom I had spent hours talking to death everything from sharecropping to Sunday School to SEC football, a man who had sat with me while I cried over a broken heart, was gone. “I know ... I know ... I’m so sorry ... I love you ... I know ... I know,” I cooed to the bereft voice on the phone. I did not sleep well that night. Behind eyelids that would not stay closed, memories flickered like old black and white movies – that time he spent the better part of a Saturday dragging me and his wife to every hardware store in two counties looking for a very specific pine straw rake, the weekend he had me standing in knee-high water helping him build a dock, the night he piloted the pontoon boat through an unexpected storm – , all of which became more elaborate stories with every retelling. When I finally slept, a series of fitful dreams kept me close to the surface of consciousness. I would remember only two, in each of which I was carrying a pottery vessel which, as I tripped over something invisible, went crashing to the floor, shattering into ugly irregular shards. I got up the next morning uneasy and unsure. Death does that. Every single death does that. It undermines foundations and fertilizes doubt. It instigates insecurity and makes uncertainty the only currency. It is like navigating back roads by GPS and suddenly losing service, leaving you with no choice but to keep moving forward but with no idea how to get where you are going. It was nearly midday and still far too cold when I stood at an upstairs window and looked out at my friends’ small, city-appropriate backyard. Dotted with bird feeders of various sorts, tended with great attention and much more avian knowledge than I have, it looks like something out of Southern Living. A shaft of sunlight fell on the ground beneath a shepherd’s hook and glinted off chunks of something that had clearly given way to gravity and ended up in pieces, pieces that looked strangely like the pottery in my dreams. “Something’s broken!” I pointed through the window, holding in a gasp. “Just ice,” my friend explained. “The water for the birds froze last night and I turned it out. It will have melted before long.” I sighed with relief. Nothing was broken; it was just changing form. Or, as the Roman poet Ovid wrote, “All things change; nothing perishes.” Three days later I was back at home, rising early to drive across the state to honor my friend, to share with his family, to remember his smile. Grieving, but grateful. And as I stepped outside, the call of the mourning dove bid me Godspeed. Copyright 2026

Dr. Leah Strong, the head of the American Studies Department at Wesleyan in the late 1970s (and my advisor) introduced me to the ideas of popular culture and folklore and taught me that the stories my family told, the songs my family sang, the language used by my family – strong and wise and unaffected country people – were things to be valued and preserved. It is because of Dr. Strong that my ear is trained to the cadence and melody of Southern voices, alerted to the layered meanings of colloquialisms, tender to the weightiness of words like “home” and “place.” It is because of Dr. Strong that I was able to begin formulating what I sometimes call my motto, sometimes my thesis, always my one sure thing: It’s all one big story. I owe her a lot. The recent barrage of weather watches and warnings brought on by our unusual winter reminded me of a story she used to tell about being prepared: Dr. Strong’s elderly mother, along with her dachshund Wilhelm and an unnamed tropical bird, lived with her. Every summer they evacuated Macon for Sarasota where Dr. Strong volunteered with the Coast Guard Auxiliary. One summer, in anticipation of hurricane season, the Coast Guard instructed all its personnel, including the Auxiliary, to prepare evacuation plans. Dr. Strong took her responsibility to the Coast Guard very seriously, but she also took very seriously her independence and she did not always appreciate being told what to do. She went home that afternoon and informed her mother of the Coast Guard’s instructions and the fact that she had already developed the plan by which they would remove themselves from harm’s way in the event of a hurricane: “You get the bird; I get the dog; we run like hell.” That was is it. The entire plan in twelve words. That story has been told and re-told by Wesleyan students for over fifty years. The telling is usually accompanied by the orator’s clenching her teeth and squinting her eyes in an attempt to mimic Dr. Strong and thereby emphasize the sincerity and lack of humor with which the original story was told. Like her hero Mark Twain, Dr. Strong knew how to tell a story. She knew how to capture an audience and how to leave that audience not just entertained, but enamored and – more importantly - enlightened. As the notifications regarding our recent weather kept popping up on my phone and spouting out from Alexa, I ran through my plan: Make sure the car has gas; drip the pipes; bring in dog food for two or three days; make sure all the chargeable stuff is charged. Every hour or so I thought of something else. Fill the bird feeders, locate the candles. And then I found myself thinking about Dr. Strong. To be honest, her bad weather plan was probably a little simplistic and most likely not at all feasible. Even she, I think, would admit that is always prudent to keep a supply of batteries and a couple of jugs of water on hand and to identify ahead of time which of your interior rooms provides the best shelter. Still, I have faced enough storms – the kind reported by the Weather Channel and the kind detected by my own intuition – to know that not every threat, not every disaster, not every peril can be averted by preparedness. Sometimes you just have to be able to grab what you love and run like hell. Copyright 2026

