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Almost every time I have stepped outside this spring, I have been greeted by a lizard – clinging to the doorbell on the concrete stoop at the back door, leaping American Ninja-style from chair to chair on the sun-drenched deck, darting back and forth beneath moving rockers on the shaded front porch.  I have hardly been able enter or leave without encountering the neon green, hyperactive reptile and I have had to maintain constant surveillance lest one land on the book in my lap. I will note that I am aware that “lizard” is a generic term for a large and diverse group of reptiles, including snakes, belonging to the order Squamata, and not the proper name for the creature whose acrobatic feats could easily earn him a spot with USA Gymnastics.  If I had been taught to call him a green anole (his correct name) when I was four and chasing him across my grannie’s front porch, then I would call him a green anole.  (I was not and, so, he is a lizard, just like the plastic tube through which water is conducted in the yard is a hosepipe and not a garden hose.) The Audubon guide describes him as slender with a long, wedge-shaped snout.  It is noted that his toes are padded, his tail long and thin.  The pink pouch that hangs down between the male’s head and chest is called a throat fan and is engaged for the purpose of marking his territory.  He is the only anole species native to the United States.  Finally, it is important to note that the little fellow is not a chameleon, even though his color changes in response to light, temperature, and emotions.  (Who knew that a lizard has emotions?) With that information in hand, I figured that I knew about as much about the lizard as I needed to know. About a week ago, though, I was sitting in my reading chair – large and overstuffed, tucked into the corner between one of the bedroom windows and the French doors that lead to the deck – when I changed my mind.  My journal was open and I had been musing for some reason about a stopwatch.  “Stopwatch,” I had written.  “Stop watching.  Stop looking, observing, concentrating on, focusing on what a watch represents.”  A gentle reminder, I supposed, to slow down. With the pen still in my hand, I heard a loud splat and looked up to see that a lizard had thrown himself against the glass in the door.  Splayed out like a crime scene silhouette, he could have been a lizard-shaped suction cup.   I ignored my own words and watched.  Sat very still and held my breath.  He stayed for no more than a few seconds, but long enough for me to be astonished that his head was a disproportionately large percentage of his seven-inch self, to be amazed that his belly was the color of a gardenia petal, to be surprised that there was no sign of his throat fan. Then, just as quickly as he had plopped onto the glass, he flung himself backwards  like a scene out of “The Matrix,” padded toes cushioning his landing before he disappeared.  I may have gasped.  I know I sighed. I don’t generally revisit what I write in my journal.  The words are not meant for posterity or recollection.  They are meant only as a conduit, a means to turn wordless things into words, into spendable currency.  This time, though, I looked down at the black lines curling and crossing each other to see that they had twisted themselves into something different.   Instead of “stop watching,” the vision of the stopwatch was telling me – as an order, not a suggestion –  to “stop AND watch, stop TO watch.”  Consistent with every mysterious encounter I have ever had with Nature, this one was gently reminding me that all I will ever need to know (about the lizard or anything else) can be learned, will be learned by watching, by focusing on that which is right in front of me.  Even when it means I have to look away from something else. Copyright 2025

I learned to love sports on Sunday afternoons, sitting on the floor of the living room at the feet of my father watching black-and-white images of men named Unitas and Matte and Mackey move back and forth across the television screen. I learned that there is no drama like physical drama, that power belongs to the people who interpret the rules, and that it is permissible to yell in the house if the yelling is along of the lines of, “Kill him!” or “You missed the call, ref!” Most importantly I learned that sports, in its best possible incarnation, is the telling of a story. In 2019, Cory Carignan was a wide receiver on the Minot State (North Dakota) University football team. The first game of the season was on September 5, for which the Beavers traveled 745 miles to play the University of Minnesota at Duluth. The Beavers’ sole score came on a kick-off return made by Carignan after he fumbled on the three-yard line. The ball rolled into the end zone and Carignan, chasing the ball, was swarmed by UMD players for what initially appeared to be a certain safety. Somehow, the teenager playing in his first college game managed to break free and run 104 yards for a touchdown. The video of that play shows up every so often in my social media feed based on an algorithm I do not understand (in a mathematical sense), but absolutely adore (in a magical sense). I could not say how many times I have watched it, how many times I have held my breath watching Cory Carignan outrun his opponents, tiptoe down the sideline, and make it safely into the endzone, but I can say that every time I have done so with goosebumps rising on my arms. Such is the power of sports. A couple of weeks ago, the video appeared again and, again, I watched it with the same rising emotion, as though the outcome was uncertain, as though I did not know that the tacklers would fall away one by one, as though I did not know that Cory Carignan would cross the goal line and spread his arms in an embrace of the moment that would be relived, at last count, over 71,000 times. As the video begins, Carignan is the only one in the frame. The fumble, the muff is all that exists for a second or two. The