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His name was Grady Waters. He was gray and slightly stooped. If he had had a wife or children I never knew it. He sat in the corner on the front row next to the wall. He wore a white dress shirt and dark pants. I couldn’t tell you anything about his tie other than he always wore one. For many years he sang in the choir of the small Pentecostal church in which I was reared, until, I think, someone shared with him what the rest of us already knew – that he couldn’t sing, that his was not a joyful noise. But it is not his white shirt or perfect attendance or inability to carry a tune that makes me remember him over 50 years later. The reason I remember Grady Waters, the reason I will tell you that he is the first saint I ever knew is this: Every Sunday morning, every Sunday night, every Wednesday night, every night of every revival we ever had, just before the preacher strode toward the pulpit to begin the sermon, Grady Waters rose slowly from his corner, approached that same pulpit with a confident timidity, and removed the empty water glass that sat there. He left the sanctuary by the side door and, two minutes later, returned with the glass full of water. The tenderness with which he replaced that glass within reach of the preacher was the same, I am certain, as that with which the Magi made their own simple offerings to the Christ Child. I never saw anyone else take the empty glass and return it full. We were all sure that Grady Waters would do his job, fulfill his role. He did not have much in terms of wealth or power or anything else, but he had a purpose and he lived out that purpose with a faithfulness that the rest of us took for granted, a faithfulness that was not fueled by acknowledgment or gratitude or some title conferred upon him by people we called leaders, but rather an awareness of the goodness in us all. It’s been eighteen months since the world changed. Eighteen months since every job became dangerous and those that were already dangerous became frighteningly so. Since we started pointing people out for their selfless service, calling them angels and heroes. Then just when we thought the world was turning aright, it didn’t. So, here we are again, calling upon the same people to do the same impossible things. And, not just calling really, but demanding, expecting, requiring. It is in these moments that we are forced to admit that teachers aren’t angels and nurses aren’t heroes. They are simply people who are, as my pastor said last Sunday, “living into the original goodness into which we were made.” However you believe you came to be walking around in a human body, whatever you think is the source of your sentience, you were created in goodness and manifest in beauty. You were made to be a gift to the world. And in allowing that to happen, in handing yourself over to be ripped open by greedy hands, you will – like your child’s teacher smiling behind her mask, like the health department nurse standing in the sun to give you a COVID test, the doctor intubating your neighbor, like Grady Waters ever constant, ever trustworthy, ever faithful to his task – become a saint. Copyright 2021

Ponderous and clumsy like a mare waiting to foal, August arrives bearing summer’s fullness. The days have grown heavy and long and everything – the turtle I pause to watch waddle across the road, the turkey vultures lifting languidly from the carcass left lying in the ditch, even the butterfly whose bouncing from flower to flower has become more of a slide – moves slowly in the wet heat. My feet produce little more than a shuffle as I propel myself down the road, each small advance like pushing through a wall. Like a puddle that spreads to fill in a footprint, summer claws at me from the woods, the fields, the ponds. Barely restrained by the ditches and fence lines, it has filled in the gaps. All around me is green. I try to delineate each of the different shades – hunter and emerald and jade and chartreuse. I attempt to segregate the muddy greens, the clear greens, the shiny greens, to evaluate their intensity and separate then by source. Nearly drunk with heat, I walk through what feels like three dimensions of color. I am rounding the curve at the beaver pond when, out of the corner of my eye, I detect the tiniest flash of white. An eyelash, a dust mote. Turning, I see an egret – the bird we have always called a pond scoggin – folding its wings and gliding to a stop on the exposed end of a log jutting up out of the pond at slim angle. He has joined another egret, equally thin-legged and equally aloof. They turn their necks from side to side, surveying the dense greenness into which they have fallen from the clear blue sky. The two birds are the only non-green objects within my vision. Like two singular brush strokes, their whiteness sticks out, casts a shimmering reflection into the algae-covered water. The image imprints on the back of my eyelids and I think about it all the way home. So much green, so little white. Broad water, tall trees, wide spans of grass. Two skinny birds. Light in the midst of dark. At some point I start hearing the voices. Voices of everyone from my grandmother to the politician of the week holding forth on the power of a single candle in a dark room or the first glimpse of sunrise after a lonely night. Fables and parables, sermons and stories, aphorisms, axioms, and maxims of every sort testifying to the smallest light. “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,” says the Chinese proverb. “All the darkness in the world,” said St. Francis of Assisi, “can not extinguish the light of a single candle.” Martin Luther King, Jr. repeated over and over, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.” Is that what it’s about? Light and darkness? I walk through the front door and the cold air seizes me. The haze of