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- Great Horned and Eastern Screech Inquire
It is dark outside. Very dark. The concrete beneath my bare feet is cold and my first thought as I lift the lid of the trash can to toss in an empty box is that winter is almost here, that soon I will not be stepping outside barefoot, that lying ahead are months of shivering. Owen stands beside me, staring into the darkness and considering whether he wants to make a break for it, whether some raccoon or possum or armadillo has breached the perimeter of his domain and deserves being chased. He decides against it and backs up into the light and warmth of the house. I wrap my arms across my chest and watch the landscape come into focus as my eyes adjust. As much as I dread the approach of winter, there is something exhilarating about the cool dampness that is an October evening. No longer burdened by the weight of summer’s heat, my shoulders straighten and my breaths deepen. I am just about to step inside when I hear it: “Whoo hoo hoo whoo hoo.” The cry comes from the depths of the branch, somewhere among the ageless pines and scrub oaks is a Great Horned Owl, tufted and camouflaged. The call freezes my movement and I forget about my feet. I don’t know how long I listen to the lament, its minor chords wafting through the night air. Six nights later I am again standing at the back door. And again I hear an owl, this time an Eastern Screech Owl: “Whoooooooo whoooooooo.” The high-pitched trill is floating toward me from farther away this time. If the call of the Great Horned Owl is a mournful bluegrass ballad, that of the Eastern Screech is an aria. People who know about such things say that nighttime hooting is primarily for the purpose of notifying intruders that they have entered a particular owl’s territory or warning nearby owls that a predator is near. I am flattering myself, I know, to think that I am the intended audience, but it feels as though my avian neighbors want to tell me something. The only problem is that I need a translator. Or maybe I don’t. I have lived in close proximity to the natural world for a long time now, long enough to have learned some things that only nature can teach. I have learned that whatever is planted – cotton or sweet corn or effort –, harvest can’t be hurried. I have learned that hearts, not just fields, can benefit from lying fallow for a while. I have learned that tears, like the rain, will not last forever. Staring into the autumn night, I realize the owls are not telling me anything. They are, in a language that is my own, asking a simple question. Nearing the end of what has been a long year, a hard year, a year with no rest stops, no coffee breaks, and no time outs, they want to know who: Who am I? Who do I want to be? It is a question usually reserved for first days of kindergarten and freshman psychology classes and job interviews. It hardly feels necessary at my age, but the owls are insistent and they are such good neighbors I feel compelled to at least try to answer it. But not tonight. Tonight I will retreat and sleep and dream, safe in knowing the Great Horned and the Eastern Screech and all the others will not let me forget. Copyright 2024
- Even If It Hurts
If my life were a work of literature, the leitmotif representing my mother would be a straight pin. Mama taught herself to sew when she was just a girl. By the time I became aware of the extent of her gift, she had developed quite the reputation as a dressmaker. Her work was easily recognizable by the flatness of her seams, the invisibility of her hems, the absence of puckers in her set-in sleeves. She was, in contradiction to her generally lighthearted and carefree demeanor, an obsessive when it came to her sewing. As one would expect, she made all my clothes. Among my most vivid memories of junior high school are the remembrances of spending the afternoon at Minkovitz, trying on at least a dozen outfits with absolutely no intention of buying anything while Mama sketched each one in her tiny spiral notebook, adding meticulous notes: “Peter Pan collar” or “cut on the bias” or “tartan plaid.” From Minkovitz, we would cross the street to the Bulloch County Bank and continue on down the block to Belk (which had a fabric department at the time) to choose the fabric, the thread, and the zipper with which she would recreate (the same but better) my next new outfit. A few days ago when I was refugeeing from the hurricane, I was sharing that story with my great-niece Chambless. She was eight when Mama died and most of her memories are of a quiet, withdrawn woman whose own memories had faded into unrecognizable images. I wanted her to know Mama as the creative, energetic woman she had been. As I tried to explain to Chambless the – to her – inconceivable notion of homemade clothes, I remembered Mama’s penchant for leaving a straight pin somewhere in every dress or skirt of blouse she made. It was not intentional, but somehow, in the careful removal of pins from zippers and collars and seams, she always managed to miss one. My earliest recollection of inadvertently locating the errant pin was one Sunday morning strutting myself into church, down the side aisle to our pew, the full skirt of my new dress bouncing and the bow at my waist cinched so tightly I could hardly breathe, and having to stifle a yelp as I sat down and felt the pin stab into the back of my chubby little thighs. Mama died on November 30, 2000. I few weeks later I was going through her cedar chest and came across a Christmas tree skirt that she had made for me when I was living in my trailer, my very first grown-up person home. I could feel my eyes getting teary as I picked up the skirt and, as I lowered my face to bury this fresh wave of grief in the fabric, I felt something sharp run across my hand. I started laughing before I even found it. Even after a number of years of use, the unfolding and encircling of lots of Christmas trees, there remained within my mother’s gift a straight pin. Two weeks ago and four years later, as I packed up my things to make a run away from Helene and up the interstate to family and a place with air conditioning, I grabbed the quilt off of the guest room bed, a quilt Mama and I had made together in 1975. When I woke up the next morning, in a strange place, but surprisingly refreshed, I went to throw back the quilt and felt a sharp prick on my leg. I shook my head as my fingers maneuvered the pin through the layers of batting and fabric. I stared at it for the longest time. I can not say for certain what the repeated appearance of the straight pin means. I do not know for sure that Mama has played any part in its showing up every so often. I will not demand that anyone else call it anything but a coincidence. But I can and do and will hold in my heart the simple truth that love lasts forever and love will find a way to its beloved. Even if it hurts. Copyright 2024