mistake, the error is all we see. We anticipate the catastrophic end as though we are all Beaver fans and we can protect ourselves from disappointment by not believing in miracles. We dare not think of second chances and redemption. Somehow, Carignan manages to scoop up the wildly bouncing ball and dance around the horde of defenders advancing toward him. As he does, the camera pans out, the screen widens, and we can see that he is not alone. At least five of Carignan’s teammates have made it down the field and are running alongside him, deflecting defenders and creating the alley through which he runs. By the time he reaches the 50-yard line, most of the others – teammates and defenders – have fallen away, but there are two, two teammates whose names we do not know, who continue to run alongside. Two teammates who escort him all the way home. What is the story? Initially I would have asserted that Cory Carignan is a reminder that it ain’t over ‘til it’s over or ‘til the final whistle blows or ‘til the fat lady sings. But after further review, as the referees say, I think it is something different. After watching the video four or five or ten times more, after finding out the touchdown by Cory Carignan (whose name was mispronounced over and over by the broadcaster for the opposing team) was the Beavers’ only score and that the Beavers lost that game 52-7 and that they would go 3 - 8 on the season, I think the story is this: No matter how badly you mess up, how big is your failure, how improbable your redemption, if you will just pick up the ball and keep running, there are people who will run with you and a precious few who will follow you all the way home. Copyright 2025

The call of a killdeer is less a song than a squeal. It reminds me of the sound of a straight pin being drawn across metal. Or a branch being blown across a window screen. Or a fingernail on a chalkboard. High-pitched and shrieky. In the open field just outside my bedroom windows, I often see them making bounced landings, their voices mimicking the squeaking of brakes as they quickly become invisible, light brown feathers and black neck rings blending into the foliage. I was startled, then, just the other day when, backing out of the carport, I heard a killdeer precipitously close. I stopped the car and got out to look for what I assumed was an injured bird and it took only a moment to locate him, a warm brown blot on the bright green grass. I approached slowly and, rather than flying away, he began limping toward the edge of the yard, one wing dangling at his side. Every couple of steps he awkwardly attempted to lift the wing and each time I got a glimpse of the multiple shades of tan and rust and white that feathered his belly. I did not immediately realize that I was talking to him, cooing sympathetically as though my reassurances would assuage what had to be primal fear. I could almost hear his tiny heart pulsing hard and fast in time with his shrieks. He struggled all the way across the yard, across the driveway, and into the field, forcing me to accept the fact that there was nothing I could do to help and taking some slight solace in seeing another killdeer close by, a friend – I convinced myself – who would, surely, not leave the injured bird alone. I have not been able to get the bird out of my mind. I have scanned the yard and the nearby brush for feathers. I have listened intently for killdeer calls closer by than usual. I have reminded myself over and over that it is the way of the natural world for birds to be injured, for birds to die. I decided that the least I could do was to write about the killdeer, to offer up a remembrance, a memorial. I could, with words if not avian medicine, give honor to my feathered neighbor. I began by researching the killdeer, including its Latin name (Charadrius vociferus), its species name (plover), and its habitat (which happens to be quite broad both geographically and seasonally). After mentioning that killdeer often nest near “human development,” the text goes, quite nonchalantly if you ask me, to mention that “Adults perform broken-wing displays to distract predators from their nests and young.” I think I read the sentence five times in succession before I started laughing. I had, obviously, been had. It is not the first time I have been fooled, duped, or deceived (though it is more common for my gullibility to be revealed by humans than by birds), but it is the first time I have articulated the common thread among the fooling, duping, and deceiving. Having been tutored by the killdeer, I can now say with clarity and, I hope, generosity that birds – and people – lie when they are afraid, when something important is at risk, when everything within sight, within earshot feels like a threat. And considering the general state of things that is pretty much every day. Somewhere in my yard, probably deep within the branches of the 40-year-old Ligustrum, there is a killdeer nest and over the next couple of weeks there will be baby killdeer, a gift that is worth the lie. Copyright 2025

There is a memory from my childhood that reappears every so often: I am seven or eight years old, sitting between my parents on the pew that may as well have our names on it, the pew on which we sit every Sunday morning.  Without fail.  We are those people, those “every time the church doors open” people.  The choir, unrobed and untrained, is singing “When The Roll Is Called Upon Yonder” and I am gazing at the beam of spring light that lasers through the long window just off my father’s shoulder.  There are a million tiny dust motes floating in the light, hovering like fairies. This was the moment, I am quite sure, that I fell in love with churches.  All of them. The square white wooden chapel on a dirt road keeping watch over worn gravestones. The cathedral nestled among skyscrapers, its stone walls thick enough to keep out the noise of millions of lives. The arenas, surrounded by acres and acres of asphalt, that used to be shopping malls.   