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Acorns and seashells and nests.  Pebbles and starfish and seeds.  Antlers and feathers and twigs.  Scattered over bookshelves and mantles and tabletops, they are the harvest of hundreds of hours spent wandering. I run my fingers across the downy feathers and through the silky seeds.  I clack the antlers against each other, conjuring a scene of young bucks jousting in the moonlight.  I hold the shells to my nose and somehow breathe in the ocean. I was never someone who picked up moss and bits of fur.  I was not a child who came inside at the end of a summer day sweaty and dirty, her pockets full of bark and discarded exoskeletons.  I was a girl who spent her afternoons, her Saturdays stretched across the bed in her green and blue bedroom, the one with shag carpet, reading Heidi and Little Women. But at some point, well into adulthood, I started picking up snake skins and abandoned nests.   I began filling vases with broom sedge and honeysuckle.  I began littering the coffee table with maple leaves that eventually dried out and crumbled into dust.  It was as though observing, experiencing, enjoying nature was not enough.  I wanted to possess it. Over the last couple of years, confronted with the reality that nobody is going to want any of my material possessions, my collected tangible property, my  stuff when I have been, as we say, gathered to my people, I have begun divesting myself of said stuff.  Large numbers of books, entire sets of dishes, an inordinate number of blankets and throws have found their way to shelters and thrift stores and recycling bins. What has not been thrown away, however, is anything I picked up from a road, a beach, or a fence row. Sunday was a perfect spring day made more perfect by the absence of caravans of ATVs chugging up and down my road.  After the Braves secured a come-from-behind victory with a three-run homer and just before the back nine at the Masters, I decided to take a walk.  It was a dawdle, really.  An amble.  A purposeless perambulation.  If I expected to find anything it would have been a feather fallen loose from a turkey vulture or a cluster of tracks where a herd of deer had danced their Saturday night away.  I did not expect to find a quarter. It was lying nestled in the soft treads of a recently passed tire, heads up, George Washington looking not the least surprised to have been dropped from a pocket so far from civilization.  I vacillated a moment on whether to pick it up, not so far removed from my former profession that I didn’t remember tales of coins being laced with fentanyl.  Convincing myself of the unlikelihood of such a scenario, I picked it up and dropped it into my pocket, fiddling with it all the way home. It was a couple of days later that I figured out what George, the father of our country and he who could not tell a lie, was telling me:  Picking up that quarter made it mine, but picking up an acorn, a pine cone, a ladybug never will.  The sand dollars and sweet gum balls, the holly sprigs and dried hydrangeas, the turkey egg and wasp nest will never be mine.  They can only loved with the tenderness reserved for that which can not be possessed. Copyright 2024

It is Maundy Thursday.  Instead of heading to church for the commemoration of what Christians call the Last Supper and –  less considered and even a little uncomfortable –  the washing of the apostles’ feet by Jesus, I am heading to the grocery store because I forgot to get cheese and noodles for Sunday’s mac and cheese and because the cheese grater that I have had for my entire adult life has given up the ghost.  I am more than a little perturbed, irritated, put out. That said, it is a lovely afternoon.  After a couple of days of heavy clouds and heavier rain, the sun is bright, but soft.  It sifts through the back windshield to land on my shoulders like a fleece blanket, like Grannie’s veined hands stroking me gently as she shushed my little girl tears.  The fields that stretch out on either side of the road are practically grinning, so ready to feel the tremble of new growth pushing up through the soil.  Perhaps, I think, this – this gentle hum of spring that I can feel recalibrating my mood – is communion in a different form. Rounding a curve, I feel gravity pull against the cruise control, and see, a couple of hundred yards ahead, a shiny black pick-up truck stopped in the road.  I slow as I approach.  A man steps out, leaves the driver’s door open, and begins moving toward something lying in the left-hand lane.  It could be a baseball cap.  It could be anything, really, but I think it is a baseball cap. He pauses as I get close enough to make out his features.  His hair and moustache are the color of his truck.  He is no older than forty.  He is muscled, not like a man who works out, but like a man who works outside.   He is also, I can tell from the shine on his truck, a man who is particular, a man who pays attention. I am only a couple of car lengths away now.  He lifts his arms and I assume he is going to wave me around, the way we say in the country, “Never mind me sitting here in the road.”  He does not.  Instead, he frantically waves his arms over his head and then points to the baseball cap, which – I suddenly realize – is not a baseball cap, but a turtle. I smile, lift my hands from the steering wheel to make sure he knows I understand, and watch him bend down and gently nudge the turtle toward the newly-green grass on the edge of the road.  He is grinning as he hurries back toward the truck. “Thank you!” I yell.   He doesn’t hear what I’ve said.  He trots toward me.  “Thank you,” I repeat. He smiles and shrugs.  “I had to help the little fellow.” He returns to his truck, lets me go first.  He follows me all the way to the stop sign at the four-lane highway where we turn to go in different directions. I blink my eyes to hold back tears. All the irritation and disappointment of a few moments before dissolve in the kindness, the tenderness, the humility of one man’s lowering himself to serve another. That is, I realize, as the Easter weekend traffic rushes past, what this day, this week is about.  That is what the liturgy means when it urges us to “Do this in remembrance of me.” Not every church service takes place in a church.  Not every worshipful offering is made in the reflection of stained glass.  Not every prayer is uttered from a pew.  Sometimes, like today, the service is held, the offering made, the prayer whispered between strangers on an asphalt road. Copyright 2024

