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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

When I retired from practicing law, I decided two things:  The first was that I would not speed.  No longer subject to the power of a judge who could hold me in contempt for being late, I would drive the speed limit, even on the interstate.  The second decision was that I would not set an alarm.  I would no longer be jarred from sleep, but would, instead, break the surface of the day slowly, languidly, quietly. This morning, though, this late August morning, I did wake to an alarm.  I have an appointment – a designated place to be at a designated time.  A time that, in these days of self-rule, makes me wince, but even as I wince I leave the bed, pull up the covers, and walk stiffly toward the door to step outside. I do this thing – this stepping outside, this breathing of un-conditioned air, this briefly surveying the world – every morning.  It is like the blessing before a meal, an acknowledgment that what is being offered to me is gift not wages.  It is a reminder that, if I open my eyes and my arms, I will see and hear wonders. On most mornings I am met by the clear colors and distinct shadows and certain dimensions.  On most mornings I recognize everything around me, can see the weeds that need to be pulled, the splintered wood on the screened-in porch, the footprints on the unswept steps.  On most mornings I am self-conscious, absurdly aware that my hair is sticking out in all directions, that my bathrobe should probably be thrown into the laundry, that my brain is screaming for caffeine. Not this morning.  This morning there is just enough light to discern the mist that smudges the landscape into indistinct objects in the palest of colors.  The sun is still lolling beneath the horizon and the birds are not yet vocalizing in the branch.  I am wrapped in a sacred stillness that I realize, as I stretch my arms into a high arc, is the world reverently awaiting the birth of the day. In my peripheral vision I detect movement and turn to see a doe and fawn moving away from the sawtooth oak under which they have been breakfasting on acorns half the size of golf balls.  In the low light they could be ghosts of deer, floating over the damp grass.  I watch until they turn the corner where the field road meanders down to the pond. If I had not awakened to an alarm, if I had not resisted the urge to instruct Alexa to snooze ... and snooze again ... I would have missed the deer.   Yes, they are probably there every morning.  The deer prints and discarded acorn caps that they leave behind are prima facie evidence that the Sandhill buffet is something like their Waffle House, but heart-shaped footprints and lacy cupule will never evoke in me the amazement of seeing, even through early morning mist, the mama, the baby, so beautiful, so close. I am always grateful that I get to live so near to what we casually call nature, what we nonchalantly claim to appreciate and want to protect, but every so often that gratitude turns into humility.  And every so often that humility becomes supplication, a simple prayer that I never forget that these acres are shared. Copyright 2025

I got my first pair of glasses when I was in ninth grade after I noticed that I had to squint to make out the numbers Miss Kemp had written on the chalkboard.  I can still feel the coolness of the windowless classroom and the momentary panic that ensued when I considered the possible consequences of getting even a single digit wrong in the equation we had been given to solve. The joy and, more acutely, the relief I experienced a few weeks later after a visit to the ophthalmologist in Savannah and the delivery of my first pair of glasses completely eclipsed any self-consciousness I may have experienced.  Pulling the glasses out of their case at the beginning of each class and replacing them as the bell rang to move to the next period was something like Christmas morning, so happy was I to be able to see.  The fact that the distant world could now be as clear and accessible as the up close one was, as far as I was concerned, a miracle. I thought about that a few days ago after yet another person expressed incredulity at my ability to read and knit and file my nails without the assistance of glasses.  I am, I offered, VERY nearsighted and went on to explain that a couple of decades ago, about the time that most of my contemporaries started needing readers for their aging eyes, my optometrist said to me, “You know, you are probably never going to need reading glasses. You are so nearsighted that you should be able to easily read unassisted your entire life.” Considering how much reading I did and still do, I accepted that prediction as a gift and have held on to it as though it were a promise.   The promise has held and even now, as I approach the end of my seventh decade, I read and use the computer and stare at my phone with no ocular assistance. I admit, though, that reading road signs and recognizing friends at a distance and, if it were necessary, deciphering an algebra equation at the front of a classroom are entirely different matters.  I need assistance to be able to drive the speed limit and know which exit to take, to follow the score on the television screen, and to identify the person in the pulpit on Sunday.  All of which makes me grateful for the tiny piece of plastic I insert into my eye each morning. At any rate, all that contemplation of visual acuity or lack thereof led me to consider whether nearsightedness and farsightedness might be about more than literal seeing.  Could it be that emotional eyesight is equally important?  Might it also be about how one witnesses the world, how one encounters creation, how one interprets what one experiences?  Is it possible that some of us can focus on, be content with what is up close while others of us gain clarity only when sharpening our gaze on that which is far away? The answer is yes. The farsighted among us are, I think, the scientists and the astronauts, the financiers and the politicians.  They are the people who can see the numbers without squinting.  Their consideration is for what lies in the distance, the not-yet, the still to come.  They are not discouraged by the smallness of what they see from here, knowing that it will fill the future.  They plan ahead for the rest of us.  They are the preparers, the anticipators, the foreseers.    The nearsighted are the writers and artists and creators of all kinds.  They are the noticers of the small and inconsequential, the observers of the ordinary and quotidian, the payers of attention to the close-up and nearly invisible.  They bend close to gape and gawk.  They stop to stare. They deliberately absorb the atmosphere through which they walk and then sweat it out in the form of paintings and poems, stories and songs.   We don’t get to choose whether our emotional eyes are made to see up close or far away, but, in a world that is continually going into and out of focus, it would do us well to figure it out. Copyright 2025