I love being surrounded by the echoes of oft-repeated words.  I love the soft rustle of pages – Bibles and hymnals and bulletins – being turned.  I love the consistent, if uniquely expressed, symbolism and ritual, the invitation to participate, and the feeling that descends on me every time I walk in, the sensation that can only be described as sacred. Today, though, it is different. On this particular Friday in April, drenched in springtime sunlight, I am not immediately engulfed in the reverence I have come to expect when entering a church.  Today, as I take a seat in the balcony and look down at a full sanctuary, the long cylinders hanging against the chancel wall – the metal tubes through which the organist will send blasts of air to produce majestic music that is both doleful and triumphant – make me think of the raucous belching of a gutted muffler. Today, as I look around at the congregation, so many of whom are  young adults, the white glass circle surrounding the face of Jesus in the stained glass window looks less like a halo and more like a veterinary cone, a tool of captivity and humiliation. What is wrong with me? I wonder.  Where are the feelings of comfort and assurance that I expected, wanted, needed to envelope me as I stepped into this meager repository of what we know of God?  Why, on this day, can I not see the sacred?  My senses are skewed by anger and that anger has made me sarcastic.  It has also made me sad, so sad. Ellie was 24 years old. Just a few days shy of 25. When cancer invaded her body and stole her future, she had not lived even a quarter of a century.  The words used to describe her – “a ray of sunshine,” “a shining light,” “a genuine joy” – are not the exaggerations of people struggling to assuage the grief of those who loved her best.  They are the God-honest truth, truth that makes all this even more painful.  And they make me sure that I will have absolutely nothing to say to her mother when given the opportunity to pull her wounded self into my arms for a brief moment. I am stiff and straight-backed as the service begins, but somewhere between the first powerful notes of the organ swelling and spreading in an invisible wave to land on my shoulders and the tender prayer of the minister who baptized Ellie as an infant, I feel the anger, the sarcasm, even the sadness give way to something else, a revelation of sorts. I realize, as the tears finally come, that it is not, of course, the churches and chapels and cathedrals themselves that create the sacred.  It is not the stained glass windows or the altars, the prayers or the hymns.  It is not even the scriptures or the sermons.  It is the desire of the human heart to recognize, to acknowledge, to know that what we experience of life is but a threshold, a doorway, a waiting room.   And as the benediction rises and falls upon our grieving heads, I yield to the mystery, to the ineffable presence of all that is beyond understanding, to the unfathomable power of love.  Copyright 2025

I planted the crepe myrtle last spring. Actually, I did not plant it. I had it planted by someone who knew what he was doing. It was his suggestion that the tree be planted outside one of the windows where it would eventually provide some relief from the western sun that, in July and August, turns the living room into a reasonable facsimile of a sauna. My professional picked a spot between the chimney and the bay window in the kitchen – a little nook, a niche, a sheltered corner. He dug the hole according to the guidelines known by every subscriber to Southern Living (“three times wider than the root ball, but no deeper than the root ball itself”), loosened the roots slightly, and dropped the tree into the hole. He then patted the soil gently and gave the tree its first bath. I have failed at a number of horticultural efforts over the years – the camellia, the dogwood, and multiple hydrangeas – but something about the crepe myrtle made me optimistic. Despite its scrawny limbs, I got the impression that this one, this Lagerstroemia indica, was scrappy. And the chances that I would forget to water something that I saw every time I passed the window were pretty low. The crepe myrtle survived the summer heat and almost total neglect as I directed all my attention to the sudden illness that would take my father 37 days after diagnosis. Withstanding a near-drowning from Tropical Storm Debbie and Hurricane Helene, it limped its way into fall, dropping with a languid sigh the one leaf it had managed to produce. It trembled in the cold stiff winds of winter and bore up under four inches of unexpected snow. When green finally began its creep across the landscape, I kept waiting for the little crepe myrtle to, if not burst into bud, at least gasp its way into producing some evidence of life. Day after day I stared through the window at a bare tree. I was disappointed, but not surprised. Had I really expected this latest attempt at gardening to result in spectacular success? I rolled my eyes and muttered under my breath something about wasted money and “never again” and I let it go. Then just before Easter, I noticed the way the late afternoon light was falling in soft puddles on the wood floor and stopped to watch it shimmer like the surface of a pond beneath a gentle wind. I took a deep breath and turned to look at what I knew would be a subtle, but still stunning sunset. And that is when I saw it – the crepe myrtle covered in fat buds and bright green leaves bouncing in the breeze. The tree I had left for dead, the tree I had forsaken was alive. I stood there with my hands on my hips frustrated with, aggravated at, and provoked with my own self. This was not the first time I had, in an effort to avoid disappointment, given up on something beautiful. Not the first time I had feigned disinterest or claimed detachment when I stood on the edge of letdown. In fact, I had lived enough moments just like that one to know that if I chose to stand there long enough, take another couple of deep breaths, stare into shimmering light at the horizon for a few more seconds, I would experience the magic that is believing, that is hope, that is resurrection. And I did. Thus is the power of spring. Copyright 2025