It was over 25 years ago that I had the mistaken idea that I could be a gardener. I had yet to learn that the piece of land upon which I had planted myself belonged not to me but to itself and that it would grow what it wanted and only that. I had yet to learn that being a gardener requires not just intention and resources, but at least a little talent.  I had yet to learn that, contrary to what my elementary school teachers proclaimed, I can not be anything I want to be. I have now learned all those things (along with plenty more) and, as a result, I carry around a little more cynicism, a little more suspicion, and a little more distrust than I did on the day I ordered the “perennial wildflower mix” from some catalog that had made its way into my mailbox. The seeds came in a container that looked like a slightly obese Pringles can.   The photo on the outside was of a wide expanse of lavender and pink and yellow wildflowers, glowing in the light of a springtime sun.  The planting instructions were rolled up inside the can like a scroll of ancient wisdom, the type so tiny that I had to squint to read them. It was some time, several months actually, before the enthusiasm that prompted my purchase returned and I made my way outside to put the seeds in the ground.   I chose the location upon which to scatter the Lilliputian seeds (The instructions were clear that there was no planting involved.), started hacking away at the grass-mostly-weeds with the tool, a cultivator, I had purchased specifically for the occasion, and discovered quickly that my knees were probably not up to much gardening. Still, I am nothing if not determined, so the dirt got turned up and the seeds scattered and watered and I rose from the posture of prayer with the idea that all my labor would be rewarded. It was not. Not that year.  Not the next year.  Or the next.  Or any of the following twenty years. It is important to know when to give up and, eventually, I did. But I never forgot. One day about two weeks ago as Owen and I approached home from our walk down the river road, I got a glimpse of something yellow near the ground under the kitchen window.  It could have been anything – a Dollar General plastic bag from the bed of somebody’s pick-up truck was most likely – , but it wasn’t.  It was, in fact, a flower. I was not shocked or startled.  I wasn’t even mildly surprised.  I was, as a Victorian novelist might say, bemused, that is, “slightly confused; not knowing what to do or how to understand something.” But it was not the flower (which I subsequently identified as freesia) about which I did not know what to do.  It was me. Twenty years is a long time.  A person can let go of a lot of things in twenty years, can turn a lot of corners, can pack up and put away a lot of dreams. I knelt down in front of the flower, its little face bobbing in the breeze like a cork on a pond.  I felt the corners of my mouth turn up into a smile and I felt something slowly dissolve in my chest.  Apparently, I had not given up, let go, put away.  Not completely.  Apparently, somewhere in the deepest part of me, as in Pandora’s box, there remained hope. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman says that hope is often grounded in memory.  In this case, I think, that grounding may be literal.  I may have given up my expectation, my anticipation, my longing, but my hope was just buried – along with the seeds –  surviving somehow for twenty years.  And coming back to life in accordance with its season. I have kept tabs on the freesia, checked on it every day.  It has opened wider, grown taller, been joined by another long stem of sunshine-banana-lemon yellow loveliness.  And it is reminding me to hope. “Hope,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “is the thing with feathers.”  It is also, I am learning, the thing with petals and pistils and stamens and stigmas. Copyright 2024

Overnight the yellow jessamine blooms. Floating in the topmost branches of the scrub oaks along the river road, the flowers look like a cloud of fairies. They also look like an entire orchestra of trumpets, the outer lips curling back into snarky smiles. And, then, over the next night, the wild plum trees bloom. Their bright gold stamens wiggling back and forth in the slightest breeze look like the jacks I used to toss into the air and watch fall on the breezeway at Mattie Lively during recess, scraping my knuckles on the concrete as I rushed to pick them up before the red rubber ball bounced. And, then, crossing the yard, I see that the blue toadflax has sprouted up around the holes that the armadillos have dug.  The stems are tall and thinner than a spaghetti noodle.  A circle of asymmetrical petals that dangle like dog tongues makes the tiny flowers. It is – obviously and with disregard to the official date on the calendar still three weeks away – spring. Or so it seems.  I am not completely sure. Despite the chartreuse buds on the hydrangea and the olive green catkins dangling from the oak trees, despite the balmy breeze and the early light coming through my bedroom windows, despite the near-constant birdsong I can not bring myself to take my coats to the dry cleaners. Spring is a flirt.  A coquette.  A tease.  She can not be trusted. One February I found a beautiful dress on the clearance rack at Dillard’s in Atlanta.  