the heat evaporates as the sweat flash-freezes and my body shivers. My gratitude for air conditioning has never been greater. I get water. I sit down. The egrets accompany me. I can’t stop thinking about them, wondering why I noticed, why their small whiteness caught my attention in all that large greenness. I know why only when I see the back-to-school ads and feel myself cringe at the memory of the things my friends and I did to get noticed, to stand out from the crowd, to make our marks. I cringe because every one of those things – the clothes we wore, the styles in which we wore our hair, the music to which we listened – were all alike and served only to make us indistinguishable. We stood as a broad swath of green, not an egret to be seen anywhere. I want to run to all those little girls and middle schoolers and teenagers setting forth on their first days of school and block their paths. I want to take their sweet faces in my hands and whisper, “The secret is in the contrast, dear one. Go out there and be an egret.” Copyright 2021

In the Victorian language of flowers, the geranium symbolized happiness, good health and friendship. Its flirty little petals sprouting from the top of tall stems makes it resemble a Tootsie Pop and it comes in about as many colors. Their appearance at the local garden centers is as much an announcement of spring’s arrival as is the first daffodil. And any porch sporting geraniums is a house I’d like to visit. I kept geraniums in big clay pots on my front porch summer after summer until I figured out they just couldn’t take the direct sun. This year they swing in baskets from shepherd’s hooks planted at the corners of the screened porch: tangerine orange, hot pink, and white. The almost daily rain showers we’ve had the past month or so kept them happy for several weeks, blossoms exploding from bud tips and frilly leaves maintaining the deep green color of health. Once the showers stopped, though, I forgot I was supposed to water them. The result was a bunch of dried up Tootsie Pops. When I finally noticed the hastening demise of my flowers, I panicked. I grabbed the watering can and poured so much water into the dark black soil that the shepherd’s hooks bent forward, swaying under the extra weight. Then, with chippers in hand, I approached them to perform that most macabre of all gardening tasks, dead-heading. The wind that had accompanied all those rain showers had played chase with the fallen leaves and grass clippings at the edge of the yard, tossing bits of the detritus into the basket. I reached into the mass of dried things and realized, too late, that the wad of dead leaves and twigs clasped in my hand wasn’t leaves and twigs at all, but, rather, a nest. I quickly put it back into the basket, but not before noticing that it contained three eggs and two obviously just-hatched baby birds. The birds were each smaller than a thimble and were as ugly as a baby bird can be. One had his mouth open so wide that it obscured his entire bald head. The eggs were smaller than jelly beans. I immediately placed the nest back in the basket and jumped away, flooded by the trifecta of negative emotions – regret and anger and grief. Walking back and forth I just kept muttering, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.” There is nothing so debilitating as regret. Last week included the birthday of one of my dearest friends, a friend I lost far too young to forces both nefarious and heartbreaking. On the day I was silently wishing him a happy birthday, I was also remembering that in the days after his death my only comfort was in knowing that I could remember him without regret. Through all the years of darkness, he knew he could call me and I would listen. He knew I would always make the necessary effort to be his friend. And he knew I loved him. That solace has accompanied me through every day since. It has reminded me over and over that people die, relationships change, and seasons turn, but that they can die, change, and turn without leaving behind a legacy of regret. I get to choose. Copyright 2021

I am mesmerized by what foresters call prescribed burns (as though a doctor somewhere pulled out a little white pad and scribbled on it, “Set fire to the woods.”). There is something magical in how the forest floor is turned from brown to black by the orange wand of combustion, how the low-lying smoke lingers for days, how fine is the soot of the footprints I make after venturing in a few steps. The woods along my road were burned off a few months ago. The short flames crept along the floor of the forest, rapid and silent, like a soldier crawling toward a target. They consumed the brittle pine needles from last year’s shedding and left with only a singe the vines and grass and trees that still run with sap. The fire left tall pine trees with black aprons and turned fallen limbs into large, oddly-shaped licorice sticks. It revealed the topography of the land, like a sheared sheep is left surprisingly skinny. Without the insulation of the underbrush, the calls of the hawks, the quail, the woodpeckers echoed from one side of the road to the other and the squirrels and rabbits went from being nothing more than the rustling of dried leaves to the flashes of brown and gray fur. And the trees. The trees looked taller and wider in the emptiness of the ground in which they were rooted. Pine trees in the coastal plain are watchmen, sentinels, sentries. They are Beefeaters in their tall hats and sharp swords, immovable and unassailable. A few weeks after the burn, on Father’s Day, the electricity on our road went out. One of the trees, the immovable and unassailable trees, had collapsed across the road and taken out a power line. The lengths of cable fell in coils, soft circles of deadly invisibility. The lunch I was making for Daddy and my brother went uncooked as the men in bucket