The light of the early spring sunset is soft, its colors muted. It comes through the wide window at a slant and the shadow that is thrown by the vase of tulips in the middle of the kitchen table is the palest gray, like someone has tried to erase it. The tulips are over a week old now. Their straw-like stems are beginning to curve down toward the tabletop, yielding to the inevitable pull of gravity. A handful of petals lie scattered at the base of the vase that belonged to my friends’ grandmother, each of them making me think of a silent movie heroine on a fainting couch, the back of her hand against her forehead in resignation. Fields of Grace is a you-pick farm outside Columbus that exists to support a ministry “to women who have endured any type of trauma and to provide caregivers with a restful retreat.” My friend Melissa, a retired midwife who is herself a restful retreat, took me to the farm after I commented over and over about the bouquets of tulips on the tables and countertops of her farmhouse, tulips that I had to be convinced were real. Cold and wind greeted us at the farm, but it did not matter. I had never seen tulips in such abundance, never seen tulips in so many shapes, never seen tulips in such luscious colors. I walked up and down the rows, clippers in one hand and a bucket in the other, equally thrilled at my good fortune and dismayed that I could not take them all. I was particularly fascinated by the tulips that did not look like tulips, at least not like the tulips I learned to draw in elementary school – three triangles at the top of a rounded bucket. Some of them were full and blousy like the chiffon skirt of a ballgown; some were velvety and stiff; some were nonchalant and droopy, wrinkled like worn linen. But it was the colors that had me entranced. I stared and stared, searching my memories and all the words I knew, trying to imprint on my hippocampus the exact shade of each one. The purple tulip, the one that resembled a peony in its lushness, was the color of grape cough syrup. The iridescent orange variation, with its fleck of hot pink, exactly matched mercurochrome, the now-banned disinfectant that bathed the cuts and scrapes of my childhood. The pink tulip, whose delicate petals resembled suede, was the color of amoxicillin, the liquid antibiotic that is every new parent learns to request at the first sign of illness in her newborn. Later, I scribbled down the descriptions on a scrap of paper and it was only then that I realized that for each of the floral hues – purple and orange and pink – my brain had chosen something curative, something medicinal to represent the particular wavelengths cast upon the cones at the back of my eyes. My memory, my perception had interpreted my experience among the flowers as therapeutic and restorative. Staring at the tulips now – the ones I brought home and at which I have gaped in awe as their initial beauty faded into soft decay – I congratulate myself on understanding. Not just the healing properties of flowers, though the tulips have healed my spirits with each concentrated gaze and sideways glance, but also the idea that medicine, in most cases, has to be administered. We can not, as it turns out, heal ourselves. Despite the human bent toward independence, we are made for connection, most especially when we are hurt or lonely or grieving. We are meant to live not only our own lives, but to be a part of the lives of others, to bandage the wounds of a suffering world with whatever tools we have at hand. Including, sometimes, something as beautiful and ephemeral as a field of tulips. Copyright 2025

I wake to heavy blue-gray light sifting through the blinds.  The rain is hard and hits the metal roof in rhythmic waves.  The bed is warm and I do not want to leave it just yet.   But I will.  I will ease from under the covers and feel the cool wood of the floor on the bottoms of my feet.  I will stretch and remember again, as I do every morning, that my body is not as limber as it used to be.  I will open the blinds and see a small marble of hot pink breaking through the clouds at the horizon. And, then, the executive function of my brain will remind me of all I have to do.  It is a long list. Fifty years ago I was a college student in the second semester of my freshman year. Among other courses, including the second half of both American History and American Literature, I was enrolled in Psychology 101. I registered for the class with enthusiasm.  Psychology was a real “college” class.  I had never taken it before and in the 1970s, on the heels of the revolutionary 1960s, psychology still felt a little risky.  My enthusiasm, however, waned rather quickly. My recollection is that it was a Wednesday night, the night before our second exam of the semester.  It was late and the hallways of the dorm were quiet.  Yellow light seeped from under a few doors, but almost everyone was in bed when the fire alarm went off. We moved in small pods toward the various exits and then stood in our pajamas and bare feet in the cold and dark for what seemed an interminable length of time while the Macon Fire Department confirmed that there was no fire, no danger at all and allowed us to return to our beds. The next morning, someone came up with the idea of asking Professor Lewis if she would consider rescheduling the exam in light of the previous night’s events.  Her response, delivered in a haughty drawl, was “I would really like to see how you perform under these circumstances.” I was 18.  I was unaccustomed to adults being anything but helpful and sympathetic.  I took the exam, of course, and finished the semester doing everything necessary to make an A, but my interest in psychology disappeared. It was later in the semester that I arrived in class to find a quote written on the chalkboard at the front of the room, a leftover from an earlier class.  In the few seconds it took to read it and the few more it took to write it down in what would become the first of many quote books I have kept over the years, I gave myself a mantra to which I would return often and which would provide the motivation necessary to create a productive and useful life. "Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.”  – T.H. Huxley I have quoted it to myself and to others hundreds of times in the last 50 years.  It reminds me that an education imposes a responsibility.  It reminds me that self-discipline is not a matter of desire.  And on this stormy morning, the words of a man who was never able to find an academic position and, thus, was never called Professor, turn me from the window to the things that ought to be done. Copyright 2025

