Search Results
278 items found for ""
- What Is Your Name?
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
- A Forecast of Snow and Questions
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 Gifts of the Bowls
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
- Wild Geese and Santa Claus
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
- Reflecting Christmas
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
- Blessing The Memory
It is the single most vivid memory I have of Thanksgiving. It was 1983 and both my grandparents were still living. We had stuffed the little house on College Street with people and food and all manner of conversation. When the last Tupperware dish had been uncovered, Pa rose from his seat at the table to say the blessing. It should be noted that my grandfather never approached this occasion with the intention of simply expressing gratitude and asking for blessing on the food. He took the opportunity to pray for people and weather and prosperity. He included distant relatives and whatever issues were currently uppermost in the minds of the citizenry. He commanded the kitchen as though it were an auditorium and there was no way to know how long his oratory would continue. On this particular Thanksgiving, my mother, who had recently obtained a video camera, the kind that has to be hoisted not lifted, the kind that could produce a dent on the shoulder of the person holding it, stood in the corner and panned the room of bowed heads. My nephew, a little over a year old and just beginning to put together the idea of communicating in something other than grunts, was balanced on my hip as the prayer progressed. After some time, but before Pa had gotten to the end of the prayer and the traditional inclusion of the "sick, afflicted, and oppressed," my nephew called out, "Stop!" Snickers and titters of laughter swept through the room, all recorded for posterity. Undeterred from his patriarchal responsibility, Pa kept praying. I can't say I remember another thing that happened that Thanksgiving, but the images -- the smell of turkey and dressing, the breeze from the open back door, the heat from the cooling oven, the closeness of all the bodies -- came back to me the other day as I made the menu for this year's observance. There is, of course, a lot for which to be grateful, but honesty compels me to admit that the twelve months since last Thanksgiving have left me questioning the ease with which I normally approach the fourth Thursday in November. The weight of so much change and loss is too much for me to balance on my hip. There are moments when I want to yell, "Stop!" And, yet, even as I grit my teeth and straighten my shoulders, I can't resist the other images that creep in from the edges of my memory -- the feel of soft baby fists resting on my neck, the crunch of pecans stop fluffy sweet potatoes, and, overwhelming them all, the perfect contentment of having all the people I love most in a single room around a single table. That will never happen again and I can't help feeling sad even as I am reminded of the oft-repeated adage: Don't be sad that it is over; be glad that it happened. This year, I decide, I can choose to be both. Copyright 2024
- Making A List and Slashing It Twice
The engraved silver tray that sits on the sideboard in the dining room has no real purpose for most of the year. It just sits there looking pretty and reminding me of the friends from whom it was a gift. Come late November, however, it is pressed into service as the receptacle of Christmas cards. Sometimes, on days when all the holiday-related chores are done and I’m feeling particularly festive, I open the day’s cards with a brass letter opener while drinking something hot. On days when they are accompanied by too much junk mail and/or too many solicitations, I rip them open on the way back to the house from the mailbox. However they are opened, each is dropped onto the tray eventually forming a soft mound of cardstock and smiling faces. A handful of them will be traditional Christmas cards, the kind with stylized nativity scenes or ornate wreaths on the front with sentimental phrases printed inside: “May you know the true meaning of Christmas this year.” “Blessings to you and your family during this special season.” “Merry Christmas from our house to yours.” The vast majority, though, are the fancy kind from Shutterfly or Mint, “custom designs” featuring photos of tailgates and proms and graduations, of ski trips and spring break and Independence Day at the beach. There is not a frown or closed eye or crooked collar among them. Everybody I know, apparently, is happy and beautiful. It was the habit, the tradition for many years before her death, that at some point during the holidays my mother and I would sit and go through the cards together. “This,” I would point out to Mama, “is my friend from law school and her family.” She would hold the card with both hands, gaze intently, and offer commentary of some kind: “That little girl looks just like her daddy.” It is, to be honest, a little early to be thinking about Christmas cards. We still have two weeks until Thanksgiving, after all, but I am already getting emails offering me 40% off if I place my order now, so it – the choosing and ordering and addressing and stamping and mailing – has been on my mind. And I have made a decision. This year I am not sending Christmas cards. I did not come to this conclusion without serious consideration. And it is not just because I spent over $400 on the endeavor last year. Nor is it because the year has been exhausting and I simply do not have the energy or because I do not have sincerely warm feelings for the people on my Christmas card list (fastidiously maintained since 1992). It is because I have allowed the choosing and ordering and addressing and stamping and mailing to become rote, automatic, mechanical. I have permitted the process to overshadow Christmas itself, made the checking off of one more thing from the holiday to-do list the ultimate goal. As a result, I fear I have completely failed at acknowledging and honoring the people with whom I share memories of the past and hope for the future, with whom I have experienced the greatest delight and the deepest grief, without whom my life would be infinitely smaller. Penance is due for such an egregious transgression. Retribution is owed. Restitution must be paid. So, let it begin here. Hear these words of confession: I love you all and I am grateful. Copyright 2024
- 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