trucks made their way to the fallen soldier, raising and tossing him to the side before restoring our connection to the grid, all while I wondered if the fire had killed the tree. I went walking later that afternoon. The road was tattooed with bucket truck tire treads and the flat footprints of work boots. In the ditch lay the tree, the broken end stuck into the air, splintered like jack-o-lantern teeth, its heart splayed open for all the world to see. I stopped for a moment to stare at the tree, its broken limbs and huge pieces of bark that had flaked off in the fall. If I had wondered whether the fire had something to do with the falling of the tree, staring into the exposed trunk answered the question. The tall, majestic watchman was dead long before it hit the power lines, weeks and probably months before it thudded to the ground. The tree had rotted from the inside out. The fire had only provided the push. Just like so many people. Men and women who, like the tree, stand tall and proud, who proclaim with no small amount of fanfare that they are invincible. People who convince others to depend upon them, to give them control based upon what looks like strength and stability. People who, all the while, are dying on the inside, whose spirits have failed, whose hearts are decayed. When something, like a prescribed burn, comes sweeping through their forests they will always, always, always fall. I don’t know what destroys the inside of a tree, but I know well what eats up the heart of a man, the spirit of a woman. It is lethargy and selfishness. It is disloyalty and pride. It is believing that one can not fall. And finding, far too late, that a prescribed burn is on its way. Copyright 2021

I am the observer. From the back door I watch a gray squirrel hurry on tiny feet across the ground to the bird seed that has fallen from the feeder. He rises to his haunches and pushes his treasure into his mouth with claw-like hands. The male cardinal who was already there continues pecking at his breakfast, but flies away at the arrival of the blackbird. I am the observer. From the kitchen window I see the turtle paused on the edge of what will eventually be a flower bed. He is almost hidden in the grass that needs cutting. The tracks he has left in the road on his way to the pond are wide and smooth and symmetrical. He is nonplused by Owen’s attention, the cold nose poked at his head, the dancing from side to side. He pauses long enough for Owen to lose interest and then slowly, ever so slowly, moves on. I am the observer of the barn swallows nesting on the front porch, the black snake writhing his way under the shrubbery, the black swallowtail perching on the verbena at the edge of the road. I am always the observer. Until today. Today I am the observed. Across the field the doe stands at the very edge of the cultivated rows, the long deep forest of hardwoods within an easy leap. Her fawn is a few feet away nibbling at the tiny cotton plants that have just pushed up through the crust of soil. The doe is not eating. Not right now. Her ears, two leaf-shaped satellites, are raised and she is looking in my direction. It is at least a hundred yards to where I stand, still and silent in the middle of the road. I have stopped to watch them, the doe and the fawn, and instead find myself being watched. I know that the slightest movement on my part will send the deer hurrying to cover, so we – the doe and I – find ourselves paused like a movie frame. In the space between us a question hovers in the heavy summer heat: Are you a danger? I am not, but the mother does not know that. She knows only that I am different and in her world different can not be trusted. Eventually my curiosity overwhelms me. How much movement can I make without the doe bolting? I lift one arm from my side and place it on my hip. That answers the question. She turns and steps like a ballerina into the brush, glancing back only long enough to make sure that the fawn follows and to watch me for one last second. I do not immediately resume my walk. I stare for a moment at the break in the tree line where the animals have disappeared and wonder what it meant, this brief encounter. It is not a lesson about maternal instinct or survival or co-existence. It is a lesson about what happens when something, someone different comes close enough to see me. I have confronted and been confronted by deer hundreds of times. They have darted into the beam of my headlights and into the sides of my cars. They have scurried into the branch when I’ve opened the back door suddenly. They have, in herds of 10 or 20, raced across the fields with the grace of a corps de ballet. But they have not, like this doe, simply walked away. And in walking, not running, she reminded me of this: You run when you are afraid. You run when staying is too hard. You run not necessarily knowing where you’re going, but knowing it is too dangerous to stay. Walking away is different. It is fueled by strength, not fear. It is prompted by a clear notion of where you are and where you want to go. And it always allows for one final look back. Copyright 2021