It is Saturday night. The stiff wind of the afternoon has ushered in a chill that shakes my shoulders as I get out of the car. It is the first day of March and, so, I should have expected the wind, but I will never not shiver in its presence. I am here to sit around the table with people I love, with people whose genetic material and history and at least some sensibilities I share.  “It's nothing fancy,” my aunt proclaims as we take our seats. There is a platter of hot bread, a bowl of rice, and a pot of steaming gumbo, piquant with chunky tomatoes and bell peppers, but no okra because my cousin doesn’t like its sliminess. We pass around paper plates, paper bowls, and plastic spoons, making it easier for the cook who will, as she always does, refuse help in clearing the table and washing the pots. When the bowls are empty and our bellies are full, we stay, leaning in as though the table were a fire and we our ancestors.  Our shoulders curve into one big circle – a cave, a womb, a place of safety – as we talk. I have done this hundreds of times; it is as natural as breathing. We pass around a book that my cousin has put together, a photographic collection of recipes of the woman who was my grandmother. The recipes, written in a hand that is anything but florid, take us back to the kitchens we remember, the kitchens where she tied on her apron in one quick twist and set to rolling out dough for biscuits and dumplings or flouring chicken.  They are written on envelopes, the back of deposit slips, scraps of paper torn from wire-bound notebooks, and include notes on their provenance – “from Minnie Lee,” “out of Linda’s book.” The images spark a conversation about her difficult childhood and we shake our heads in amazement that her heart and her arms remained open.  We tell stories that make us laugh and cry; we ask questions to which there are no answers; we share memories and correct each other on minor details.   The hours slip by.  Somebody yawns.  Somebody stands up to stretch.  It is time to go.  I take with me a Rubbermaid container of leftovers.  It warms my hands as I step outside into the damp coldness.  “Be careful,” my cousin calls from the porch. I have told the story before, the story of the Thanksgiving long long ago, the Thanksgiving when I was still small enough to sit under the dinner table while Grannie and Mama and the aunts talked.  The men and children were long fed and the women could take their time nibbling on bits of ham, slicing off the crispy edges of the pound cake, sipping coffee. I have no idea if they knew I was there.  I sat quietly, so still that my feet went to sleep.  I stared at their legs, watched them cross and re-cross their ankles and tuck them beneath their chairs.  I always say that it was sitting under the table – along with afternoons shelling peas and mornings shucking corn – that I learned to tell stories. Tonight, though, I learned something else: It is at the table that we, like the medieval knights who had to remove their weapons in order to sit, are invited to lay down our swords, encouraged to reveal ourselves, welcomed into a vulnerability that is both frightening and enlivening.  It may well be the only time when our masks slip enough that we are truly seen. The world needs more tables. Copyright 2025

Winter has its own kind of beauty.  There is the fog, thick as a quilt and gunmetal gray in the distance and thin like gauze up close where it shimmers all pale and silvery.  There is the way the horizon at sunset, bare limbs silhouetted against sky the color of a stove eye under a boiling pot, looks as though it has been dye-cut.  There is the deep stillness as the moon rises and the frantic rattling of wind chimes in a rainstorm. But winter is cold and dark and there comes a time – right about now as it happens – when the fog and the bare limbs are not beautiful and the owl hoots floating out of the branch like wraiths feel like broad hands on my back ready to push as I stand on the edge of the abyss.  And it doesn’t help when, on only the second day of the most wintry of months, a certain burrowing rodent sees his shadow. When this happens, there are only two things that can repel the wraiths and pull me back to safety: baseball and camellias. I don’t know when, exactly, I fell in love with baseball, but it may have been all those afternoons sitting on the bleachers at Jaycee Field watching my brother and his friends, without helmets or batting gloves or coolers full of Gatorade, swing and throw and slide with joyful abandon.  It may have been when the Braves moved to Atlanta or when Henry Aaron was chasing Babe Ruth’s homerun record, but fall in love I did and every October, with the final pitch of the World Series, I start keeping track of the days until spring training.  There is nothing that can warm my shivering heart like the words, “Pitchers and catchers reported today.” While baseball stands as prima facie evidence that nothing, not even winter, lasts forever, camellias prove that nothing, not even winter, can overcome life that is determined to bloom.  In yards where the occasional brown leaf still falls with a Camille-like sigh, the camellia thrusts itself through thick green leaves and opens like an old book, its petals arching back from canary yellow anthers.  