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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

The morning light of late November shoots through the windows like a laser, throwing itself past the interruptions of windows panes and blinds to leave a geometrically exact grid on the wall.  The pencil-filled mug-shaped shadow is a perfect silhouette. The glass in the frame on the wall glints with sun so bright I have to narrow my eyes to look. Outside the window, on the narrow strip of field grass mown into a reasonable facsimile of yard, dew creates a mirror on each of the palm-sized sycamore leaves whose grips on narrow branches have been loosened by wind and gravity and, then, just as I begin wondering what the mirrors reflect, thin clouds gauze over the sun and the leaves became just leaves. Something about the scene makes me remember that 34 years ago this week – the week of Thanksgiving – I moved my few pieces of furniture and far too many books into this house I named Sandhill, this house deliberately placed so that the morning sun comes through my bedroom windows, so that a breeze across open fields leaves rocking chairs on the front porch in near-perpetual motion, so that grazing deer and I can catch each others’ eyes. I assumed it would always be so. Another look out the window reminds me that even in nature, especially in nature, nothing remains the same.  Pine seedlings now occupy the dirt that once produced corn and peanuts, cotton and soybeans, Vidalia onions and winter wheat.  They need little tending and will not be harvested for many years, but they are already changing the landscape around Sandhill, at least in my imagination.   Still short and years away from qualifying as actual trees, I can already see them, tall and dark and blocking out the back deck sunrises and the front porch sunsets that have kept me company for decades.  One day I will not be able to see rain clouds approaching from a distance.  At some undetermined moment in the future I will not be able to stand in the front yard and watch a bulbous moon magically appear on the horizon and float up into the sky. Among the many lessons I have learned from my dirt road observatory, however, is that anticipatory grief is dangerous.  Mourning a sun that has not yet risen, a breeze that has not yet brushed my cheek is evidence that I am not paying attention to the sun, the breeze that is mine today.  It means that I am missing the beauty and the lessons in the new landscape developing around me.  It means that I have lost sight, if only for a moment, of the reality that I am capable of surviving and adapting to things I never wanted. It was providential, I think, that it was at Thanksgiving that Sandhill became my home, my safe place, my inspiration.  Providential that in the light of thousands of sunrises, some of them obscured by clouds, I have learned how to find truth in small things, to trust the voice of my heart, to tell the stories that matter.   How can I be anything but grateful? Copyright 2025

The old house at the crossroads, its raw wood grown to a deep, dull gray, was already old and gray the first time my father drove us down the rocky dirt road to the farm. Its walls tilted and its porch sagging, the abandoned dwelling was the last piece of evidence I needed as proof that we would soon arrive at the end of the earth. It hasn’t changed much in the fifty-something years since I first saw it.  The last remaining panes of wavy glass were shot out by drunk teenagers at least 30 years ago and the crepe myrtle tree that used to bloom in the fall has been completely overrun by sedge brush, but it remains the landmark by which we and our neighbors offer navigation to people who don’t use GPS.  And it turned out that the end of the earth is exactly where I was supposed to be. Almost exactly one mile from my front door, the old house has become a part of my terroir, my “somewhereness,” the full descriptiveness of who I am.  I know it like I know the pond in my backyard, the fallen fencerow at the edge of the field, the tree struck by lightning that refuses to fall.  I can show you where  a clump of daffodils blooms every spring and where, come summer, gladioli the color of peach Nehi sprout right at the edge of the overgrown yard.  I have seen people stop their cars and herd their children into the cotton field that runs almost all the way up to the collapsing walls just to get what I am sure turned out to be their Christmas card photo.  And in a near-Southern gothic moment, my sister-in-law and I found my mother sitting on the hood of her mini-van in the shade of the old house’s rusted tin roof having thrown a pair of pantyhose at a rattlesnake in an attempt to charm him. The house has been a part of the set design of my life for over half a century and I don’t think anyone, even – no, especially – the people who actually own it can blame me for feeling a little proprietary. A few months ago I drove by and saw a pick-up truck backed up to the house and a couple of men I didn’t recognize loading bricks from the crumbling chimney.  Because country folks were the original Neighborhood Watch, I called my high-school classmate whose family owns the house and hundreds of acres surrounding it.  Turns out that one of his cousins was building a cabin and what initially appeared to be trespassing was an act of reclamation. It didn’t stop with the bricks.  Over the last few weeks the men in the pick-up trucks have been taking boards – most certainly hundred-year-old heart pine – from what is left of the walls and now, instead of casting a thick black shadow over the crossroads as the sun climbs the sky, the house looks like a skeleton, light slanting through the empty walls.  I can see all the way through them, the remaining boards make me think of the ribs of long-dead roadkill.   I think it is admirable, this reusing of resources, this saving of history, but I can’t help feeling wistful.  All around me, all around us, the landscape of the town, the county that birthed and nursed and reared me is being wiped away at a speed that feels more like demolition than progress – peanut fields replaced, seemingly overnight, by cinder block factories and stands of pine trees transformed into parking lots in a matter of days.  Can I be blamed for worrying that when the backdrops of our stories are gone so will be the stories? Through the window of my house – a house that will one day in the not unforeseeable future become an old house with broken windows and tilting walls – the bright sun of the first post-freeze morning of the year steps over the horizon and makes silhouettes of the emptying trees, illuminates the fallen leaves, reminds me that the stories will never be gone, not so long as there is someone to tell them. And as the sun eases silently higher and higher all I can think is, Let that someone be me.  Let it be us.   Copyright 2025