My friend lives in Texas now, not far from that place with the silos. She tells stories with her paintings while I paint pictures with my stories. She is a mother and a grandmother. She has lived in Africa and has survived breast cancer. I am, I have done none of those things. Still, we are friends of the deepest kind: we tell each other scary things, embarrassing things, painful things and we know that in the telling the fear, the embarrassment, the pain is lessened. Maybe just a little, but enough that matters. Our nearly 57-year-old friendship began in Brownies. (I am frequently reminded that so many good things in my life can be attributed to Girl Scouts.) We didn't go to the same elementary school or the same church. Our parents didn't know each other. There was little in that world of three-fingered promises and sit-upons that would have predicted the longevity of our relationship. And, yet, here we are. Held together not just by memories, though they are many and strong, but by something else. I wish I knew what to call it. I read something the other day about the sociological premise that a human being cannot really know more than 150 people. That is the number, arbitrary it seems to me, that is supposed to define a personal community. I am not a social scientist – though I took enough college hours in psychology, sociology, and political science to qualify for membership in the social science honor society (just another indication that being educated in something does not make you one). I am not a social scientist, but I know enough to respectfully disagree with the 150. I think it might make better sense to say that a person can know – really know and care about – no more than 150 people within a particular community. And I have many communities. There is my large and widespread family. There is the church in which I was raised and the church of which I am now a member. There is my Wesleyan community and my law school community. There is the community formed those three summers I worked in Dahlonega for the Governor’s Honors Program and the one formed those eight summers at church camp. There is the community formed around practicing law for 38 years and that strange, difficult to describe community that has been called framily – people to whom I am bound by neither blood nor law, but who treat me as though I am. And there is that community of which my Texas friend is a member – childhood friends. As happens so often, in the writing of the words I think I have figured out what to call it, that thing that holds me to my childhood friend in Texas, my church camp friend in Indiana, my college suitemate in Spain. It is recognition. At some point in our relationships we looked at each other and saw ourselves. And then we held on for dear life. It would break my heart to think that could happen only 150 times. That being moved by the death of someone else’s parent, being excited for the graduation of someone else’s child, being angered by someone else’s betrayal would be limited to fewer people than serve in the House of Representatives. Friends may be the one thing about which I am greedy. And, in this case, greed is good. Copyright 2021

It is the season of celebration. The season during which refrigerators are covered in invitations. The season for parties and gifts and congratulations. The season for the rites and rituals that hold a society together. Graduations, weddings, Mother’s and Father’s Days. It is the season for acknowledging the cycles and circles of life. A couple of weeks ago, this boy I know graduated from high school. He put on the silly outfit that no 18-year-old in his right mind would put on for any reason other than to make his mama happy. He smiled for the photos and said thank you to every single expression of congratulations. And, at the party to which his parents invited more than just a few people, he gave a speech. I was at that party. Just as I had been at the hospital the night he was born. A lot happened in the eighteen years between. He and I, along with his mother and sister, burned thousands of miles on I-95 between Baltimore and south Georgia. We rode bicycles, boats, and pirate ships. We walked streets in big cities and small towns and hiked nature trails in multiple states. And we told stories, lots of stories. Most of them true. As I listened to his speech I remembered the Orioles game at Camden Yards, the outdoor movie in Little Italy, and the National Aquarium where the little lights on his tennis shoes twinkled like stars as he ran up and down the ramps. I remembered trampoline hockey and dance parties in his Nana’s living room. I remembered looking for seashells on St. Simons Island and deer tracks in my backyard. Mostly I remembered the stories, the quiet moments when it was just the two of us sharing words. But about that speech ... What the boy said was that in the lead-up to graduation all of it had seemed to be a whole bunch of unnecessary hoopla, that he wasn’t really sure why he needed to attend the ceremony, why there needed to be a party. His eyes, he told us, were already on college and graduating from high school didn’t seem to be too big a deal. Until he looked at all the people at the party. All the people who had made the effort to come share the moment with him. All the people who were more than party guests. All the people who had helped him become who he is (and who will, I might add, continue to do so). It was then, he said, that he realized the why behind the silly outfit and all the photos and the big party. What I think he was trying to say is that none of us accomplishes anything on our own, that it is in community that we find the strength, the motivation, the tenacity to follow through on the promises we make to ourselves and to others. In the rituals we perform we give heft to that reality. The boy is a surfer and his parents had framed a large photo of him standing on the beach and looking into the sun, surfboard tucked under his arm. They asked each of us at the party to sign the photo. Looking at those signatures – family, friends, friends who are family – I was reminded of all the things to which one puts a signature, the symbol of identity and loyalty: diplomas, marriage and birth certificates, guest books. And, now, photos of young surfers. In the aftermath of a pandemic that stole so many moments of celebration and community it might make sense to bypass the parties, send regrets to all the weddings, forego the silly outfits. It could be tempting, would be easy to make no day special, create no occasion out of anything. But it would mean ignoring the truth of what brought us through those long hard months with our humanity intact – the anticipation of being together again. It is the season of celebration. Let us celebrate. Copyright 2021