- Rain and Acorns and the Need to Know
Last week, as the 17½ inches of rain soaked into the sandy soil, I went outside to gather the branches that had scattered themselves across the yard and was surprised to find that acorns had already started falling. It is August. The temperature is still regularly in the 90s. The leaves are all still green. The trees from which those acorns fall are sawtooth oaks. They are twenty years old now. They are tall and full and anchored in the sandy soil just outside my back door. Every time I look at them I get a jolt of perverse pleasure as I remember someone telling me, when they were spindly seedlings, that they would never grow, never live. That someone was wrong. About a lot of things, as it turns out. Speaking of lots of things, there are a lot of things to like about sawtooth oaks (the shade, the breeze they draw in summer, the crunch of fallen leaves in autumn), but my favorite thing is the acorns. Sawtooth oak acorns are as big as scuppernong grapes and their caps are curly. When the caps fall off – and they always do – they look a lot like buckeyes. They roll around in your hand like marbles, heavy and smooth. Every year at least a couple handfuls wind up inside the house in a bowl just because they are so beautiful. Usually by the time I notice them, so have the deer. The dirt surrounding the roots will look as though it has been turned up by a Lilliputian plow and I will have to work hard to find acorns that haven’t been nibbled already. This year, though – maybe because the deer have been pushed to higher ground by Tropical Storm Debby – the acorns are mounded up in pristine piles awaiting my admiration. I have always thought of the sawtooths as twins – fraternal not identical, not mirror images of each other, but close. When the acorns fall it is impossible to tell where the fruit of one tree stops and the other begins. There is simply one wide blanket of mahogany orbs. That changes today. As I continue shuffling my feet, the sound of acorn against acorn reminiscent of the maracas in second grade rhythm band, I see a pile of acorns that are different – tiny, minuscule, smaller than a garden pea. I stop, stare, look around. All the acorns under this tree are of the diminutive variety. For the next couple of minutes I turn in circles taking in the contradiction: the two trees have, after 20 years of making the same kind of acorn, produced starkly different ones. My first thought is to contact one of my biologist friends for an explanation. My second thought is to pull out my phone and Google my inquiry. My third thought is, “I don’t want to know.” I am generally a very curious person. It is not often that I don’t want to know something. It is not often that I choose ignorance over knowledge. I don’t ever remember saying, to myself or someone else, “I don’t want to know.” In fact, I am generally dismissive of those who are content to embrace obliviousness, but these are strange times. Houses are flooded and roads are washed out. Friends are displaced and livelihoods are lost. And in the midst of the chaos, there is still death and grief. Which is why, as I continue studying the acorns I realize that it’s not that I don’t want to know. It is that I don’t need to know. For right now, for these liminal days, it is enough to watch and be amazed. Copyright 2024
- What I Don't Know
At 1:29, a.m. the power goes out, cutting off in mid-sentence one of the hurricane experts on Weather Channel. Flashlight in hand, I search for the remote, thinking about how – when the power does come back on at some indeterminate future time – I will be stuck with Jim Cantore and friends because I have no idea how to change the channel without pointing and clicking. By 3:00 a.m., the house is already so hot that I have thrown back the covers, not even a sheet between me and whatever danger might exist in the night. The wind is throwing itself against the outside walls in gusts of up to 70 miles per hour. Every so often the walls creek like when you break the spine of a book. There is no chance of my falling asleep. I don’t know if I have ever felt more alone. At 4:15 a.m., the phone dings. “Okay at Sandhill?” At 4:40 a.m., it dings again. “Are you ok?” The darkness feels a little less heavy, but the wind continues to howl and the house continues to moan. I imagine what it is like outside. I imagine the does who live in our woods encircling their fawns in the crater-like beds they make along fencerows. Are their hearts racing? Are they, too, longing for daylight? At 6:30 a.m., as the sky begins to lighten, I raise the blinds and stare through the gray mist. I can see the outline of Daddy’s house, his empty house. I, for some reason, tiptoe to the back door and look out at my beautiful, beloved sawtooth oaks. They are still standing, but it is as though an egg beater has attacked their foliage – holes where full limbs once reached toward the sky, broken branches dangling just out of reach from the ground. The sound of my brother’s UTV draws close. Together we ride the farm, assessing the damage – part of a fence folded over, a couple of sheets of metal roofing on the equipment shelter flapping in the wind, and lots and lots of downed trees. Later, we will join our neighbors in clearing our two-mile dirt road. A tractor, a chain saw, and muscles make a big difference. Only when vehicles can once again make their way to the highway, do any of us catch our breaths. It is Tuesday as I write this. I still don’t have power. Over the last five days, though, I have seen the best of us. I have charged my phone and filled my cooler with ice at the church I call home, a church that miraculously, when everything around it lost power did not. I have been fed homemade muffins, given a gloriously hot shower, and regaled with stories that almost made me forget by friends I have known since elementary school. I have been welcomed into the home of my nephew and his family where I