My friend Lynn was with me and we agreed that it would make a wonderful Easter dress.  It was navy blue with large white polka dots.  It had a fitted waist and a full skirt.  It was also sleeveless.  The fact that it cost $15 was the piece de resistance.  A bargain for sure.  I could hardly wait for Easter. On Palm Sunday the temperature crashed.  The forecast was definitive: Easter would not just be chilly, but downright cold.  I spent the entire week looking for a sweater to go with my $15 dress.  I found one – it cost $70. That sweater – which I remember with bitterness – is, of course, but a symbol for every disappointment, rejection, and betrayal that I have ever experienced.  A metaphor for every failure, loss, and defeat I have ever suffered.  A reminder of every false step, wrong decision, and poor choice I have ever made.  That sweater is a monument to Nature’s unpredictability and my own humanity. And, yet, even as I stare at my coat hanging over the chair in the living room ready for what I am sure is going to be another day of stiff wind and brrr-ish temperature, I can not help imagining the first barefoot day, the first whiff of honeysuckle, the first taste of blackberries.  Even as I recognize Spring for the heartbreaker she is and always will be, I admit that I am besotted and always will be. Spring, I have learned, like friendship and love, is never a bargain.  You will never get it for less than full price. Copyright 2024

This is a sad story. If you do not like sad stories, you should probably stop reading now.  I will offer, though, that, in one way or another, they are all sad stories.  You know what I mean. I was coming home from church on Sunday. It was cold. It was gray. It was one of those days in which the atmosphere seems to have paused itself. No wind, no sound.  Just cold. I had pulled off the highway, was edging toward the bad curve, following the shallow ruts that had been made after the minimal rainfall of the day before when something caught my eye. In the shallow edge of the road that passes for a ditch was a baby deer. He couldn't have been more than a few days old. He was lying down, but with his head and shoulders raised, his dark eyes alert. I thought at first that he had somehow gotten stuck in the mud, but realized quickly that he was not struggling and, besides, there wasn't enough mud for that. The only other option was that he had been hit by a car or a truck and that his hips had been broken. I looked away as I drove past him. Not because I am insensitive.  Quite the opposite.  I internalize this kind of situation.  For every bird with a broken wing, every squirrel that darts into the road at exactly the wrong moment, every raccoon or possum that freezes in the beam of headlights, I am overcome with  undeserved guilt and unreasonable regret despite the fact that I am not responsible and there is absolutely nothing I can do. As for the fawn, even if I tried to approach him, to bundle him up in some way so as to get him to a wildlife veterinarian somewhere who would most likely not be able to save him anyway, his mother – who had to be somewhere close by, probably staring at me from the edge of the woods – would chase me away. Nor could I, as we say, put him out of his misery because I did not have a gun with me.  (I say that like I could have done it.  I could not.) I unsuccessfully fought back tears. I bit my lip.  I muttered all sorts of angry and uncharitable and disrespectful words toward the truck driver and nature and God.   And then I grit my teeth, pressed the accelerator and I reminded myself that animals die. That we all do. Last week, on Ash Wednesday, I stood in front of a man holding a bowl of ashes and looked him straight in the eyes as his thumb smudged a cross on my forehead.  “From dust you have come.  To dust you will return.”  He says it matter-of-factly and, yet, in his soft, deep voice there is  such compassion. It is a strictly Christian thing, this placing of the ashes, but it occured to me as tears rolled down my cheeks that it would not be a bad idea for all of us – Christians and Jews and Muslims, Republicans and Democrats and those who don’t even vote, vegans and vegetarians and keto people – to stop once a year to stare death in the face. To acknowledge the temporary nature of our lives, the frailty of our bodies, the impotence of our intentions.  To allow another temporary, frail, impotent human to gently touch our foreheads and remind us of how precious it all is. The next day buzzards were hovering over the body of the deer.  They scattered as my car approached and I watched their wings spread like giant brackets on a page of sky. Copyright 2024

At this time of year, at this time of night, with only the single yard light as illumination, my backyard looks like a painting, maybe something from the Hudson River School – all blurred edges and smudged lines and muted greens.  Mist hovers, hangs, trembles and, if it had a sound, it would be the softest possible hum. Returning home late at night, I am likely to encounter, within that painting, one of my neighbors – an armadillo, a raccoon, an owl, but usually a deer.  Experience has taught me to approach with caution. On this particular evening that caution is rewarded.  My headlights, arcing into the branch,  spotlight two deer, yearlings from the size of them, standing just at the edge.  They are thin and sinewy and, in the dimness, make me think of the enchanted creatures that populated the books I read as a child. I brake gently as they still themselves and raise their elfin heads in my direction. They have no more than a couple of seconds to decide what to do. The one slightly closer to the front end of my car, a weapon against which they have no defense, turns and moves into the woods, stepping gently like a ballerina en pointe, and disappears.  The second turns and runs.  