Today we are at The Little Pond, Daddy and I. Before last week I had not been fishing in probably twenty years and now here I am headed back to the dark water. (Other than myself, no one in my family feels the need to name locations and inanimate objects, thus The Little Pond. Last week we were at The Big Pond.) There are a number of reasons why it has been so long since I’ve gone fishing. Some of them are the standard reasons we give for neglect; others I won’t admit. And while those things were holding me, the game has changed. You don’t ride down the road with the window cracked and your cane pole whipping in the hot breeze anymore. In the 21st century one fishes with a telescopic fiberglass contraption that is handy and efficient, but not nearly as romantic. The sight of the long line of cane poles leaning against the eaves of Mr. Newton’s sport shop on Savannah Avenue were always the harbinger of summer for me and, bouncing down the field road toward the pond this morning, I miss it. Turning off the road into the yard of the pond house that will always be Mama’s, a tiny fawn springs toward the branch. He is smaller than Owen, so new that the white spots nearly cover his tiny body, leaving only small streaks of soft brown. I am entranced, Daddy is bothered. He knows that fawn will grow and prosper by eating his cotton plants. Last week we fished with crickets; this week the bait will be worms. The cricket farm a couple of counties over has burned and there is no telling when crickets will be available again. For the foreseeable future, the more expensive worms will be the delicacy dangling from our hooks. Once in the water it doesn’t feel like 20 years. The heat on my legs, the rock rock rock of the boat, the sound of the paddle behind me moving from one side to the other as Daddy guides us to the spot where he thinks the fish may be bedding. And, most importantly, Daddy himself. His solidity, his certainty, his soft reminders. It was Daddy who taught me how to fish. How to bait my own hook, how to take fish off my line. And, in a way that my eight-year-old self could not understand, how to live. Move slowly through the water. Talk only when you have to. Be gentle with what you catch. Keep only what you can use. When I was about four, not yet tall enough to see the top of the kitchen counter, I stood on a stool and watched Daddy at the kitchen sink cleaning his catch from that day. Scales flew through the air like snowflakes with every flick of his brown wrist. The slices into the bellies of the bream were straight and smooth and I gazed in wonder I did not understand as he scooped out a spoonful of gelatinous roe and said, “These are eggs.” I was not afraid of the knife. I was not afraid of the thin red lines of blood that ran to the drain. I was not afraid of the occasional sudden fish flop onto the linoleum tile. I was interested and curious and safe. He reached into the next fish. With the tip of his pocket knife and thumb, he grasped a wad of entrails, and went to drop them into the pile in the sink that represented his day’s work when something caught his eye. “Look,” he said, pulling a tiny blob of fish flesh away from the rest. It was dull red and about half the size of a thimble. It was the fish’s heart. And it was still beating. The two of us were very quiet for a few seconds and in those few seconds the image settled into my memory, dug a den and burrowed in. Over the ensuing sixty years it has inserted itself into my consciousness over and over – light coming through the kitchen window, the earthy musty smell of fish, the tickle of a fish scale on my cheek. Today, though, it returns with more. Today the image has a voiceover, a recitation of everything I’ve ever learned from fishing: Move slowly through the water. Talk only when you have to. Be gentle with what you catch. Keep only what you can use. And never ever ever forget that, even outside the body, the heart beats on. Copyright 2021

The hydrangeas, known as Suzane and Uncle Bud, survived a brutal pruning last fall. They also survived a relocation mandated by the construction of a new screened porch. And they survived winter. Come the first warm day, they were covered in tight buds the color of English peas. Hydrangeas are my favorite flower and nothing makes 95 degrees and serious humidity bearable like the sight of a big vase of hydrangeas in the middle of the kitchen table. Alas, there will be none this summer. I walked outside the other morning to find that the deer – the deer at whom I do not shoot, the deer who wander freely through my yard and feast mightily on saw tooth oak acorns in the fall – had nibbled off every single hydrangea bud. They had tiptoed their way to within 15 feet of my back door, had actually walked across a significant portion of concrete carport, and banqueted on my buds. I did not cry. I wanted to. I wanted to find one of those deer and look him or her in those luminous brown eyes and pitch a fit such as has never been seen. I wanted the buck to spread the news, the doe to warn her children, I wanted every deer within a hundred acres to understand that one does not mess with the hydrangeas growing behind the little gray house. Instead, I took a deep breath and reminded myself that we, the deer and I, are neighbors. That we, the ravenous omnivores and I, are all a part of the same ecosystem. That we, the makes-me-want-to-say-a-bad-word trespassers and I, have to figure out a way to co-exist. I understood, of course, that the figuring was entirely incumbent upon me. I had a year to do it. But, then, the next day I went outside to water the geraniums and coleus and amaryllises – plants which are, apparently, not deer delicacies – and discovered one uneaten bud. A single survivor of the massacre. It was beginning to open, the tiny florets just barely peeking out at me. Like Wonder Woman against the Germans, I sprang into action. I hoisted a discarded wooden pallet onto its side, establishing its verticality by leaning one side against the foundation of the screened porch and stacking concrete edging blocks three high on either side of the pallet. It is not attractive. But it has worked. So far. I will not declare victory, though, until a fully-bloomed hydrangea head is flopping over the edge of my favorite vase. Until I am sure that my efforts have defeated the deer. Until it is clear that I have won. So every time I head out the back door these days I am glancing at the hydrangea bush, making sure my little blossom is still there. And in the glancing I’ve found myself considering what it means to fight for something you love. Does it always involve force and weapons? Doesn’t it sometimes require simply watching and waiting, being stubborn and unyielding in your love? Even without Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth there are some things that can’t be denied and one of them is that love does whatever it has to, even when that is nothing. I want that hydrangea blossom. I want to see it, hold it, sniff it. I want to revel in the fact that it exists because I protected it. But if I don’t get that – if my nascent bloom dies, if my great wall falls, if some maniacal deer plows through – I will still love hydrangeas. I will love hydrangeas and I will wait until next year. I will wait and stand watch. Copyright 2021

The windows to my study are shaking. The water hits them with a force that makes me think, for just a minute, that they may shatter. It is not rain that rattles the glass, but the pressure washer I hired to give Sandhill a bath. A much needed bath. Water and some kind of soapy something will wash away the dust and algae and bird droppings and whatever else has settled on the roof and walls around me since I last had it done. I wasn’t here the last time. I was still spending my days in a courtroom. But today I get to listen to the rattle, see the tiny rivers run down the glass, feel in my bones the rhythm of the shush shush shush. When I go outside I will smell something like bleach. It is a shame I can’t taste anything; I would like to say that home maintenance is a full sensory experience. When the shushing stops, I walk outside to find puddles on the front porch, shaking like Jell-O in the spring breeze. The cement of the carport is – rid of its clumps of red clay and yellow pollen – the color of cement, flat gray. There is not a spider web to be found in any corner of any window and I can’t helping thinking, as I walk the perimeter, that my humble little house looks like a movie set. I want to freeze this moment. A couple of days later a friend comes to visit. We are going to walk toward the river, to watch Owen look for something to chase, to cut eucalyptus and maybe some tiny mimosa blossoms. As we open the front door, a handful of dark birds swoop across the porch like it is a runway. The barn swallows are back. It’s only been in the last couple of years that barn swallows have found Sandhill and the nice high corners of the front porch roof. I love watching their acrobatic tumbles through the yard as they attempt to divert my attention from the nests; however, those nests are messy and, glancing at the shiny white rocking chairs and the shiny white columns, I can’t help but grit my teeth a little at how quickly my movie set house is going to go from pristine to polluted. In a recent episode of one of my favorite television shows the plot revolved around the patriarch navigating a difficult season with one of his adult children. The conflict was, in the way of television, resolved by hour’s end but not without the relationship undergoing a significant shift. In response to the son’s comment that he was glad the conflict had been resolved, the father, not so quick to agree, replied, “With every win, there comes a loss.” It stopped me cold. Winning and losing are not limited to fields and courts and courtrooms. We exist in not only a physical world, but a psychic one as well. And in both of them Newton’s third law applies. “Equal and opposite reaction” holds true not only in mechanics but also in mortality, for engineering and for emotions, in rocket ships and relationships. The win is when children grow up and create homes of their own; the loss is that they no longer need us in the way they once did. The win is when the friend moves into her dream house; the loss is that she is no longer just down the street. The win is when the wrens build their nest in the eaves and grace me with their dancing; the loss is when my movie set house turns back into just plain Sandhill. With every win there comes a loss. And with every loss an opportunity to see wisdom in letting go. Copyright 2021

The day that Mrs. Blitch stood in front of the classroom and told us that we were going to make apple butter, she may have just as well said, “We're going to make magic.” I can’t say that I actually remember the peeling and measuring and cooking and I can’t say what kind of apples she used or what other ingredients she added, but to this day I remember the end result, the feel of the tiny Dixie cup in my left hand and the plastic spoon in my right, the dipping down into the rich caramel colored surprise and finding that the food of which I had not been previously aware was delicious. Third grade was my favorite year of elementary school. In addition to making apple butter, we went on a field trip to City Dairy, both the downtown processing plant where the glass bottles rattled down a metal conveyor belt and the farm on Banks Dairy Road where we walked down the cement floors of the long barn and watched a cow being