slept under a handmade quilt and saw Owen teach his cousin Case how to do the zoomies. I have rolled down my car window and given a thumbs up to passing utility trucks and continued down the interstate crying because I am so full of gratitude, but also because I know – from Helene and, before that, Debby and Matthew and all the others – that we could be this way all the time if we would but take a breath, pay attention, let go of thinking that we can be, do, accomplish anything without each other. I don’t know when I will again sleep in my own bed, walk my own road, sit on my own porch and gasp in delight at the beauty of the world. I don’t know when the fence will be repaired, the severed limbs carted away, the road to Sandhill cleared of all debris. I don’t know when I can stop worrying about my friends in North Carolina or if that whirling circle of orange and red and chartreuse taunting us from the Gulf of Mexico will become Isaac and hit us while we are down. What I do know is that today I am freshly showered and bracingly cool, surrounded by people I love and I don’t know that I need more than that. Copyright 2024
- A House On The Water
There is a house on the water that beckons me from time to time, bids me to come watch the waves that are hardly waves, that lick lightly against the docks and seawalls and tree trunks along the shore. It is a house where I have laughed until I cried, cried until the tears lulled me to sleep. A house where I have been loved and tended and nursed back to, if not health, then at least a level of wellness that allowed me to move on. The first time I saw it, it was just a lot studded with hickory trees and carpeted with pine needles. The lake was on the other side of a couple hundred feet of brush, barely visible from the road. My friends were considering buying it and building a weekend house. They wanted to know what I thought. I knew it didn’t matter what I said; they had already made up their minds. A short while later they did buy the lot and they built a house and on the day they moved in – the day after a deluge that left the as-yet-unsodded yard a slick palate of red clay – I, along with the rest of them, carried bulky furniture and boxes of kitchenware and armloads of linens up still-wet steps to begin the process of making it a home. My housewarming gift was a terra cotta angel that they hung on the screened porch that overlooked the lake, a porch where over the years we would sit and stare at the stars reflecting off the water until late into the night, talking softly of important things. A few years later, long enough for the house to have birthed significant memories, it burned. There was nothing left but the skeletal remains of appliances and the terra cotta angel. Having fallen two stories as the wood around her charred and crumbled, she survived but for a tiny chip off the corner of her robe – a small scar, a huge reminder of resilience and survival. So much was lost in the fire. Photos and family heirlooms, the last of the vegetables that Grandma canned. And, yet, my friends decided to rebuild and not just rebuild, but make the lake house their home. It took a while, but the new house created its own memories. It is that house to which I have come at the end of this long hard summer. We are sitting on the porch watching the unpredictable clouds that one moment are flitting across the sky and the next emptying themselves of thick rain and the next producing a fine mist that blows in our faces. “Look! There he is! The fisherman!” I turn my head, looking for a man in a raincoat and slouchy hat, wondering what kind of idiot would be out on the water in this weather. What I see instead is a white heron, long and elegantly lean, looking exactly, I think, like Benedict Cumberbatch if Benedict Cumberbatch was a white heron. “He comes every day,” my friend explains. “Sits on that cypress stump and catches fish.” And at just that moment, the heron lowers his skinny neck and plucks a fish from the water. “It’s amazing,” my other friend says, “that he is fast enough to do that.” I nod in agreement. It is, in fact, amazing. What is more remarkable to me, though, is that the cypress stump upon which the heron makes his stand is underwater. It looks as though he is standing on the surface of the lake, the possessor of some strange buoyancy. It reminds me of St. Peter. Later, lying in a bed that feels almost like home, unable to sleep, but not necessarily unhappy about it, I think of the heron. I wonder what is my strange buoyancy, what it is that keeps me from sinking. It varies, of course. Sometimes it is a book; sometimes it is a long slow walk down my dirt road. And occasionally it is a house on the water that beckons me from time to time. Copyright 2024
- Seashells and Peanut Shells
The car is loaded with three beach chairs, a cooler full of food, two cases of bottled water, a suitcase holding more clothes than I can wear over three days, a novel marketed as the perfect beach read, and three bottles of 70 SPF sunscreen. Before I admonish Owen one final time to be a good dog, I hang on the back door a tin sign that says, “Gone to the beach.” For a dozen years now, the three of us have been doing this – manipulating our schedules and maneuvering around obstacles to spend three or four days at the beach together. We converge every summer on this same spot on the north end of Tybee Island to sit in the sun and watch the container ships on the horizon, to walk the tide line looking for shells, to eat boiled peanuts, to read in short snatches between conversations. This year it almost didn’t happen. Despite elaborate computations that would have made Miss Kemp, our high school trigonometry teacher, proud, we managed to make reservations for the exact day on which Tropical Storm Debby turned the southeast Georgia coast into the set for the Weather Channel. We are a stubborn bunch, though, and after further elaborate computations an alternate date was reached and, so, here we sit, toes in the sand. The sun is as bright as it always is. The tide rushes in as it always does. The seagulls squawk and dive-bomb the peanut shells as they always do. Missouri and Virginia and Bulloch County seem, if only for a moment, far away. The three of us met in 1967. We navigated adolescence within sight of each other and remember things about each other that no longer matter. Two of us attended the same college. Two of us had the same major and chose the same profession. Two of us lost our fathers in the last year. Our lives have, for over 55 years, twisted and turned and overlapped despite the physical distance. Every year there is something new to talk about – a longed-for success, an unexpected loss, a professional dilemma, a personal disappointment – but we always end up dissecting how this annual rite came to be, how this place became sacred, how those awkward sixth-graders became confident (if sometimes weary) women and that they remain friends. We are old enough now to see these days for what they are – a brief respite from lives that haven’t turned out exactly as we had planned, a gentle reminder that friendships can last even when other things don’t, a simple confirmation that it is worth what it took to get here. We are old enough to be grateful. Copyright 2024