I can see him in the glow of the headlights for probably 40 yards, his white tail gleaming, until his round rump dissolves into the darkness. I never make assumptions about the behavior of deer.  They are much like humans in that they may reverse direction at any moment and, thus, I have learned from experience to wait.  To make sure.  When it becomes clear that both are gone, that neither is coming back, I ease my foot off the brake and roll slowly into the carport. While I wait, though, I can’t help wondering:    Why did the two deer behave so differently?  Why did the first deer simply move out of the way of the danger while the second one ran?  Is one the older sibling, always following the rules?  Is the other the younger, prone toward recklessness and adventure? A few nights ago, around the full moon, I got an urge, as I sometimes do, to go outside and walk around in the dark.  As I opened the front door and before I could step out onto the porch, I saw a herd of deer not more than 30 feet away.  They did not freeze; they simply stood there, a couple of them glancing in my direction.  They looked for all the world like a crowd at a tailgate or a barbecue.  Catching up on the week. I thought they would eventually bolt, that if I took a couple of steps in their direction the entire group would dash into the nearby field. They did not.  My feet grew cold waiting. I went back inside, shaking my head wondering whether my front yard was really mine. Tonight, as I pull my coat tight against the wind and hurry inside, I wonder if either or both of the deer I just encountered were a part of that herd.  Is one of them a young buck feeling the first itch of antler buds on the top of his head?  Is there a doe somewhere deep in the woods snorting and blowing to call them back to safety? Will they find their way back to the bed of soft grass that is somewhere nearby? After so many years of living among wild things, I no longer chastise myself for anthropomorphizing.  I am absolutely convinced that the wrinkled face of the tortoise slowly making his way across the yard reflects wisdom.  I am sure that the chatter of the mockingbird indicates frustration.  And I have no doubt that somewhere in the woods outside my door there is a doe licking the faces of her children, so very glad that they have made it home. Copyright 2024

Kenan’s was not a bookstore.  It was an office supply store, the place where the lawyers in town got their yellow legal pads and had their business cards printed, the place where the accountants got their rolls of adding machine tapes and long green spreadsheets, the place where everybody who had an office got carbon paper and ballpoint pens and staples. Kenan’s was not a bookstore, but it had a little room off to the side where students could find paperback copies of the books assigned to them by the doyennes of Statesboro High School, Fronita Roach and Dorothy Brannen.  One could also find those books’ Cliff Notes, the purchase of which, I imagine, was accomplished with the same furtiveness and stealth utilized, in those early years of the 1970s, to purchase what the cool kids called weed and what the rest of us called, in careful whispers, marijuana. The first time I went into Kenan’s was to purchase a dictionary, a 4" by 7" paperback with a cover price of 75 cents, at the instruction of my ninth grade English teacher.  Marcia Lanier was young and enthusiastic and funny and, ever determined to ingratiate myself to my teachers, it never occurred to me, as it had to some of my classmates, to ignore her instructions and depend upon the dictionary we had at home. I wrote my name on the title page and probably –  though I have no specific recollection of the act, only of who I was and still am – read the foreword, the “guide to the use of the dictionary,” and the key to pronunciation.  I took it to school, carried it around in the stack of textbooks on my hip, and then did it again every day for the next nine months. I still have that dictionary, the one I bought at Kenan’s.  The glue on its spine dried out long ago and entire sections (from “dangerous” to “projectile,” for example) lie loose between the covers.  Its pages are the color of weak tea and the font is so small that I have to squint to read most of the definitions.  Stuck between two of the pages is an index card on which Miss Brannen wrote, “Jonathan Swift,” the author assigned to me as the subject of one of many required book reports, and on which I wrote in handwriting that no longer looks like mine, a brief biography of Swift, including, “received payment for only 1 work: 'Gullliver’s Travels'.” I no longer need my copy of Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language.  I can, with a few keystrokes on my laptop, call up not only the definition of any word in the American language, but its synonyms and antonyms.  I can hear someone pronounce it and I can find all the famous quotes in which it was used. I no longer need my ragged, outdated dictionary, but it remains within my reach, in a basket on a table beside my reading chair.  I don’t remember the last time I used it to look up a definition, but just today I reached for it, held it in my hands, fluttered the pages with my thumb, and remembered for just a moment the girl who handed Mr. Kenan a single dollar bill in exchange for all the words in the world. I worry sometimes, when the conversation veers toward the banning of books or the inevitability of artificial intelligence becoming the coin of the realm of writing, that we have forgotten, through neglect or intent, the sacred nature of words.  That we have lost our understanding of the power of words to create and connect.  That with our submission to the perversion of language (including and, perhaps, especially profanity), we have lost the ability to articulate the deepest human emotions and the most generative ideas. It might do us well to return to the dictionary, one sure thing in the stack of uncertainties we carry on our hips, a reminder of the weight of our words. Copyright 2024