The steam rises to my face and I instinctually turn away, gripping the handles of the pot as the pasta tumbles into the colander in the sink. The hot water rushes through the holes and in seconds the strands of spaghetti, only moments ago twisting and twirling around in the water as single threads, are clinging to each other, clumps of cooked flour awaiting something (tomato sauce? cheese? lemon?) that will give it actual flavor. I shake the colander two or three times and, as the last of the liquid drains out, the light coming through the kitchen window reflects off its stainless steel handles and I am carried back to my grandmother’s kitchen. This is not the house that my childhood knew as Grannie and Pa’s. This is the town house, the little two-bedroom just two blocks off Main Street. It is the house where Grannie, with tears running down her cheeks, sang “Red River Valley” to me when I came to say goodbye when I left for college. On this particular day, which could be any of the hundreds of days I stopped by, opened the screened door without knocking, and spent a handful of minutes re-centering myself in the world I was only just beginning to understand as an adult, Grannie is sitting at the table, the S&H Green Stamps catalog is open in front of her. Her face, never reflective of light-heartedness, is serious. In response to my inquiry as to what she is doing, Grannie offers, “There’s a little girl at church gettin’ married. They’re givin’ her a shower. I’ve got some Green Stamps saved up and I thought I might could find her something in here.” She pushes the catalog across the table. “You know what young people like. Maybe you could help me look.” I eagerly accept the catalog and begin turning the pages. “What about this colander,” I ask. “It’s stainless steel so it will last a long time and everybody needs a colander. Have many stamps do you have?” “Three books.” “Perfect! It’s only a book and half.” “And you think she will like it?” “Absolutely. It’s certainly something I would like if I was getting married.” She nods her head, pushes the catalog aside, and asks don’t I want something to eat. A week or so later I will make another visit to the little house and will be greeted by Grannie holding an S&H Green Stamps box. Inside will be a colander, the one that 40 years later will sit in my sink and conjure up memories. Grannie will look at me with the closest thing to delight that I ever saw on her face and say, “I wanted you to have one, too.” There is no moment in which I have ever felt more loved, no place in which I have ever felt safer than that day in Grannie’s kitchen, but the truth is that that same love, that same safety greeted me, my brother, my cousins, every single one of us every single time we stepped over the threshold. That love, that safety is the cornerstone upon which all our lives have been built. I blink away what might be tears, empty the spaghetti into a bowl, and consider the thought that when I assured Grannie that it would last a long time we both knew somehow that I wasn’t talking about the colander. Copyright 2026

Despite knowing that the weathered boards of the deck will be wet and cold, I step outside in bare feet and turn east, toward the spot where the sun would be dangling were it not for a curtain of clouds.  The rain that teased snow started in the night with drops thick as cane syrup – fat and heavy and slow – and it continues this morning with indifference.  Rain don’t care. I do this every morning, this brief inspection of the landscape, this quick review to make sure that the sycamore tree is still upright, that the field road is still winding up over the low rise, that the birds have, once again, found something about which to sing.  With just one or two deep breaths, whatever weight may have settled overnight falls away and I am somehow convinced that whatever insanity awaits me in the morning news, in the next text message, in my uncontrollable imagination, all shall be well. This morning, though, it is cold and dark and I am not so sure. Bending just slightly at my waist, I place my hands on the deck railing.  It is slick with rain, so I keep my eyes down as I stretch my heels, noticing that my hands have become my grandmother’s hands, thick blue veins creating a relief map of memory.  It is because I am looking down, away from the horizon, the sky, the future, that I see the spider web.  Spread across at least three deck spindles, the threads of the web are pendulous with lingering raindrops.  Moving ever so slightly in a breeze I cannot even feel, the drops are a thousand tiny prisms, diamonds, mirrors reflecting a thousand rays of silver gray light.   What captures my attention, though, is the irregularity of the web.  Its sections are oddly sized – some narrow as a dagger and others wide as a fan.  The hub is off-center and the threads look more like yarn than filament.  It is, in fact, rather ugly. As soon as the thought appears, I apologize.  To the spider, the web, myself.  The web is not ugly.  