- Saturday in the Park with Little Girls
The bright sunshine is filtered through a wide canopy of live oak branches heavy with dark green leaves. Behind me three or four men and one woman are practicing what I think might be lacrosse. In front of me, on the other side of the wide sidewalk that winds beneath the live oaks, a group plays soccer. Beneath collapsible tents, the farmers -- the vendors of everything from organic mushrooms to goat cheese to sweet corn – stand placidly watching, as do I, their potential customers move up and down the sidewalk, pushing strollers, holding on to leashes, holding on to someone else's hand. I am not a farmer, nor am I a customer. I am a writer, an author, an invitee to the Forsyth Farmers Market for what they are calling their inaugural book fair. What this means is that I get to sit here for a few hours, in the shade behind a table on which I have spread out copies of the three books I have written and hope that someone who came to buy fresh peas is suddenly stricken with a desire to read. I haven’t been to Forsyth Park in a long time, over 20 years, as a matter of fact. I attended a wedding here once, had a plastic water bottle thrown at me once by a gang of juveniles, got approached by a street preacher once. I don’t anticipate any of those things happening today. One of the organizers stops by my tent to chat, to thank me for coming. “What’s been your favorite part so far?” “The dogs,” I answer after brief thought. I can tell my conversation partner is surprised. “The way some of them look like their owners. And how some of them don’t.” I don’t tell her that I am flummoxed by the fortyish man, at least 6'2", cradling the Pomeranian; that I am mesmerized by the English Greyhound who, along with his owner who could easily be a model, prances nonchalantly through the crowd. I don’t mention that the hairless something-or-other gave me creeps. She walks on to the next tent and I decide to watch something other than the dogs. As I watch, I take notes. I observe that at least 50% of the people who walk by have tattoos. I conclude that it is now socially acceptable to carry one’s vegetables in a bag labeled with profanity. I realize that the only people responding to my smiles, my attempts at eye contact, my offers of “hello” and “good morning” are the little girls. There are a lot of them. They are all different colors, all different ages. They wear shorts and t-shirts; they wear cotton dresses with ruffled skirts. Some of them toddle awkwardly, their fat baby fists clinging to the hands of their parents. Some of them lope like gazelles. The thing that they all have in common is this: In response to my smiles, my attempts at eye contact, my offers of “hello” and “good morning,” every one of them – every single one – waves. Not the parents, not the grandparents, not the brothers. Just the little girls. People don’t wave much anymore. Grandmas standing on front porches bidding goodbye to their parting families, pageant queens on the backs of convertibles, rural drivers who dangle their hands over the tops of their steering wheels anticipating the approach of a neighbor. Also, little girls. Things are different now from when I was a little girl. I never heard the phrase “stranger danger.” I did not resist hugs and pats on the head. I walked through life assuming that every adult was good and kind and safe. I understand, though, that the world has changed. That we teeter on the verge of losing touch with ourselves and each other. Which is why on this summer Saturday in Savannah it doesn’t matter that I had to get up at 6 a.m. to drive 50 miles to sell three books. What matters is that the little girls waved. And that makes me think that there might be hope for the world after all. Copyright 2024
- So Little One Can Do
There is so little one can do, sitting at the bedside of one's father. One can clean his glasses, knowing that with every rub one is destroying evidence, fingerprints from all the times his fingers, scarred and knotted, have unfolded the metal legs and placed them on his weary face. One can hold his hand, squeeze it tightly and feel the tears flood as he squeezes yours in return. One can whisper, “I love you,” over and over again as the light through the closed blinds fades from midday to dusk. Otherwise, one sighs, smiles bravely at the nurses who slip in and out of the room, imagines how in the world one can survive as the tide ebbs farther and farther from the shore. I'm not sure that any of us thought Daddy was ever going to die. And certainly not from something so pedantic as cancer. If you'd asked me, I would have told you that when the time had come for him to, like David, sleep with his fathers, he would, like shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams -- on some balmy summer night with the moon dangling over the grain bins –, walk across the backyard into a cornfield thick and green and bending in the breeze, pausing only long enough to look back over his shoulder and whisper, "God's good, ain't he?" as he disappeared into the stalks. If he had heard me say that he would have shook his head and said, "All right now, Doll. You know better'n that." And I do, but it really is kinda what I have always thought. Nevertheless, despite his toughness, his determination, his resilience, despite the fact that four months ago on his 88th birthday he was doing things like cutting grass and planting pine trees, despite the sobs that rise in my throat every time I consider a world without him in it, the truth – which in my father’s ethos matters most – is that he is dying. A few Saturdays