I do not rake leaves. I have leaves.  Lots of leaves.  An entire backyard full of leaves.  I have one of those wide rakes with splayed tines.  But I do not rake. Because I am a firstborn, a former Girl Scout, and still a licensed member of the Georgia Bar, however, I feel compelled to defend my actions.  I, in deliberately choosing to leave the leaves untouched, am not being lazy,  an act of moral turpitude for which I could easily be disinherited.  Nor does my choice arise from the desire to see my leaves slowly dissolve and re-nourish the soil, though being a good steward of the earth is something to which I aspire. I do not rake leaves because I like the sound of them shooshing, shuffling, crackling. I like to feel them gathering around my ankles like waves at the beach or suds in the bathtub, disappearing my feet and creating a mystery as to how I can possibly be standing.  To move through mounded piles of sycamore leaves broader than my out-stretched hands or heaps of oak leaves curling tightly in on themselves like cigars creates a sound that startles me into consciousness on days when too many layers of clothes and too much time huddled inside have left me lethargic and disinterested. It would be easy to say that rushing through dead leaves makes me feel like a child again, but that would not be true.  It makes me feel very much like an adult who can not rake her leaves if she doesn’t want to. A few days ago, I went outside to refill the bird feeders and noticed that the previous night’s stiff wind had amputated from the trees a number of branches –  most of them thin and delicate, bending back and forth at angles so slight that they could pass for straight – , tossing them about the yard in a meteorological game of pick-up sticks. I filled the feeders and, since I was already cold, set about picking up the branches, tossing them into a pile at the edge of the yard that always reminds me of my preparedness in the event that I should need to start a fire for some reason.  Back and forth I went, loading my arms, emptying my arms, listening to and being comforted by the crunch beneath my feet. Suddenly I stumbled, caught myself, and knew without looking down what had interrupted my stride.  A sycamore root, one over which I have probably stepped a thousand times,  hidden beneath the leaves. If there's anything I like better than dead leaves, it is the thick, winding, surface-breaking roots of a sycamore tree. They defy just about everything I ever learned about roots in third grade science. They do not stretch deep into the earth, searching for water and nutrients. They run shallow and stretch out around the trunk like uneven spokes on a wheel.  They scar easily from things like riding lawn mowers because of their nearness to the surface and, in the way of scars, create a strange kind of beauty. The stumble stopped me.  I stood under the wide naked branches, clutching the twigs to my chest, feeling the wind on my cheeks, and – in this week of Epiphany – had one: It is the sycamore roots over which we have stepped a thousand times that will most likely trip us up. That is, it is the long-held and rarely re-considered opinions that so often leave us faithless, the once-made and never-questioned allegiances that so often lead to betrayal, the legitimate but dangerous desires for permanence and stability that so often result in stagnation. I took a breath.  Deep and chill.  I dropped my load and turned to go, the sound of crunching leaves both witness and judge. Copyright 2024

It is late Christmas afternoon. The rain that came earlier, for most of the day,  has stopped, leaving the road beneath my feet alternately crunchy and smushy. The clouds have not completely disappeared. The sky is a mottled pewter, still and dull. The bird sounds are soft and low to the ground.  I can’t identify any of them. In the distance, over the field and through a large stand of pine trees, I hear gunshots. Muffled by the dense atmosphere and the distance, I can not tell whether they are made by a rifle or shotgun, a Christmas present most likely, being broken in by its proud new owner. It reminds me of all the Thanksgiving mornings and Christmas afternoons of my childhood in which my father, my uncles, and, later, my brother and cousins, clad in various degrees of camouflage, gathered up in a field to hunt.  Their success was never measured by the number of doves or quail they shot, but by the stories they wrote from just being together. It is the kind of memory that would generally evoke other holiday memories, that would send my mind down a trail lined with images of Icebox Fruitcake being pulled from the back of Grannie’s refrigerator, of an Etienne Aigner pocketbook being pulled from under the Christmas tree, of a sticky cedar tree being pulled across a field by my four-year-old nephew. Generally.  But not today. Today there is the matter of the Christmas tree.  Four days before Christmas the top section of lights on my Christmas tree blinked once and died.  Two days later the middle section bid farewell, leaving only the lower third illuminated. Every time I walked through the living room, the crippled state of my tree caught my attention, reminding me that as Steve Walsh and Kansas pointed out in the late 70s, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky.  Before I left the house I was looking online at post-holiday sales on Christmas trees because, of course, I have to resolve the issue a full 365 days in advance. Sigh. It occurs to me that while Mary and Elizabeth get all the attention this time of year, Martha (she of the “distracted by many things” fame) is probably more familiar to the women I know.  Trying to feed the big crowd that is due to arrive at any moment, provoked at a sister who doesn’t do nearly enough to help, the work of the holiday has (she thinks) fallen all on her and, to make matters worse, somebody (that would be the Son of God) is saying things like, “Sit down, Martha.  