Milky white and the palest of pinks, coral and crimson and carnelian, Camellia Japonica is the Scarlett O’Hara of southern yards and parks and cemeteries.  As God is her witness, she will not be deterred from confronting the cold and showing off not only her beauty, but her resilience. I have always wanted a camellia in the yard at Sandhill and last year I finally got around to planting one, choosing a spot with just the right amount of light, far enough away from the closest structure that it could grow without impediment.  I was so hopeful. Alas, my attentions were drawn elsewhere last summer and the camellia died.  All winter I have looked at the stiff, brittle limbs with sadness and regret. Yesterday, just five days after pitchers and catchers reported, I stopped by my favorite park for a walk and was greeted with tree after tree laden with camellias – solid red and candy cane-striped, open-faced and ruffly at the center.  The ground beneath each was carpeted with blossoms, thrones covered by mantles, thick and velvety.  I could but stare. I brought a handful of sprigs home with me.  I put them in a cut glass bowl.  I put the bowl in the center of the kitchen table where the fading sunlight could catch the facets and throw prisms onto the warm wood.   It is still cold.  The days are still short.  But now I remember that nothing, not even winter, lasts forever and nothing, not even winter can overcome a life that is determined to bloom. Copyright 2025

When the snow finally melted, when it finally finally finally melted, I walked outside onto the deck and watched the sunrise. I watched it move slowly, out of time, up over the edge of the world, turning the sky a million shades of pink and yellow.  I hadn’t bothered to put on any shoes and felt the overnight cold seep up into my ankles.  I didn’t even care.  The landscape had returned to its rightful colors. It startled me at first to hear the birds.  The last week had been preternaturally quiet, as though the snow had muted the entire world.  But here they were, chirping and calling and singing the morning into existence.  I pulled my phone out of the pocket of my robe and opened the bird song identification app. The screen refreshed rapidly, recording the sounds of crows in the distance high above the fields, a jay and a cardinal playfully arguing from the low limbs of the sycamore tree, a gentle wren whispering from the eaves of the carport, and a mournful dove nested deep in the branch. It took me a minute to recognize the next sound as the voice of a bird.  It sounded a little like the opening of a potato chip bag, like the crinkle of cellophane.  The app identified it as the call of the Common Grackle. I keep a list of each new bird I hear at Sandhill.  To confirm that I had not, in fact, heard the grackle before, I flipped through the pages of the little leather book where I keep the list.  I had not realized how many of the birds I recorded are identified as “common.”  There is the Common Ground Dove, the Common Yellowthroat, and the Common Loon.  And now the Common Grackle. I stared at the list and reflected on all the mornings, in every season, that I have stood or sat silently and listened to the choir of avian voices.  Not once have I heard anything common, anything ordinary.  Not once have I gone back inside unmoved by the marvel of bird song.  How could anyone hear the faint coo of a dove and think it common?  Who could listen to the sustained minor chord of the loon and not think it extraordinary?  Why isn’t there a Lyrical Grosbeak or a Coloratura Thrush? There is, of course, another definition for the word “common.”  In addition to meaning well-known or familiar, common also means belonging to more than one person or to all the members of a group, as in “common ground” or “common interests,” not subject to individual ownership or control.  This usage carries with it a sense of beneficence, of doing good, or promoting the interest of not just oneself, but of others as well.  It carries a sense of sharing. Not in a social media sense, which is far too often fueled by the intent to disseminate untruths or appropriate someone else’s creative efforts, but in the kindergarten sense, the assumption that anything is better when experienced alongside another person.   Perhaps that is what the ornithological namers meant.  Perhaps, instead of their labels being intended to segregate birds into factions, they wanted the Common Goldeneye and the Common Grouse and the Common Gallinule to be reminders that none of us possesses the world, that none of us can lay claim to any of its beauty and wonder to the exclusion of anyone else, that what we occasionally experience as sacred astonishment is the thread that connects us all. Copyright 2025

I am standing at the window of my study.  I stare out at a sky that is a wide swath of mottled clouds the color of asphalt and the air is cold and dry.  The newly-risen sun is obscured, but its illumination is slowly adding depth and definition to the bleached-out grasses and empty branches that surround the small square box where Owen and I try to stay warm. The cold and the stillness jumpstart the reminiscing that seems to be part and parcel of most days these days and I find my thoughts tumbling back to another cold January and another window. Vi, a friend from law school, had invited me to visit her on Edisto Island.  The morning after my arrival, after a three-hour drive down two-lane blacktop, still a little sleep drunk, I stood quietly at the wide windows of the condominium living room and stared out at a golf course, its grass so green, so manicured, its surface so uniform that no one would ever mistake it for anything else.  About 25 yards away, down an easy slope, the tiniest trickle of a creek made a jagged slice across the smoothness.  A small wooden bridge, arced in a subtle rainbow, connected the two banks. The sun had risen but its light had not yet made its way into fairway’s dim alley, buildings on one side, tall pine trees on the other.  