ago, as we followed the ambulance taking him to hospice, we all wept. His last trip down Settlement Road, which was going to be named Bradley Road until he refused because it sounded too proud. His last glance at the fields he had harrowed and plowed and planted and watered and harvested for 50 years. His last glance at the pine forests and the red clay and John Deere 6400. Even then it hardly seemed possible. But it is possible. It is also inevitable. And in these last days, as his grimaces grow deeper and his breaths more erratic, one can not help imagining what the world will be without his presence – his stories, his admonitions, his prayers. One can not help wondering what happens when the fulcrum of a family falls. In the days to come there will be the rituals that strive to give shape to grief. There will be the mechanics of stopping this and closing that. There will be all the emotions, not just the pleasant and sympathetic ones. And in each of those rituals, those mechanics, those emotions there will be a painful reminder that – in the tritest of terms – life goes on. It is dusk. It is time for the next person who loves him, who is loved by him to take over the honor of keeping company, bearing witness. It is time for me to go. There is so little one can do, leaving the bedside of one’s father. Copyright 2024
- People and Paint Chips
I love paint chips. I love that their names are so evocative. Nonchalant White and Jersey Cream. Flamingo Feather and Equestrian Green. Borrowed Light and Cabbage White. I love the ones that have five or six shades of the same hue, dark to light. Surf Green fading into Composed into Hazel into Waterscape into Dewy. Down Pour melting into Leisure Blue into Respite into Take Five into Balmy. I love the way, when you fan out a manufacturer's deck of chips, you can see all the colors in the world. And, yet, all the walls at Sandhill are white. There is a very good reason for that, of course (There was a very good reason for every design and decorating decision I made while building Sandhill, often to the chagrin of the contractor and subs.). The fact is that white is never just white. As we learned sometime in elementary school, white reflects all the colors of the prism, so a white wall changes with the kind and amount of light it reflects -- from the soft pearly light of morning to the bright yellow light of noon to the smoky lavender light of dusk. Sandhill faces south. The sun rises in the bedroom windows and sets in the living room and kitchen windows, which means that the white walls actually change color throughout the day. And throughout the year. By choosing white for the walls I actually chose an entire spectrum of colors. But how to choose which of the hundreds of whites? Despite the fact that I had spent years adding torn-out pages from magazines, I'd never come across any instructions for answering that question. I was, then, dependent on my own ingenuity, which resulted in attaching to first one Sheetrocked wall and then another the paint company's brochure of all available whites. I don't remember in which room I started, but I took the time visit the house-in-progress at least three times at different hours on a given day to look at all those whites. One by one I drew a line through the ones I didn't like in that room and in that light before moving on to the next room and repeating the process. After a couple of rounds I narrowed it down to Pittsburgh Paints Vanilla Milkshake. Fifteen years later when I undertook some repairs as a result of wind damage from three hurricanes in a row -- Charley, Frances, and Ivan -- the winning white was Benjamin Moore Decorators White. The next time I felt compelled to make changes, it was Sherwin Williams Ice Cube. The life lesson in all of this -- because a highly verbal, slightly bossy first-born is going to find a life lesson in everything -- is, first, that I clearly prefer cool whites and, second, that different people (or companies) are often going to call the same thing by different names. And while I think that names, for everything from hair color to fingernail polish, are significant, it's important to remember that a name can't reflect everything there is to know. About a hair color. Or fingernail polish. Or paint. Or, say, about the girl you meet on the first day of college whose parents favored names from 19th century British literature. You have to get to know her before you can make a real choice as to whether Philippa is someone with whom you want to share a dorm room. You have to spend time with Philippa in different circumstances and different lights to know if you will share your shampoo or invite her home for the weekend. You have to, in a way, pin her to the wall and live with her for a while. Because when you do – when you are patient in the picking – it will be a choice you can live with for a very long time. Copyright 2024
- Heirlooms
My family doesn't have many heirlooms. Not in the traditional sense of “objects of value held by a family for several generations.” We have stories and legends and inside jokes. We have loud laughs and good hugs and lots of scripture and poetry and axioms memorized and available at a moment's notice. But when it comes to Great-Grandma's sterling or Sister's breakfront, you will have to look elsewhere. When I moved into Sandhill I didn't have a lot of furniture. I had been living in a mobile home for six years and the only thing I wanted to take with me from that what was my first grown-up home was a pine end table I'd bought on sale at Macy's. I bought a bed, a nightstand, and a couch from L.A. Waters Furniture and figured I'd fill the rest of the rooms as I found things I liked. About the time I moved in, Mama suggested that I take her cedar chest. She didn't give it to me, but, rather sheepishly, asked if I'd like to have it. It had been the object of much covetousness as I grew up and was, on the rare occasion, allowed to go through its contents -- the wedding dress she didn't wear when she and Daddy decided to elope, the tiny yellow housecoat that had been mine as a baby, her high school scrapbook, and the blue satin-covered baby book in which she had written every milestone of the first six years of my life. The story behind the chest was as fascinating to me as its contents. Mama had purchased it when she was a working girl in Savannah and living at the YWCA. After graduating from Collins High School, she'd left her