Let’s visit.” Back at home, the first thing I see as I walk in is the tree.  I pause.  I take a breath.  The truth is that no one else noticed its failure.  Not the technician who came to fix the gas logs.  Not the family that came to celebrate the season.  Not even the children who camped under its false branches awaiting the distribution of gifts. For all that I have noticed this Christmas – the distant look in my father’s eyes as he watches his great-grandchildren open gifts, the chrismons fluttering among the branches of the evergreens in the church chancel, Christmas cards growing into a soft mound on the silver tray – I am learning that perhaps there is also value in not noticing.  I don’t have to see or hear or even feel everything.  I can choose what is worth acknowledging and ignore the rest.  What kind of Christmas gift is that? Copyright 2023

No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers. Laurie Colwin As I was packing up to go to law school, it occurred to me that I was going to be responsible for my own nutrition for the first time ever. Having lived in the dorm for four years in college and, thus, getting all my meals in the dining hall, the fact that I didn't know how to cook was unimportant. Now, suddenly, it was. It is still a little embarrassing that the one thing for which I requested a recipe from my mother was grits. Grits! I was acutely aware of my insufficiency and thought, from years of observation, that grits would be easy -- and cheap, of course -- to make. And, so, my mother, without once laughing, wrote down the instructions by which she had fed me so successfully on so many winter mornings: 2 Tbsp. quick grits per serving Bring 1 1/2 cups of water to a boil. Add grits; reduce heat to low. Continue cooking about 20 minutes, stirring frequently. Add water as needed. Those simple instructions became the first "recipe" I transcribed into the three-ring Hallmark recipe binder I bought for myself at the Hen House in the Statesboro Mall. In the ensuing years, that binder has grown to include a culinary history of my life. Its pages are appropriately stained and the Scotch tape by which I attached many of its offerings has turned that ugly shade of yellow. Slips of paper and clippings from magazines are stuffed between its pages. I can almost cry when I see the handwriting of friends and family who have shared their favorites. I recently wrote about one of those recipes. Skillet Almond Coffee Cake, and, surprisingly, a number of folks have requested the recipe. I don't think it's because of a broad love of almonds or coffee cakes, but because of something vastly more important. Skillet Almond Coffee Cake doesn't require elaborate ingredients or advanced culinary skill. It doesn't take hours to prepare. It is a simple recipe that becomes extraordinary in the hands of one who cooks with love. Ask anyone who has every been the recipient of an aluminum foil-wrapped offering. So, because it is the season in which nothing is more festive than gift-giving, here you go. Skillet Almond Coffee Cake 3/4 cup room temperature butter 1 1/2 cup sugar 1 1/2 cup flour, sifted 2 eggs 2 tsp. almond extract slivered almonds sugar for sprinkling Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time. Add flour, extract, and a pinch of salt. Pour batter into an iron skillet (9 to 11 inches) lined with heavy duty aluminum foil that has been sprayed with cooking spray. Leave excess foil on side. Sprinkle top with almonds and sugar. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 - 40 minutes. During very last minute, turn on broiler. WATCH CLOSELY! Freezes well. Drizzle with chocolate for dessert. Merry Christmas from Sandhill! Copyright 2023

I have made it so many times that I could surely do it without consulting the recipe, but I don’t dare.  Reading the words, repeating them out loud, following them with my finger and leaving smudges of egg yolk and butter along the edge of the page – each is as essential as the instructions to “cream butter and sugar” and “add eggs one at a time.” Skillet Almond Coffee Cake is dense and buttery and, when cooked just right, has, like your grandmother’s pound cake, a crack or two in the top.  The scent of almond extract is thick and sweet and hovers in the kitchen like expensive perfume.  And the taste, especially when still warm from the oven, is, well, rapturous. I first tasted Skillet Almond Coffee Cake probably 30 years ago in a mountain cabin in North Carolina.  My friend Mary Catherine generously shared the recipe and in the years since, I (along with Mary Catherine’s many other friends) have made, eaten, and shared its deliciousness more times than I can count.  The parents of new babies, bereaved families, new home owners, and regular folks deserving of a thank you have all been the recipients of Skillet Almond Coffee Cake from the oven at Sandhill. The recipe reached a new level of notoriety when our friend Gena, having been tasked with providing breakfast for a professional chef who was speaking to her women’s club,  made Skillet Almond Coffee Cake and found herself being asked by the chef for the recipe. “It’s not mine.  It’s my friend Mary Catherine’s,” Gena attempted to deflect before, as Southern women are wont to do, relenting and sharing. To the email in which Gena made her confession, Mary Catherine replied, “I actually found that recipe in the Richmond Junior League cookbook abut forty years ago!  So even though it is now considered ‘mine’, it belonged to someone else first!” I smiled as I read.  Respect and generosity.  The very essence of our friendships reflected in that brief exchange. And then I read it again, the last part: “It belonged to someone else first.” Maybe it’s the fact that the tree is up and lit with tasteful tiny white lights and the wreaths are hung on both doors, front and back.   