The coin-sized moth lay flat against the front door, its paired wings curving gently like Peter Pan collars. I almost didn’t see it. I had crossed the yard, climbed the front steps, and taken the porch in three long strides, my thoughts on a million things, when something – It may have been Owen darting between my legs hustling to get inside or the singular flash of light that blazed through an opening in the pines as the sun reached the horizon. – interrupted my daydreaming and I noticed it, inconspicuous and still. The moth was creamy white and pale tan, the colors mixed softly and unevenly into less a pattern than a smear. It made me think of bleached camouflage or butter pecan ice cream softened by summer. It looked nothing like the moths I generally see around Sandhill – the tiny white ones flapping against the porch lights, the occasional buckeye that makes me feel as if I am being watched, certainly not the rare luna whose celadon wings shine in the darkness. I pulled out my phone and took a photo in the nature identification app which may well be the best thing about my smart phone. It took only a couple of seconds for my moth to be identified: Pale Oak Beauty. I nearly swooned. What a beautiful name! What an evocative name! What an absolutely perfect name! I could have stood there longer, but – as mentioned – Owen was trying to get inside and I had mail in my hands, so I left my Pale Oak Beauty to his paleness and his beauty and went inside. I did not, though, stop thinking about him. In fact, it’s been nearly two weeks and I haven’t stopped thinking about him. This is not unusual behavior, of course, for a woman who, decades after building toad-frog houses in the damp fall dirt and building forts with pine straw still brings inside abandoned nests and lost feathers and discarded acorn caps to show off in bowls. It is not odd or strange or questionable. It is necessary fascination with and appreciation for the vast creation that exists outside these tiny, tenuous shells in which we travel, these ever-diminishing things we call bodies. So, amongst the bill-paying and the sheet-changing and the grocery-shopping, I have been marinating in the way the moth clung to the door without the slightest sound or movement, the way his body could hardly be distinguished from his glorious wings, the ways those wings mimic so amazingly the bark of the scrub oaks in the branch outside my back door. I have been wondering about the human being who gave him his name, what she knew of oak trees, and deciding that she, too, is one of us, those who touch rocks and twigs and shells with reverence. And, most importantly for these days of deepening darkness, I have been rejoicing in the simple, yet unimaginably intricate way in which the seasons – over and over and over – come and go and come again. Copyright 2025

It was funny, really, after I got past the pain and the blood and the embarrassment.  Funny like Tim Conway falling down the stairs in slow motion or Lucy racing the chocolate conveyor belt – funny because it reflected the simple human truth that none of us is ever really in control. The source of my humiliation – my stairs, my conveyor belt – was the treadmill planted ostentatiously and unavoidably in the middle of my bedroom.  Every day I clip the safety key to the bottom of my shirt and set off on a 40-minute walk to nowhere.  The pink faux Fitbit that I strap to my wrist measures my heart rate and reminds me when it is time to hydrate.  And that, on this particular day, is when what would become my contribution to sketch comedy started. About three-quarters of the way to my destination, which was, of course, also my starting point, I reached for my grocery store-brand bottle of water and felt its thin plastic yield to my grip.  I also felt the condensation that had begun forming the minute I took it out of the refrigerator and that left my hand dripping wet.  I took a quick gulp, set the bottle back down, reached for the handlebar, and felt my hand slip.   Digital displays are handy things, except when one’s condensation covered hand accidentally slides over the speed button and, within a couple of seconds, raises the speed from 3.1 to 6.0.  I raced to keep up with the speeding track beneath my feet, one hand clinging to the handlebar and the other flailing over the screen trying to slow the monster down. Managing a slight reduction in speed, my lizard brain (It had to be my lizard brain.  My other brain is smarter than that.) made the decision to jump off.  One foot landed on the bedroom floor, one slipped on the water that had dripped from the bottle onto the treadmill and proceeded to throw me face down onto the treadmill where I slid to the end and off onto the floor, at which point the safety key pulled away from its magnetic home and the treadmill stopped. Note that except for an ugly scrape about the size of an Oreo on my left knee, a scrape that created an ugly and obvious scab and which has taken about five weeks to heal, I was fine. I caught my breath, rolled over, and started laughing, which was the only thing to do. It was the next day before it occurred to me that I could have just pulled the safety key.  (It also occurred to me that my “other brain” may not be quite as smart as I thought.)  As is so often the case, that which would have saved me was a simple action close at hand.  An obvious solution. An easy fix.   Why is it so difficult for us to slow ourselves down? Why do we kick so hard against the pricks of deceleration? Why can we not see that still and quiet are not the same as empty and that acknowledging limitations is not the same as incompetence?   My wound has nearly healed.  The ugly scab has, as scabs do, slowly hardened and flaked away and pretty soon all that will be left is the soft pink skin of a new scar, a constant reminder of what happens when I forget. Copyright 2025