tiny little for the big city of Savannah to take a job as a telephone operator with Southern Bell. My favorite phone call stories were the ones involving lonely soldiers at Hunter Army Air Field who would ring up the operators just to have someone with whom to talk. Once, when I was about 10 or 12, we were in Savannah and, for some bewildering reason, found ourselves walking down Whitaker Street after dark. Mama pointed out the Y to me and told me how, when she worked the night shift, she had walked home alone, under the Spanish moss-draped trees, down the cracked sidewalks, past a funeral home. I was amazed at her bravery. I saw adventure and fearlessness in the woman in whom I'd only ever seen duty and protectiveness. She had, amazingly, once been young and carefree. She had also been imagining another life – the life of wife and mother – and toward that end she saved up enough money to buy a hope chest, a receptacle for her dreams, the very same Lane cedar chest that was such a treasure trove for the daughter she would one day have. So, of course, I'd like to have it. And in the back of Daddy's pick-up it made the very short journey from their house to mine, a testament to Mama's youth, a symbol of my adulthood. Today the chest sits at the foot of the bed in Sandhill’s guest room. It bears the smell of cedar, a stamp listing the patent numbers given to the Lane Company, and a couple of short red Magic Marker strokes made by one of the many children who have knelt at the chest with paper and pen to draw a picture. It holds the quilt made for me by Mama and Grannie, a crocheted bedspread that Mama started when I was a small child and finished when I was 35, the American flag jacket given to me when I was chosen to carry the Olympic Torch in 1996, and the quilt I started in college and which was finally completed by my friend Debra during the Covid lockdown. My mama’s chest (because it will never be fully mine) is scratched and faded and watermarked. The strong cedar scent has faded. The lid creaks loudly when I open it. Not long after Mama died, I went into the chest looking for something and found the Christmas tree skirt she had made for me my first Christmas in the mobile home. As I unfolded it I felt a prick on my finger – an overlooked straight pin, Mama’s calling card. For all the months she had been gone, for all the years before that she had been going, she was palpably there. Deeply present. With me in a way I had not known before. I laughed out loud. And then I cried. For Mama, for myself, and for the real heirlooms, the ones that lie folded in our hearts. Copyright 2024
- Bookends
Minute. It is a minefield of a word for people whose first language is not English. Like a nine-year-old girl in south Georgia in 1964. A girl whose vocabulary, when she started first grade, included words like chimley, but not chimney; winder, but not window. Who didn't yet have the ability to understand that when her grandmother said she was going to "hope" someone she meant she was going to offer assistance, but also -- in a deep spiritual sense -- also meant that she was sharing her own expectation of better things to come. It is a word that, to this day, conjures up a specific memory of utter humiliation. We'd been assigned a report, to be presented orally, on aquatic life. Like every other assignment, I approached it with curiosity and zeal. There was nothing in the world I liked better than learning unless it was pleasing the adults in my life. We did not have a set of encyclopedias in our home and in fourth grade I'd not yet been exposed to library research. I would later learn to love the card catalog and the Reader's Guide To Periodical Literature, but those delights still awaited. The single resource available to me was a large dictionary purchased by my parents from a door-to-door salesman -- Webster's New World Dictionary: The Everyday Encyclopedic Edition. The volume contained far more than a dictionary, however. There were sections on scientific terms, business correspondence, civics (This was back when people still knew what that was.), principles of grammar, geography (including, before GPS and Google, the distances between principal cities of the United States and of the world), history, home economics, literature (including a section on the world's great books and synopses of all of Shakespeare's plays), mathematics, medicine, music, and space. And then there were the illustrations, beautiful hand-colored plates that opened the book -- "Rare Birds of Brilliant Plumage," "Plants of Great Commercial Value," "Principal Edible Grains," precious stones, building stones, Yellowstone. Of greatest interest to me at that moment were "Living Corals," "Fish of Unusual Interest," "Game Fish Caught with the Fly," and, what was to be my downfall, "Minute Life in Ponds and Streams." Several of my classmates were, I knew, going to report on the ocean and saltwater life. I'd never seen the ocean and, even at that young age, understood the writer's adage of "write what you know." I knew ponds. There was one right outside my back door. It was the water into which we threw stale bread to feed the fish. It was the water in which we swam in the summer. It was where Daddy taught me to bait my own hook, where he and I floated trying to catch supper. I worked so hard on that report. And on the day that I was scheduled to do my oral presentation, I took to school with me Webster's New World Dictionary: The Everyday Encyclopedic Edition. I had practiced holding it open so as to share the beautiful plates at appropriate moments. I was sure that my classmates would be impressed. And perhaps they were. But what I remember about that oral presentation, all I remember, is that when I opened the book and held up "Minute Life in Ponds and Streams" I pronounced the first word as though it was the one meaning 60 seconds of time. I had no idea that, in that context, the word was pronounced differently. That it meant something other than time. My assumption during preparation was that calling something "min-it" life simply meant it didn't live very long. Immediately, before I could close the book and bring it down to my side, my teacher -- standing at the back of the room with her arms crossed over her chest -- shouted: "My-newt. It's pronounced my-newt." Never had I been so ashamed. Things that happen to us as children, we all know, linger. Long after the moment. Long after the day. Long, long