Maybe it’s because the gifts have all been purchased and wrapped in paper that coordinates with the living room furniture.  Maybe it’s because I just can’t help getting soft and sentimental and reflective  when the little garden flag that harkens “Merry Christmas” waves to me every time I walk outside. Whatever the reason, I got a little weepy as I considered what it means that everything, everyone I call mine belonged to someone else first.  This small patch of land that was home to people long before the age of deeds and plats, long before studs and beams came together to make a house.  The soft gold puppy who showed up on the stoop one afternoon and who has stayed long enough for his nose to go gray.  The people who crossed the threshold and sat at the table over and over or just once. They all belonged to someone else first.  And they will belong to someone else when I am gone. Using the first person possessive in referring to anything – objects, money, people – is ignorant at best and selfish at worst. Somewhere in between the two is, I think, the fulcrum upon which one can live a good life.  A spot where gratitude and stewardship meet and Skillet Almond Coffee Cake belongs to us all. Copyright 2023

I stare through the plate glass window, my knees pumping up and down on the pedals of the stationary bike. The scene is gray and wet. The tires of the cars that flash past in both directions make a shushing sound that I can’t hear, but that I know. Across the highway is the cemetery. (For much of my life it was the only cemetery in town and, thus, carries the privilege of the definite article.) It feels appropriate, symbolic, well-timed that I would be here on this cold and rainy Sunday after Thanksgiving, working as hard on my attitude as I am on my cardio. I am approaching the anniversary of my mother’s death. Three years. Even longer when I count the long descent precipitated by Alzheimer’s. The missing, the longing, the sorrow feels as heavy as the sky that hovers over the low tombstones and soaring monuments. The calendar tells me it is almost Advent and my heart tells me it is anything but. I glance down at the digital numbers keeping me apprised of how many calories I have expended, how much time has expired, how far I have gone without moving at all. I can’t help wondering if all these machines were intentionally placed to face the cemetery. Is it on purpose that the patrons are reminded day after day of what all their effort is meant to, if not avoid, then certainly delay as long as possible? Or is it just unavoidable irony? And, then, as if she were standing right behind me, I can hear my mother’s voice. “Stop whining or I’ll give you something to whine about.” She knew well that, despite my generally optimistic attitude, I am capable of melodrama. “Now, hold up your shoulders and finish your exercising so you can get home before the roads get bad.” So I straighten my shoulders and, staring once again toward the cemetery, I notice a maple tree – Surely it was there before! – covered in leaves that look like flames. Orange and red and pomegranate pink. It stands right at the edge of the road by which every hearse, every mourner enters the cemetery. A single swath of color, a welcoming sentry, an invitation to see – even in darkness and sadness – beauty. Staring now at the glimmering shimmering tree, I remember the Thanksgiving afternoons of my childhood. Between the gluttonous meal at lunch and the return for second helpings at supper, Grannie and the aunts and the cousins would squeeze into the largest of the cars parked in the backyard and ride around the county looking for burial places of various kinds. I can see my mother and my aunts, their tiny waists cinched in shirtwaist dresses, leaning over to straighten a crooked wreath or reset a tipped over potted plant. I can hear their whispers as they point out to each other familiar names while we children wandered up and down rows of granite headstones, calculating ages and giggling at the old-fashioned monikers. We knew nothing of mortality, of grief, of the inevitability of both. We also knew nothing of the way in which our hearts were harvesting memories, laying them by in barns from which we would be able to pull them on cold and wet Sundays, on warm and sunny Wednesdays, on special occasions and ordinary days. Snapshots and video reels and audio files that defy death in amazing and mystical ways. The wind picks up a little, tickles the leaves on the maple tree just enough to send them dancing. I slow my pedaling, take a deep breath, and smile. When I was in college and first started keeping a quote book, I came across one from James Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan. “God gave us memories,” he said, “that we might have roses in December.” Or, I remind myself, in this case, maples in November. Copyright 2023

To be clear, it’s not just the cold. Not just the way it makes my teeth chatter like a jig doll. Not just the way it leaves my cheeks raw and my lips feeling like sandpaper. It’s not just the cold that makes me hate winter. And it’s not just the dark. Not just the way the sun races across the sky like it’s being chased by a rabid dog. Not just the way that every sound in the night mimics danger. It’s not just the dark that makes me hate winter. It’s the cold and the dark and one more thing, the thing I just discovered, the third prong of the trident that spears my heart and makes me weep with the first hard freeze. That thing is the absence of color. The autumn landscape through which I have been walking every day has been drenched in color – lilac and lavender and violet dangling from long narrow stems; buttery yellow dancing in tight bunches of asters and goldenrod; oak trees and palmetto scrubs and beautyberry bushes staining the land with every shade of green. As November fades, though, so does the outdoor palette. The colors leak away and within a few weeks the world becomes