It is, like all of nature, reflective of the conditions in which it was created – the wind, the rain, the cold – and those conditions have forced into the web something far more important than beauty.  The web has been left with strength. It will not last forever, this unique conglomeration of knots.  It will eventually give way to the wind, the rain, gravity because that is like all of nature, too.  But until it does it will shimmer in the light and quiver in the breeze and testify to what it means to persevere against the odds. When I first began my morning ritual my parents were still alive.  Stepping outside each morning and turning east meant that I would see not just the sunrise, but their house.  I would see lights shining in windows and, occasionally, a truck backing out of the driveway headed to town for a tractor part.  I would be reminded that things were as they had always been, as they should be, and – without acknowledging the foolishness of the thought – as they always would be. That I can now undertake this rite of awakening without bowed shoulders and deep sighs, that I can look toward the sun and the empty house with gratitude, that I can stand in the rain and look at a messy knot of a spider web with wonder is the reminder I need that all shall be well. Copyright 2026

My friend Ivan was Jewish. He grew up in a kosher house, went to Hebrew school, was bar mitvah’ed. Even after he converted to Christianity as an adult, that Jewish childhood was reflected in his language, his personality, his way of moving in the world. He once told me a story about the agony of sitting through a long temple service. Jewish services, apparently like those of Christian churches, seemed to go on forever to children forced to sit still and quiet, especially since they were conducted in a language that the youngest ones did not yet know. Ivan explained that in an effort to predict when he would be able to move and make noise again, he carefully watched as the rabbi read from the pages of the Torah, beginning with passages at the front and moving, depending upon the time of year, more or less slowly through the sacred words, toward the end. His anticipation rose as the readings continued and he practically squealed with joy as the rabbi closed the back cover. “And then,” Ivan explained, “the rabbi said, ‘And because it is the third week of the seventh month, we will,’ as he turned the Torah back to the beginning, ‘start all over again!” I laughed out loud at the idea of young Ivan’s face falling in profound disappointment and at the realization that all of us humans, Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or None, know that feeling, that failure of expectation. In these recent weeks, the ones that have curved madly toward and then gently away from the end of one year and the beginning of the next, I thought of that story and its theme of linearity (a geometric principle that a change in one variable effects a change in another) and its metaphysical corollary that anything can be changed with enough human effort. Belief in that ability is the basis of every new year’s resolution that has ever been made. Try hard, be disciplined, and you can make yourself better. You can spend less and exercise more. You can expand your horizon and reduce your carbon footprint, you can lower your cholesterol and raise your net worth. We believe it and throw our energy, our time, our money into that belief like a bass throws itself at a hooked worm. And then we stare at the scale and the bank statement like Ivan stared at the Torah, stunned that what we see is not what we imagined. In that moment, when “new year new you” is outed as the trope that it is, we have two choices. We can feel the disappointment grasp us like a riptide and pull us into John Bunyan’s “slough of despond,” where guilt and shame and despair mirror back to us what sad examples of humanity we are, and resign ourselves to living life on the periphery, the place where desire and beauty and our true selves are just out of reach. Or we can feel the disappointment and, like the Charleston rabbi, start all over again. We can take a deep breath, put all our effort into lifting the heavy covers of the book, and flip back to first page and its familiar words. “In the beginning ...” And if we take the second choice, it is imperative that we remember that New Year’s Day (in all capital letters and designated as a federal holiday) comes but once every orbit around sun, but a new year is available with every sunrise, every heartbeat, every breath. Copyright 2026

One day last week – a cold and rainy day when, mercifully, I had no reason to leave home – I thought of Christmas and a specific image came to me, thrown up on the screen of my memory like one of the green-tinged slides that document my childhood. My mother and I were walking down Main Street, shoe boxes under our arms, shopping bags dangling from our wrists, our chilled breath hovering in the air for just a moment before floating off into the gray sky. And it wasn’t just a visual impression. I could feel the cold and I was looking up at my mother, not yet the four inches taller than she that I would eventually become. The collar of my coat was itchy. I could hear the traffic, smell the exhaust. How odd that, for all the tinsel-lit stages from which my child self stood on the back row and warbled all four verses of “Silent Night” and “Hark The Herald Angels Sing,” for all the sticky cedar trees I