after they should linger. And that correction, that harsh, public correction in fourth grade is a big part of why for many years I struggled so mightily against being wrong. The burden was so great that often if something I said received a response of "Really?" or "I can't believe it!", I would backtrack. "Maybe I misunderstood," I'd say. Or, "I could be mistaken." Or, "I think so," even when I was absolutely positive. A few years ago, I wrote a column about trees and I wrote, "I remember something about a tree growing from its center." A few days later, my friend Missy -- who is a real botanist, one with letters after her name -- called me. She began by telling me how much she had loved the column, how much she appreciated my drawing attention to things like trees. And, then, very gently, she said, "I did want to tell you, though, that trees don't grow from the center. Do you remember learning about xylem and phloem? The area between them is called the cambium and it's in the outer layer of the tree. That's where it grows." I was tickled to death, first of all, that I did, in fact, remember xylem and phloem and, secondly, that my friend of nearly 60 years loved me enough to both correct me and to do it privately. Not long after that, I posted on Instagram a photo of some tiny purple blooms I'd found in the yard. I captioned it "First bloom, verbena." To be honest, I hardly looked at it. I was so glad to see some color in the yard I just assumed it was verbena that hadn't quite opened its little faces yet. A day or so later, my friend Annie, who I call "The Wildflower Whisperer," shared on her Facebook page a post from the truly-learned people at Southern Piedmont Natural History a photo identifying my little bloom as henbit. Not unopened verbena. A subtle -- and loving -- correction. Missy and Annie are generous and kind. And because they are, I am smarter than I was before they corrected me. I am also stronger than I was in fourth grade. Since that moment of humiliation, I've been wrong so many times and about so many things that being wrong is no longer the indictment of character I used to think it was. I've let go of the compulsion to be right. Being wrong is no longer a reason to blush and hide, but an opportunity to admit to my humanity, to take a load off, to laugh. I often think of life events as bookends. When something unpleasant, difficult, or hurtful happens, something else will come along -- a week, a year, a lifetime -- later to close it off, to bookend it. Something that will give meaning to the hurt, make a story out of the pain. That may not always be true, but it is helpful to think so in the middle time. An oral report in fourth grade and the sweet gestures of dear friends 55 years later. Bookends between which have been the volumes of a lifetime. Copyright 2024
- Morning Song. Evening Song. My Song.
It is morning. I slip outside, barefoot and still drowsy. To the east the sun is butter, melting slowly, defying gravity to lift itself from the horizon into the sky. Dew puddles on the deck railing, drips slowly from the thin edge of the metal roof. The branch, deeply green with the sudden flush of summer, vibrates with the calling, the chattering, the singing of multiple birds – mockingbirds and cardinals, wrens and crows, sparrows and doves. I hesitate to call what I hear a choir. It is more like an orchestra warming up – the strings squeaky, the woodwinds breathy, the brass pompous and proud, all jealously playing over each other until the conductor appears and gently taps the music stand. The longer, the stiller I sit the less raucous are the chirps and screeches, the closer become the notes to a melody. I have been paying attention, deliberate attention, to the birds at Sandhill for less than two years. With the assistance of an app on my phone I have to date identified the songs and whistles and cheeps of 72 of my avian neighbors – American Crow to Yellow-Rumped Warbler. Not quite A to Z, but close enough to keep me amazed. I have made a few observations. First, birds don’t wait for other birds to begin singing; they sing when and for as long as they want. And second, some birds sing from perches out in the open – power lines, rooftops, while others make their offerings from the cover of high branches and deep foliage. It is impossible, of course, not to see the similarities to human behavior. I look at my phone – no new songs recorded today. The list stays at 72. Now it is evening. The heat of the day that has been sits lightly on my bare arms. Above the tree line, there is the faintest smudge of lavender, deepening by the moment. Within minutes – no more than ten – it will be completely dark. The road is empty but for me and Owen, who runs back and forth, into and back out of the neatly planted rows of pine trees, sniffing the ground for signs of something he can chase. It is so quiet that I can hear my shoes make prints in the sand. In the distance a Chuck-will’s-widow offers his plaintive cry. I stop to listen for a response, a call back from another Chuck-will’s-widow. Nothing. He calls again. Silence. I wonder if he knows that he and his kind are on the Common Birds in Steep Decline List. Is that why his song is so mournful? The darkness is falling rapidly now. I turn for home. I think about lists. Birds In My Backyard. Common Birds In Steep Decline. Birds That Sing Together. Birds That Sing Alone. Why the urge to quantify, to measure, to count? With every step the porch light grows brighter and the lament of the Chuck-will’s-widow grows fainter. The night grows deeper and the morning – the morning in which the mockingbirds and cardinals, the wrens and crows, the sparrows and doves will chorus again – grows closer. I answer my own question: I count the birds to remind me to count the other things – the days lived, the breaths taken, the people loved – and in the counting to find my own song. Copyright 2024
- A Perfectly Ordinary Subdivision