I was considering walking out onto the porch to check the temperature when suddenly a deer, two deer – no, let me count them – eight deer scampered across the bridge into the woods. Like most things of surprising beauty, the scene unfolded too quickly to capture with a photograph. I stood at the window an extra moment making myself memorize the details. The next day, headed home from my brief jaunt to the island, the vision of the deer came to me again and I found myself wondering why they had taken the bridge.  There was no logical reason they should have. The creek, narrow and shallow as it was, was no match for their long slender legs. They could have easily bounded over it with one stride, two at most, even the two yearlings at the end of the line. How in the world had deer, wild and untamed, learned to use a bridge? A few nights later I got a text message from my friend Ted: Look northwest in five minutes to see the International Space Station fly by.  I looked at the clock, gave the pot of soup on the stove another quick stir, and headed outside. The sky was dark and cloudy.  I doubted I would see anything, but wanted to be able to tell Ted that I had tried, so I arched my neck and looked toward the spot where the Space Station was supposed to appear.  And, lo and behold, it did!  For six or seven minutes I stood there in the darkness, my head moving like a pencil at the end of a geometry compass, tracing an arc through the night. How in the world had people, so tame and so far removed from the wildness of the world, come to fly so far above the earth? The memories drift off to wherever it is that memories sleep and I notice that the sky is no longer gray.  It is almost completely white, clouds spread from horizon to horizon interrupted in occasional spots by the softest of blues.  The question remains. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” The world is full of questions – Will it snow? Will the power go out?  Will democracy survive? Venturing an answer, I have learned, will do nothing more than confirm my ignorance, reveal my ego, and set me up for disappointment.  Instead, I will – for today at least, inside my snug house, surrounded by books and memories – try to live the questions. Copyright 2025

The mantel at Sandhill is one solid piece of heart pine, the soul of a tree that, were it still standing, would be well over 100 years old.  It is solid and square.  Its rings are the color and thickness of the layers of a love-baked caramel cake. Last week it was also full and flush, strung with pine and ivy and bay leaves, twinkle lights moving in and out of the branches like a creek through woods or a snake through high cotton.  Last week, nestled among the greenery, were the shiny glass ornaments that were too big for the tree, the string of paper doll teddy bears that Adam and Kate made the Christmas they were six and four, and a set of three ceramic angels, a gift from the mother of a college student who used to work for me. This week, though, it looks lonely (I have a tendency to anthropomorphize.).  There is an empty vase on one end and three brass candlesticks, their tapers leaning precariously, on the other.  For the life of me I can not remember what was there before. I walk around the house thinking that something will jog my memory (Was it that antique copy of The Plays of William Shakespeare ? The pine needle basket I bought at a craft fair decades ago? A photo on an easel?), but nothing does, a consequence of what I can not be sure and I refuse to debate myself over old age or inattention as the culprit. Instead, I forage the bookshelves and choose three hand-thrown pottery bowls holding nature’s debris.  The smallest bowl, fired a shiny cream with its rim outlined in teal, guards a handful of seashells, a sand dollar, and a single sycamore pod.  The second bowl, heaped high with more shells, is the color green of 1960s bathroom tile.  The largest bowl, big enough to have held the black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, contains a nest blown from its perch by Hurricane Helene, its outer rim a Jenga-like construction of twigs and small branches, the inner lining made of small roots and specks of dried leaves. I examine the tableau from various angles.  The negative space between the bowls feels almost prophetic, as though the room between them, the noticeable emptiness, is intentional, purposeful, meant to leave room for what is to come in the new year, already a quarter of the way through the century. I light the fire.  I light the candles.  The bowls make shadows on the wall. Outside the wind is picking up.  It makes howling noises as it careens around the corners of the house. It is, I think, safe to assume that real winter is upon us. Today, I remember, is Epiphany. The twelfth day of Christmas.  The day on which Christian church commemorates the arrival of men from the East to worship the Infant Jesus.  “Epiphaneia” is an ancient Greek word which meant an appearance or manifestation, specifically of a diety to worshippers. When I woke up this morning there was no indication that, on this very ordinary day, a handful of astronomers would be showing up with gifts. And, yet, the three bowls are just that – the gift of forgetting the past; the gift of provision for the present moment; the gift of sight into what can be. I kneel before the fire, reach my hands toward the flames, and whisper a prayer of thanks for my sweet sanctuary and a prayer supplication for all those, man and beast, who have none. Copyright 2025