As an origin story, it is nothing particularly noteworthy.  In fact, the circumstances were ordinary, mundane, unremarkable.  It was a scene repeated hundreds of times over every day across the country.  But, like Robert Frost’s road in a yellow wood, it has made all the difference. It was lunchtime.  Fifteen or twenty of us were gathered in the back room of what was then RJ’s Restaurant – heavy china plates, green napkins, plastic glasses sweating in summer humidity that not even the best air-conditioning could vanquish.  The business meeting for Leadership Bulloch Alumni had not yet begun; polite chatter and subtle gossip circled the tables placed end-to-end.  I was counting the minutes until I could leave and get back to the stack of manila folders on my desk. My friend Phyllis sat across the table from me and beside her sat then-editor of The Herald, Larry Anderson.  With the charm and genuine interest that would one day make her president of the Chamber of Commerce, she turned from side to side, leaned across the table, pulling everyone into the current of conversation.   “Oh, Kathy,” she offered when the flow of words stalled, “you have to tell Larry that story.”   I knew which one she meant, the one  about how, in reviewing the work of that year’s General Assembly, I had discovered that it was now illegal in Georgia to feed wild alligators (an act it had never occurred to me as something in which to engage).  Intrigued, I delved further and learned that our esteemed legislators had also used part of its short 40-day session to pass legislation making the peanut the official Georgia state crop, the peach the official Georgia state fruit, and the State of Georgia the Poultry Capital of the World.   They were just following precedent as previous General Assemblies had declared the shark tooth the official Georgia state fossil and the honeybee the official Georgia state insect (Didn't anyone think to nominate the gnat?).  In 1981 the legislators really got into the spirit and named 8 "officials," including an official reptile (the gopher tortoise); an official vegetable (the Vidalia Sweet Onion); and an official 'possum (Pogo, as created by cartoonist Walt Kelly). I generally do what Phyllis tells me, so I recounted my legal research and Larry found the story sufficiently entertaining to ask me to write it down so that he could publish it. I did and he did and a few days after the column came out, Larry called me and asked, “What would it take to get you to do this on a regular basis?” I almost said, “Not much.”  What I did say was, “Let me think about it.” I thought about it and decided that I could probably think of a few more things to say.  This month that was 30 years and around 700 columns ago. Seven hundred times I have begun by staring at a blank computer screen.  Seven hundred times I have panicked just a little.  At least half of those times I have had no idea what I was going to say until my fingers started moving over the keys. And every single time  I have been struck by what a privilege I have been given to share my words. It seems an appropriate moment in which to offer two more: Thank you. Copyright 2025

I have not always loved trees. I was not the child who read books in the shade of limbs extended like arms and I certainly did not climb trees – my mother’s fearfulness made that particular childhood pleasure unavailable to us. I have not always loved trees and that is probably why my fascination with and adoration of them is so deep now. It is as though I need to make it up to them, live out an apology for my prior ignorance and indifference. My affection for trees in winter is not insubstantial. Their shameless undressing and deliberate nakedness arouses in me an admiration that never wanes. It is their nature to reveal, in the hardest, darkest moments, exactly who they are – knotty trunks and crooked branches, imperfect and scarred. They leave me envious of their honesty. I cannot, though, deny an infatuation with trees in summer. Fully dressed, they entice the breeze and pretend it is their own song. Even as their limbs waltz and foxtrot and cha-cha, the dancing shade offers respite from the sun and the scent that must be chlorophyll perfumes the air as though spritzed through a giant atomizer. Behold a tree in summer and be alive. This summer, in particular, the trees around Sandhill, buffeted regularly by afternoon and evening thunderstorms, have demanded my attention. Rarely has there been a morning when the backyard was not littered with arboreal detritus. Limbs as big around as my wrist, branches the diameter of a broom handle, twigs long and skinny like spaghetti noodles. Most I have been able to gather in my arms like an over-sized bouquet; some have had to be dragged. All of them have been deposited at the edge of the pond where they will eventually turn themselves into soil. On Sunday morning I walked out to my car to go to church to discover that a large sycamore limb, one whose leaves were brown, evidence that it had been barely hanging on to the trunk that was its lifeline, had been wrenched off and thrown under the carport into the driver’s side door of the car. The physical damage, only three tiny scratches, was significantly less than my amazement that no glass had been broken, no metal dented. I pulled the limb far enough away that I had clear entrance to the car, mentally adding yard work to the afternoon to-do list in my head. Thoughts of the limb – what it must have sounded like, looked like as it was sent flying through the air – accompanied me all the way into town to my pew in the back of the church, where the sermon (coincidentally? serendipitously? providentially?) was about Zaccheus, the wee little man who, in an effort to get a better look at Jesus, climbed a sycamore tree. I congratulated myself for not laughing out loud. And, then, I considered whether the universe or the tree or God might be trying to tell me something. It was hot when I got home, changed clothes, and went outside to pull the big limb into the branch, into the growing heap of tree parts. Heading back to the cool inside, I stopped under the tree from which the latest addition had been amputated, looking as far as I could into the canopy. I wanted to know from where it had fallen, but all I saw was palm-sized leaves, fluttering in filtered light, a broad swath of green shimmering like summer sunshine on the surface of water. It was as though the tree had developed regenerative powers like hydra or starfish, filling in the gap left by what was taken away, healing the wounds that damaged but did not destroy. I love trees. I love everything about them. Mostly, though, I love their audacity – persisting in purpose, insisting on getting on with living in spite of loss, and determined to teach me things I should already know. Copyright 2025