milked. That year we also learned to write in cursive and began memorizing the multiplication tables, but it was making apple butter and watching a cow being milked – tactile, visceral connections to the world – that captivated my already rich imagination, that remain with me all these years later. My farmers have been busy the last week or so, cutting and plowing and turning and spraying. To be honest, the fields don’t look a lot different from the wide empty swathes of dirt that they were when the tractors were cranked for the first time. Nothing has been planted, nothing is growing. If I didn’t know, I wouldn’t know that the growing season has already started. If I hadn’t seen the preparations being made, I would think the fields were still napping. Standing at the edge of the field and watching the dust rise behind the tractor I considered that all preparation, whatever the endeavor, is like that. It goes unnoticed except by the one doing it. I don’t know exactly where thoughts and memories lie in the brain, but the thought about preparation must have been hovering somewhere close to the memories of third grade because I could suddenly see Mrs. Blitch in her plaid shirtwaist and glasses that turned up at the corners like the petals of a tulip. I could see her hovering over the heat lamp under which we had placed another set of Dixie cups, these containing seeds dropped into dark brown dirt by our still chubby eight-year-old fingers. I could feel the joy that she brought into the classroom and the excitement that she shared with us. And I realized that I had never once considered what it took to make that magic, what had been required of her in preparation. All the time she spent buying apples and seeds and Dixie cups. All the hours that she had put into getting us ready to fall in love with growing things. All of which amounted to a teacher’s breaking of land and spreading of fertilizer. I feel certain that on the last day of third grade I told Mrs. Blitch thank you with all the sincerity that a third grader can muster. I feel certain that she knew how much I loved having her as my teacher. But I did not have the tools to understand what she had given me before I even walked through the door of her classroom. Not even in my vivid imagination could see that nearly 60 years later all that preparation would still be bearing fruit. I couldn’t possible know that the apple butter was simply the harvest. Copyright 2021

On the second day after the second dose of the COVID vaccine, I found myself struggling just the least little bit to maintain an optimum level of gratitude. Awakened before dawn with chills that had me turning on the heating pad and electric mattress warmer, I purposed to get myself out of bed and into the day, soldiering through what I'd been assured were symptoms that wouldn't last very long. I did incredibly well -- walking three miles, doing household chores, paying the requisite amount of attention to Owen -- until about two that afternoon. The chills had diminished, but they'd been replaced with uncharacteristic fatigue, so I finally gave in. (I can't say when was the last time I stretched out on my couch. I made sure, before I bought it, that it was long enough for me and my legs and it is very comfortable, but I'm a sitter, not a lounger and in the rare moments that I actually put it to use I'm generally upright.) I turned on the television, put the remote and a glass of water on the coffee table, and allowed myself to recline. There is a basket at the end of the couch that holds a small quilt made for me by my friend Melanie, a chenille throw I bought on a trip with The Buckeyes, and a woven blanket that combines all my favorite colors. The basket also holds an afghan -- wide enough to cover my tallness (a physical trait neither of my parents could ever explain), of the softest yarn in a clear bright aqua -- made for me back when my mother could still crochet. It is probably the last thing she ever made. It was the afghan I chose in which to wrap myself. As the afternoon wore on, I began to feel better. It was probably just the waning of the side effects of the vaccine, but I choose to believe that it was the comfort of being wrapped in that afghan. Christmas was hard. Mama's birthday on January 26 was hard. Easter was hard. But none of them was as hard as April 16, the day on which she and Daddy would have been married for 67 years. We took Daddy to supper and I asked him what he remembered about the Friday afternoon they drove to Ridgeland, South Carolina, and repeated their vows to a Justice of the Peace. "It was raining," he said. "Real hard." And in his eyes I could see the 18-year-old clutching the steering wheel, staring straight ahead, intent on holding the road. And he did. For 66-and-a-half years. He held the road while she held his heart. Most of the folks in my family are teetotalers, so we don't do much toasting, but that night I raised my glass of sweet tea and offered up the simplest and deepest one I could muster. "To Mama." To Mama. Maker of afghans and holder of hearts. Copyright 2021