watched my father struggle to get upright in the skinny red and green tree holders, for all the houses in the nicer neighborhoods whose yards were strewn with string after string of fat colored lights, for all the new flannel pajamas and peppermint candies and hard plastic wreaths, that particular image is what illuminated my thoughts. How unusual that an ordinary moment, one not even definitively associated with the holiday, was the one scene from decades of Christmases coded somehow by my brain to respond to that particular neural command. The day grew dark. The yard light bloomed. I lit a fire, made some hot chocolate, and sat down to watch my favorite Christmas movie, "Love, Actually." I admit that there is some dispute about whether “Love, Actually” is actually a Christmas movie. It is not a retelling, allegorical or otherwise, of the Nativity. It is not a dramatization of a folktale involving a beneficent fat man. It is, some say, just a loosely connected series of stories that happen to happen at Christmas. I don’t know how many times I have seen it, but it is enough that I can anticipate scenes, quote lines, know what has been cut for commercials. I knew as I fast-forwarded through the opening credits that I was going to cheer (Go, Sam, go!) and laugh (“There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?”) and cry (How could Alan Rickman do that to Emma Thompson?). It would be a comfort watch – no suspense, no surprises. Except, of course, this time (just like the first time) I held my breath with Colin Firth’s marriage proposal as though there was some chance his Portuguese cleaning lady might say no. I sighed every time Laura Linney called her poor broken brother darling. I growled at Billy Bob Thornton’s lechery. And just about the time Hugh Grant loosened his tie and took off boogeying through 10 Downing Street, I realized some important. The timing – the happening at Christmas – is the whole point. The mystery and magic at the heart of the story that stars a naive teenage girl and features a supporting cast of dirty shepherds and a clueless innkeeper leaves room for cameos and walk-ons and ad libs and turns even the ordinary moments – walking down a city street, for example – into memories that last forever. Memories that are Christmas, actually. Copyright 2025

It is Sunday, the second Sunday in Advent and, though the season is upon us, I am not in a particularly festive mood.  For four days it has rained.  For four days the water-filled clouds have anchored themselves in the sky.  For four days I have stared out the back door at the shed in which the Christmas tree huddles in a corner, disassembled and naked, waiting.  Waiting for the rain to stop, waiting to be dragged across the yard, waiting to yield its wire and plastic limbs to baubles and lights. We learn early what it means to wait.  Wait in line, wait your turn.  Most of elementary school, it seemed, involved some form of waiting.  I can still remember standardized test day and the jittery anticipation of the moments preceding the teacher’s proclamation of, “You may begin.” The Apollo mission countdowns projected in black and white images on pull-down screens, the starter’s pistol thrusting runners from their crouches, and the pause to say a blessing before every meal collectively taught me that delay is always brief and always results in something good. Then I grew up.  Learned that waiting can end in disappointment and loss, that patience does not always yield a prize, that longsuffering sometimes results in only that – long suffering. The irony is not lost on me, as I glare out the window at the puddles and flattened leaves, that this diatribe against waiting has erupted during the season on the Christian calendar during which we are instructed to wait.  I leave my post and walk through the living room where, on a table cluttered with photos of my family, sits the Advent wreath. Four candles.  One for each day of the darkness and gloom that have kept me waiting. Four candles.  One for each of the gifts of the approaching Nativity.  Hope.  Peace.  Joy.  Love. Without much enthusiasm I light the first two candles, hope and peace.  I watch the flames sway in the darkness, barely moving, like the girl at the edge of the dance floor waiting to be asked to join in the party.  Movement in the waiting.  Light in the waiting. I take a deep breath and, as I exhale, as I feel the frustration and tension begin to dissipate, the flames flicker.  They bend and grow smaller and almost go out.  But only for a moment.  Because hope cannot be extinguished and peace cannot be snuffed.  They will not always illuminate every corner or disperse every cloud, but they will always be available in the waiting. It is Monday.  Though the rain has stopped, the clouds still hover.  I brave the two miles of slippery clay, bouncing in and out of ruts dug deep in mud, to get to the highway, to end the hibernation enforced by rain.  I keep thinking about the flickering candles, the vulnerable flames, the light they throw into the shadows. The road ahead rises and curves and just as I get to the top of the hill, a round beam of white light breaks through the gray.  The brightness forces me to squint into the flickering, vulnerable sunshine, the flame that dares to pierce the darkness of waiting.  It follows me home and falls over my shoulders as I dive into the darkness of the shed and pull out the Christmas tree. Copyright 2025