From her perch on the dusty mantel of what was my parents’ house, she meets my gaze with an expression of curiosity. Her face is round and full. Her legs, already long for her age, are stacked rolls of baby fat.  Her eyes are large and clear. The cream and sepia tones of the photograph mask their color, but I know those eyes.  They are pale green, the color of a peridot. She is standing, leaning against the back cushions of a dark brocade sofa.  There is another photo memorializing the moment in which her grandmother is hovering at the edge of the frame, alert to the inevitable moment when her first granddaughter’s still soft and cartilaginous kneecaps will fold and send her tumbling.   The photo is secured onto a metal base which also displays a pair of bronzed baby shoes – my baby shoes – delicately hand-stitched out of heavy white satin by my mother.  I do not remember where these shoes and those of my brother were displayed in the house in which we grew up, but when we moved to the farm, into a house with a fireplace, they were placed on either end of the mantel and there they stayed, becoming – like so many things do when they sit somewhere long enough – invisible.   Now, though, as we empty the house of its possessions, they are anything but invisible.  The toddlers that my brother and I once were stand like benevolent guards over the disassembling of the lives that called it home for 50 years.  They, who have not yet experienced loss and disappointment and heartbreak, oversee our feeble efforts to answer one of life’s great existential questions: What to throw away and what to keep? I used to be excessively sentimental.  I saved everything.  There are boxes in the attic at Sandhill that contain years and years of birthday cards and Christmas cards and journals.  I still have the wall calendar from my freshman year in college, along with the course catalog and the class directory.  I have the trophy I received in 1967 when I was elected Miss Youth Camp.  It is probably in the same box as my Girl Scout badge sash. I had the first pre-school art project (a potato print) that my nephew declared he had made just for me professionally framed and the little Lane cedar chest that all the girls got as seniors in high school still holds, among other treasures, the rewards I received for memorizing the Beatitudes and books of the Bible in elementary school. A lot of life has been lived since the key to the 1967 Pontiac Tempest dangled from my keychain, since the gold satin honor graduate stole hung around my neck, since small objects like programs and matchbooks and menus were talismans, the mere touching of which had the power to make me hopeful.  I am no longer that sentimental and, as I sift through the composition books in which my father made notes for Sunday School and the Simplicity dress patterns that my mother kept long after she stopped making my pleated skirts, I cannot help wondering what I thought I was accomplishing by holding on to all that paper and fabric and metal.   She is still looking at me, the baby on the mantel, her expression no longer one of curiosity, but, instead, tenderness and encouragement and love.  “You know what to keep,” she whispers.  And I realize that I do, that I always have. Keep the pride of accomplishment, throw away the certificate.  Keep the satisfaction of achievement, throw away the plaque.  Keep the gratification of investment in people and ideas, throw away the need for any recognition beyond the joy of participation. “I will not, though,” I whisper back, “throw away you.” And in the angled autumn light I could almost swear that she gives me a wink with her peridot eyes. Copyright 2025