one big Sherwin-Williams paint card of various browns. Beige and taupe and chocolate as far as the eye can see. My personal disdain for winter, its cold and dark and colorlessness, was forefront in my mind one afternoon last week as I trudged my way up the hill toward home. The broomsedge along the road had already turned pale like wheat and I could barely see Owen, nose to the ground after a scent of some kind. What had been a watercolor wash of wildflowers just days before was now nothing more than dried weeds. Even the sky, which I had described to someone not long before as cornflower blue, seemed to have fallen into bleach. Getting within sight of Sandhill, I happened to glance over at the equipment shelter that sits just off the edge of the road. I can’t say what drew me away from my determined pace, but I slowed and, as I did, I noticed what looked like a puddle of blue. Bright blue. Starkly blue. Deeply blue against an otherwise brown and gray landscape. Squinting as I approached, I quickly realized the puddle was actually a pile of seeds. I knelt down for a closer look. Like tiny blue coins in a pirate’s chest, they ran through my fingers , a cloud of dust lingering in the air as they fell back to the ground. I was mesmerized. If you spend enough time outdoors, you will eventually learn to laugh at yourself. I felt slightly stupid when Daddy explained that what I’d seen, the object of my fascination, was nothing more than cotton seeds. Ordinary cotton seeds. Ordinary – but beautiful, I felt compelled to add – cotton seeds. I also felt more than slightly chastised. Mother Nature herself, so very much like my own mama, can be quick to discipline, quick to call for repentance, determined to correct unseemly behavior. My petulant attitude toward winter, my untrue assertions and inappropriate attitude needed correcting and, for that purpose, there was deposited in my path a pile of cotton seeds, representative of holly berries and cardinals and poinsettias, tangerines and grapefruits and Christmas lights, luminous full moons and technicolor sunsets. In addition to learning to laugh at yourself, you will, with enough time outdoors, learn to forgive yourself. You will learn that absolution – for presuming and assuming and swiping the world with broad strokes of generalization – is free and that Mother Nature’s grudges are never held against the ignorant, only the deliberately malevolent. And, so, I say the only thing I can: I’m sorry. I get it now. Winter is not colorless. But it is cold and dark. Copyright 2023

There is a wistfulness to days like this one – late October days when the sun is bright and the breeze balmy, when a sweater is unnecessary, when my walk is interrupted by hunters slowing their pick-up trucks when they go by so as not to choke me and Owen in the dust. There is wistfulness and almost a melancholy as my mind invariably races ahead to the darker, colder days ahead. I have learned, though, that the antidote to the creeping poignancy is deliberate awareness. An intentional noticing of what is, concentration on that which I can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch in this moment keeps me from whining, bemoaning, and lamenting about the moments to come. So, as Owen scampers ahead, darting off into the woods and back again, in search of his own sensory delights, I slow my steps and scan the landscape for wildflowers that have bloomed since I last walked this way. Within moments I identify, with the help of an app on my phone, two species I’ve probably passed hundreds of times over the years, but never taken the time to notice: Painted Spurge (Euphorbia heterophylla) and Wild Marigold (Tagetes minuta). They are both growing close to one of my favorites, Purple False Foxglove (Agalinis purpurea), which blooms in such abundance that from a distance the edges of the road look like they have been painted with watercolor. As I am bent over staring at yet another plant, a butterfly lands gently on one of the stalks, sending it trembling like an eyelash. I don’t remember having seen such a butterfly before and I want to know its name, I want to be able to call it – like the Painted Spurge and Wild Marigold – what it is. I gently pull out my phone and, just as I get the camera zoomed in, the butterfly flits away. I try to follow it and realize that there is a whole swarm of them looping among the marigolds and foxgloves. With long wings striped black and white, they stand out among all the green. I move slowly, trying to make sure that my shadow doesn’t alert them to my presence. I step softly, unsure of how well butterflies hear. I hold my breath. Sometimes one must disguise one’s humanness to get close to the rest of nature. I get the photo and load it into the app which identifies the butterfly as – and I can’t help laughing out loud – a Zebra Longwing. Well, of course, it is. I find out later that the Zebra Longwings aren’t even supposed to be in Georgia. That they are tropical butterflies and that their natural habitat reaches no farther north than Florida. That they are probably here only because a hurricane blew them this way. At this moment, though, in a world in which definitional names and titles can rarely be trusted – in which no one is sure what a person is when he claims to be a conservative or she insists she is a liberal, in which one can never know what to expect from someone who identifies as an environmentalist or an entrepreneur or, God help us, a Christian – , it is reassuring and amazing and downright magical to find out that Nature has given us a butterfly with long black and white wings whose name is Zebra Longwing. I call Owen back to the road, stuff the phone into my back pocket, and head for home. Thoreau may have gone to the woods to live deliberately, but I go to be amazed. And on this day, this late October day when the sun is bright and the breeze balmy, I am more than amazed. I am grateful. Copyright 2023