It was a perfectly ordinary subdivision of perfectly ordinary houses built in the 1950s and 60s, brick houses with low roofs and deep front yards, three bedrooms and two ceramic-tiled bathrooms, appliances that were avocado or harvest gold. The people that lived in those houses were ordinary people – teachers and insurance agents, nurses and car salesmen, children who took piano lessons and spent their summers playing baseball on Jaycee Field. It is still a perfectly ordinary subdivision, but the people I knew who lived there – the Kaneys, the Millers, the Murrays, the Grays – are long gone. The station wagons and tank-like sedans that ferried my friends to Girl Scouts and football practice and band practice and MYF have been replaced by Priuses and pick-up trucks with fraternity bumper stickers. There are fewer children playing in the front yards. Most of the carports have been closed in to make room for more renters and most of the azaleas need pruning. Most of the shutters could use a new coat of paint and at least a couple of the mailboxes could use straightening. On occasion, I still go there, this place that holds so many memories. I walk along the sidewalk-less roads and remind myself who lived where, how many siblings they had, their parents’ names. Nearly always I will pass a landscaping company’s trailer and see a zero turn mower driven by a man wearing earphones. Never do I pass someone’s father or teen-aged brother pushing a Briggs and Stratton. It makes me wonder why I keep going back. There is, though, the pond. Even with the new benches and walking path and charming arched bridge, it is still familiar. I can easily see me and my friends standing under a tree within sight of the camellias getting yearbook photos made. I can still see the guys playing Frisbee. I can still see us girls, sleeping bags dangling over our shoulders, piling into one of the houses where we will spend the night laughing at everything and without a reason in the world to do anything else. Not long ago, I was walking around the pond and came up on a young man fishing. He paused in his casting and turned to smile and say hello. “Caught anything?” I asked in accordance with standard southern protocol. “Not yet.” “Good luck,” I offered, walking on into the flock of Canada geese who are always patrolling. The fisherman was still there when I came back around. “You just missed it!” he called out joyously as I approached. “I got one!” As dear as memories are, too much remembering leaves one at the risk of wistfulness and, in the flash of the fisherman’s smile, my wistfulness fell away. My pop-your-wrist Polaroid image faded and was replaced with a PNG digital, what was superseded by what is. That is, of course, the way of life, of time. “Congratulations!” I called out and meant it. We had our 50th high school reunion not long ago and I pleased myself to no end by recognizing nearly everyone without reading their nametags. We pooled our collective memories to tell stories. We looked at photos of grandchildren who, if we squinted our eyes, looked a little like the people we used to be. We told stories and relived moments and – Lord, help us! – sang the alma mater. This is what I knew at the end of the night: I like these people, the ones with slower steps and thicker middles and less hair, more than I liked the people they used to be. And what I was thinking as I left the fisherman at the pond is that it is possible that I may just learn to like this neighborhood, with its own version of slower steps, thicker middle, and less hair, more than the neighborhood it used to be. Not likely, but possible. And that is enough to keep me going back. Copyright 2024
- From Day to Day and Term to Term
The mantle over the fireplace at my parents’ house is a gallery of candid photos and formal portraits spanning nearly 70 years. On either end are my and my brother’s bronzed baby shoes. I take down each item and remove the dust that has collected since the last time I performed the ritual, paying special attention to the expressions on each face and contemplating the story that each tells. It is easy to get lost in the memories. Dusting finished, I sweep. The broom makes a swooshing sound as it glides over the wooden floor creating a pile of sand that has hitchhiked in in the thick tread of work boots, half of a straw wrapper, and something else that I don't immediately recognize. It is a piece of paper, rectangular, slightly larger than a dollar bill, the color of weak tea. I pause my sweeping to pick it up. It is a witness summons for Bulloch County Superior Court. It is dated August 29, 1961. The blank for the witness’s name is filled in with a perfect cursive hand to read, “ Mrs. Willie Bradley.” My grandmother. Written in pencil at the top is “Mikell Street,” Daddy is close by. “What is this?” I ask him, holding it out to him. “Have you seen this before?” “It must have fallen out of my Bible” he offers. I smile, understanding immediately that this piece of paper is important because, when one is Johnny Bradley, the Bible is the place where one puts important things. Reading the summons through, I have so many questions: What had Grannie see or heard that made her a witness in a criminal case? Who was Marion Bennett? Why would she get just one day’s notice of the trial? Before I can ask Daddy those questions, along with how it came to be in his possession, this piece of paper that is over 60 years old and that, in the strangest of ways, presaged the profession to which I would give so many years of my life, he says, “I remember Mama showing me that. She was crying.” Crying is a part of nearly every story that we tell about Grannie. She cried when someone arrived, when someone left, when gifts were exchanged. She cried when pound cakes fell, when the sound of an ambulance’s siren wafted through her back door from the highway, when her little dog Missy went missing. She cried more than anyone I have ever known, her tender heart simply incapable of holding the wells and waves of emotion she was constantly experiencing. Knowing all that, still I ask, “Why was she crying?” “She said, ‘I don’t know how to do this.’” Grannie grew up hard, surrounded by poverty and violence. She was born before the words “world” and “war” became capitalized and before women could vote. She was a sharecropper’s daughter who became, at 16, a sharecropper’s wife. She picked cotton in the south Georgia summer when she was eight months pregnant. She knew self-reliance and physical labor. She knew to be careful of those in authority, including men in uniform appearing at her front door commanding her to lay all other business aside and threatening a $300 penalty for failure to appear. She knew to be afraid, afraid of so many things, including perhaps whatever it was she meant by the “this” she didn’t know how to do. So this is why she cried. And, now, from a place of privilege I rarely remember, so do I. Copyright 2024