The evening sky is streaked with high pink slashes. The backyard is littered with the first fallen leaves, palm-shaped platters skittering in the breeze.  Under the canopy of the sawtooth oaks, acorns the size of plums litter the ground awaiting the hungry deer who leave footprints that look like hearts in the aftermath of their banqueting.  The stillness and the quietness is mesmerizing and I could sit here in the waning light for hours if I did not have a job to do. In a metal bucket set safely on concrete, I make a fire.  The fuel for the fire and the object of the fire are the same.  I am disposing of some documents, documents from another time, another life, and, while shredding such things is the currently preferable way of disposal, I do not have a shredder and, now that I have gotten up the nerve, I do not want to wait.   The click-click-click of the grill lighter echoes a little as I thrust it into the bucket.  The paper, thick sheets of lawyer stock, is resistant to my destructive efforts, as words often are, and it takes a few seconds for the flame to catch.  When it does, there is no leap of light and heat, only a low and slow tremor of combustion. I could (Maybe I should.) go inside – start a load of laundry, unload the dishwasher – while the incineration continues.  I could leave the fingertip-sized flames unattended.  The likelihood of the fire escaping the bucket is, as my brother’s friend used to say, less than none.  I do not, though, leave my posta, mesmerized as I am by the orange curls that lick at words written long ago.   It is almost autumn, the season I most associate with fire, more even than Christmas with its candles flickering from tabletops and fireplaces making shadows on nearby faces.  Autumn is bonfires and oyster roasts and marshmallows metamorphosed into charcoal briquets, but mostly autumn is the burning off of fields. You cannot live most of your life as a farmer’s daughter and not understand in a visceral way the powerful magic of fire rushing across acres of land.  You cannot breathe in the acrid smell of dead corn stalks or peanut vines and not feel a rush of adrenaline, along with the slightest bit of fear that the firebreaks may not hold, that the dwarf-sized flames could conceivably overtake the boundaries made by hapless humans.  And you cannot ignore the truth that destruction is often the only way to start over, to begin again, to let go of one thing so that you can grasp another. I have learned many things from being a daily witness to planting and plowing and harvesting for over 50 years, but that lesson may be the most important. Smoke rises from the bucket and moves in an invisible current toward the horizon where the day’s remaining light hovers.  The sheets of paper that once were startlingly white and crisply flat are now black and, if I dared to touch them, they would leave my fingers stained with smut. What the words said, represented, promised or denied is now gone. The fire eventually consumes its fuel, leaving thin black wisps of ash in the bottom of the bucket and the faint scent of backyard barbecue in the air.  Copyright 2025

Labor Day marks, we are told, the end of summer.  That is not exactly true, of course.  The fall equinox is not for another three weeks and shorts and t-shirts will be appropriate in south Georgia for at least a couple more months.  Humans, though, have developed a need for commemoration and labeling.  Labor Day is a way to do that, a legislatively-endorsed opportunity for one last trip to the lake, the river, the beach.   On this Labor Day weekend, I am on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, anchored in the shallow waters for which Steinhatchee, one of the last outposts of old Florida, is known.  The Jenny B bobs in the waves created by other boats and I feel myself being lifted and lowered in the rhythm of a rocking chair or a cradle.  Across the way a toddler squeals as she is launched into the late summer air before splashing awkwardly into the water.  There is country music coming from the speakers on the next boat over, but the lyrics fade before they get to us. Lying on my back, I stare at a sky that looks like a spatterware bowl turned upside down to dome the water that surrounds me.  The splotches of blue and white – huge dollops and tiny specks – float in their own current, bumping and dodging each other in quiet politeness.  My breaths come deep and slow, my chest rising and falling like the waves. It still surprises me, the way the ocean soothes and quiets and shrinks all the things that can consume one’s thoughts.  It still surprises me how much I can love the taste of salt on my lips and the sound of sea birds squawking.  It still surprises me that this girl, who learned to swim in the Ogeechee River and fished in ponds whose water was the color of strong-brewed tea, can find such peace in the uncontainable ocean. “Here,” my nephew calls out and reaches over the side of the boat to hand me a shell, a perfect scallop, its ribs radiating out like sunbeams.  I put it in a bag with the others and I am reminded of the days, decades ago, when he handed me other things – “treasures” we called the acorns and feathers and pebbles found when he and his sister and I wandered over the farm on late summer days like this one. It is among the most human of behaviors, I think, the discovery of beauty producing a desire to share that beauty.  It is why painters paint, why writers write.  It is why grandmothers make pound cake and fathers teach their children to fish.  It is why my nephew and his family have invited me here. The afternoon begins its slow fade to evening.  Surrounded by water and with no visible landmarks, the Jenny B makes its way back toward the channel and the marina, guided only by Garman and the skill of its captain.   It is a different perspective, the returning.  I notice things I did not notice when my attention was focused on the horizon – a dock twisted into a helix by last year’s Hurricane Helene, a row of candy-colored houses on a bluff, the way the channel markers glow in the sunlight.   Later, after the boat is secured in its slip and much seafood has been consumed and sunburn has shown itself on cheeks and shoulders, we will stand on the dock and stare at the moon, silently illuminating the end of summer and promising that it is not really the end and never the last.  Gently reminding us that there is always beauty and it can always be shared.  Copyright 2025