The freeze came two days before Easter. I remembered to drip the pipes, but it didn't occur to me to pull out a sheet and drape it over the young and tender things growing outside. It was only on Monday that I thought of my crops – mint and rosemary and basil. Mine and rosemary, of course, are impervious to freezing temperatures. They are indestructible. But the basil, for which I had searched for several weeks before it showed up at the garden center, is not. I was dead-heading the pansies, marveling at their heartiness, considering their superiority over, say, roses, when I noticed the leaves of my two basil plants turned dark brown like mahogany and, in noticing, felt a mantle of shame fall onto my shoulders. What kind of person am I? Well, for starters I am not a gardener. I am a person who occasionally delights in sticking things into the ground and monitoring their growth. I’m generally pretty good about watering, but weeding is too tedious and I couldn’t tell you when I last fertilized anything. When I transplanted the lily and iris bulbs that Mama gave me years ago I actually bought one of those things that looks like a cookie counter with a tall handle and dug a bunch of nice holes, but I didn’t bother to pull up the surrounding grass, figuring that their having survived the winter in a big pile in the wheel barrel they would probably survive a little intrusion of their personal spaces. Blessedly, they have. There are, there among the grass, plenty of bright green buds ready to pop into bloom. That, however, does not absolve me of what happened to the basil. Despite it being the Easter season, I don’t expect that there will be any resurrection and, so, the only possible penance for my abject neglect is to find a story, a parable, an object lesson in the shriveled leaves. I’ve tried. Truly I have. And all I’m getting is, pay attention to your plants when Alexa interrupts the afternoon to proclaim that “a freeze warning has been issued by the National Weather Service.” As I type that sentence, though, I realize it’s possible that maybe that is all I’m supposed to be getting. That the morality play being performed in my backyard is about nothing more than paying attention to warnings. Freeze and flood, tornado and hurricane, certainly, but also the kind of warning that arises not from a government agency, but from experience and instinct. The kind that alerts me to a dangerous person, to a difficult situation, to a season of regret that is certain if I proceed. The kind that announces itself, not with sirens or bells, but with shaky hands and a queasy stomach, goosebump-y arms and a sweaty forehead. The kind that I ignore at my own peril and no one else’s. When I do – and, to be honest, there are times when I have – there’s no avoiding the shriveling, the browning, the dying. Most of the time I’m rosemary. Or mint. But not all the time. Sometimes I’m basil. Sometimes I’m fragile, susceptible to the elements, in need of a sheet or a warm corner away from the wind. In need of a warning and the ears to hear. Copyright 2021

The bird feeder is getting old. The tray on the bottom of the hexagon is made of metal and it is rusty and thinner than it was when I first begin feeding the United Nations of birds in my backyard several years ago. The plexiglass sides are dirty, but somehow the birds know when there is food inside and they come in segregated waves to be fed. The cardinals, the bluebirds, and the crows are easily identifiable by color from my back door. The smaller, browner birds, the ones who melt into the landscape when they land on the ground, are, I know, wrens and swallows and sparrows, but they don't let me get close enough to identify them. They are, all of them, brightly colored or subtly dull, happy birds. They sing in unison, if not in harmony, on the bright sunny days that are becoming more common. I am already into my third 18-pound bag of bird seed and it is just now spring. Only a few days after I had filled the feeder for the first time, I was wandering around the yard and, as I got closer to the sycamore tree from which the theater hangs, I heard a frantic fluttering. Two tiny birds had somehow managed to burrow their way into the bird feeder. Drawing closer, I could see the delicate color variations in their feathers -- browns and tans that could be the variations on a single Sherwin-Williams paint card. Their little beaks were about half is long as the nail on my pinky finger, dark and pointed. I lifted the lid and one of the two immediately rose into the open air, flapping madly to put as much distance as possible between himself and me. The second one, looking exactly like the first, kept on beating his wings against the plexiglass – rapidly, like eyelids in sunshine. I tilted the feeder, thinking that his failure to escape was due to some sort of inability to lift his head and see the sky above him. Still, with only a few inches between himself and freedom, he fluttered in place. It was as though he had become so accustomed to the fluttering and the beating and the fear that his tiny little bird brain could not engage in anything else. I tried tapping the bottom and something about that sound, that reverberation, persuaded him toward flight. I would have kept thinking about that little bird anyway, but at least twice more since then I've been called upon to free birds from that same feeder. And each time I am left wondering how in the world they managed to become imprisoned by something that was supposed to nurture them. There is a story in scripture about the prophet Nathan confronting King David with regard to his adultery. It is not a direct confrontation, but an allegorical one. Nathan explains that a wealthy man in the kingdom has taken a family’s little lamb, its pet, and slaughtered it for a feast. Outraged by the action and enamored with his own power, King David proclaims that the man shall be executed. Nathan replies, “You are the man.” Every time I think about the birds, I hear a voice in my head saying, “You are the bird.” And that voice speaks truth. How many times have I allowed something that was meant to be good, beneficial, educational, nurturing, become the method of my capture, my obsession? How many times have I, in insecurity and uncertainty, in all consuming fear, found myself beating my own wings against plexiglass? I have thought about replacing the bird feeder. I have thought about taking it down and requiring all the birds to share the little plastic pagoda-shaped one two trees down. I have thought about how I can save the birds. But I can't save the birds. The birds have to save themselves. I am the bird. Copyright 2021