I have long believed that the reason Christmas decorations are so gawdy, the reason they tend to be oversized, the reason some folks are so eager to festoon their homes and selves is an effort to counter the drabness, the colorlessness, the quiet of the year nearly gone. December is not without its own unique beauty, but few of us are able to be still enough to find it. I am determined, though, on this mild and slightly overcast afternoon to do just that – to close my wreathed front door behind me and go searching. I stop at Daddy’s mailbox to retrieve the crop magazines and John Deere catalog and flyers for gutters that still come all these months later. I avoid looking at the empty rocking chairs on the front porch. I avoid looking at the shelter where the tractor and combine are no longer parked. I avoid looking at Owen who is looking at me, waiting for instructions. As I wrestle with the idea of abandoning the long walk I had planned, my eyes are drawn to a huge flock of geese – 57, if my count is correct – approaching from the east and aiming for the pond behind my house. They look like kindergarteners in the lunch line, clumsily maneuvering themselves into a slightly sloppy V, a series of black checkmarks moving in an invisible current across the flat gray sky. So effortlessly they defy the gravity that keeps me planted on this dusty road. Every year the geese come, flying in on the cusp of winter, setting themselves down gently on the pond just outside my back door. In a few days I can expect to see feathers littering the edges of the fields, evidence not just of their presence, but also of their aliveness, their fragility. They always make me think of my friend David who would grow practically apoplectic when he heard someone refer to “Canadian goose.” “It’s CANADA!” he would mutter under his breath. “CANADA goose!” And, yet, in his endearing contrariness, he referred to the group that overran the pond in his neighborhood as “the Canadian Air Force.” I can not help smiling at the memory. I have, for many years, referred to the birds in my thoughts as “MY geese.” The ones who have interrupted my reverie today are not, of course, the same ones that I first admired many years ago, but I do believe that they are the progeny, the descendants of that first handful that caught my attention with their squawking. I need to believe that they come back, that they return so regularly because they, too, feel an attachment to this place. In Celtic spirituality, it is a goose – specifically a “wild goose” –, rather than the peaceful dove, that represents the Holy Spirit, revealing a nature that is noisy, courageous, and passionate, one that can not be controlled or tamed. One that is audacious and shameless and, dare I admit, as gawdy and oversized as an inflated Santa. Watching my wild geese move silently across the sky, I wonder if what we are really doing when we drape the windows with plastic garland and populate our lawns with motorized Nativity scenes is trying to capture, if only temporarily, that audaciousness, that passion. And I wonder what keeps us from doing it the rest of the year. The geese disappear behind the trees that ring the pond. I do not hear the splash of a hundred webbed feet hitting the water, but I can imagine the ripples catching the last of the daylight and splitting it into a million tiny shards like the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree welcoming me home. Copyright 2024

It is two weeks before Christmas and completely dark at eight o’clock.  Across the room the Christmas tree stands, the tiny lights just bright enough to make it hard to differentiate among the ornaments. Somewhere among the branches is a sand-cast lighthouse, a wooden creche, and a glass possum. At the top is a Waterford crystal star. It is clearly an artificial tree.  It has no scent.  Its trunk is ruler straight.  The branches are flexible, bendable into whatever angle provides the most attractive placement for the baubles and balls to dangle.   Directly outside the window in front of which the Christmas tree stands is the crepe myrtle I planted in the spring and the reflection of the lights makes it look as though I have decorated this tree, this real tree, too.   The juxtaposition of real and fake, actual and artificial, genuine and pretend has become, I suppose, a hallmark of the Christmas season.  “Is he the real Santa Claus?” small children ask as they stand in line for a photo with the man in the red suit.  “Do you like it?” we question as the recipients of our gifts rip away the thin paper emblazoned with images of reindeer and snow.  “Oh, you don’t have to get me anything,” we assure those from whom we well know we will receive a gift. Battery-operated candles, plastic ribbons, and electronic bells are ubiquitous.  Inflatable igloos stay frozen in 80-degree weather.  Jig-sawed nativities are projected in two-dimensional simplicity.  Numbed by convenience, we 21st-century observants see absolutely nothing remarkable in any of it. The idea makes me wistful for real trees that smell like tar and drop needles on the rug, for candles that drip wax on the mantle and leave permanent reminders of their flickering light, for chilly afternoons spent shopping up and down Main Street with my mother and standing in line at the wrapping station at Belk.  It makes me wonder if anybody’s grandmother still keeps a bowl of hard candy – all scrolled with red and green – on the coffee table.  It makes me wish for one more Christmas Eve breakfast at Franklin’s and one more Christmas pageant where the first-graders sing real Christmas carols.   Tomorrow morning the crepe myrtle will look spindly, not splendid.  Its leafless branches will tremble in the sunlight, so thin and fragile and vulnerable.  I have to admit it was more beautiful adorned by the reflection. It suddenly hits me that the holiday itself, the sacred and at the same time secular celebration, is also made more beautiful by reflection –  by memory and contemplation, by reminiscence and wonderment.  That it is only by the comparison of now to then, genuine to pretend that I am able to identify and differentiate between that which lasts and that which fades. And this is what the comparing and differentiating tells me:  Christmas lasts.  The story remains.  The promise is repeated.  Whether in the light of a candle made with wax and wick or one made of metal and plastic, it is still the light.  Now and forever. Copyright 2024