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Wisteria is a quintessential Southern vine. It doesn't just grow, it climbs. It doesn't just hang, it drapes itself with the appearance of heaviness, fullness, ripeness, that belies its actual fragility. During my first year of law school I lived in an apartment complex that was one long row of buildings facing a concrete wall separated by the driveway. That wall was covered with what may well have been a single long wisteria vine. I didn't notice it when I moved in in August, but come March it was impossible to miss. The branches looked like gnarly old fingers coming over the edge of the concrete wall and the flowers were so dense that you couldn't see the wall itself. One Sunday morning, a perfect spring day (of which Macon, Georgia does not have many), I walked up that driveway to attend church at Vineville United Methodist and, after having fortified my soul and not yet been caught up in the afternoon's studies, I could not resist cutting two or three arms full of the wisteria and bringing it in into my tiny one-bedroom apartment. I stuck clusters in drinking glasses all over the apartment, feeling both a little grown up and very much like a child playing house. Within half an hour, though, I could not breathe. The allergic reaction to the wisteria was quick and complete and I had no choice but to purge my tiny living space of the beautiful blossoms. Holding my breath as much as possible I scooped them up and took them outside and, then, came back inside and washed my hands and my eyes with cold water. For years, as long as I can remember really, a number of trees on our road hosted wisteria vines. During their blooming season, I cut my walks short, turning around to go back home before my nose could take in much more than a single sniff. A few years ago, however, the maintenance crew from the EMC cut down those trees and with them the wisteria. I watched as the branches of the slain trees dried out and the wisteria vines withered. Despite the fact that it meant I no longer had to truncate my walking, I was a little sad. The harbinger of spring upon which I could reliably depend was gone. Today I went walking before lunch. We won't be able to do that for long. The real heat is going to be upon us soon and Owen and I will have to curtail these midday walks, replacing them with late afternoon treks. About a quarter of the way home a flash of lavender caught my eye and I turned to see three ... four ... five clusters of wisteria hanging on rotting chinaberry logs, close to the ground and caught in a tangle of weeds. They are back, I thought to myself with not a little excitement. The wisteria that was collateral damage of the tree trimming, that I had assumed had died off with its host, was alive. Somehow, somewhere in the pile of rubble that the chainsaws left, a seed had managed to survive. Dormant for a very long time, perhaps it was the excessive rains of this winter and early spring that brought it to life. Perhaps it was some atomic-particle-sized floral will to live. I have no idea, but I grabbed the object lesson and ran with it. There has been so much death in the past year. So much that I am, quite frankly, tired of thinking about it, talking about it, writing about it. I want to move on in the worst possible way. But there is no moving on. The death of a person, a relationship, an expectation is never really final. The seed from which it sprang remains. Somewhere. Perhaps in the ground where it fell, perhaps in the craw of a bird or a raccoon. Perhaps only in memory. But it still exists and someday, some bright spring day here or elsewhere, it will break open and come to life. It will bloom again. Copyright 2021

The big yellow road scraper approached the crossroads from what would be the north transept (if one looked at the crossroads as a literal cross, which, as it happens, I do). Owen and I were still 25 yards or so away, but I raised my hand in greeting just in case the operator glanced our way. It is not an easy thing to turn around a road scraper, but that is what the operator proceeded to do -- turning toward me and Owen, backing up across the crossroads, and turning back in the direction from which he had come. We would not be delayed in our walk, nor would we be in the way of the county's work to make the roads passable. The operator opened the door to the cab and called out something I couldn't make out over the noise of the diesel engine. When he realized I hadn't heard, he stopped the machine and opened the door to the cab to step down. Owen was there to greet him, tail wagging and tongue dangling. "Hey," he offered while scruffing Owen's neck. "Do you know how far down that road is the Evans County line?" I understood well the reason for the question. Here at the bottom end of the county there has long been some dispute about whose responsibility it is to maintain the road that is the literal county line. "Not far," I told him with authority. He laughed. "I've already scraped it one time." He shrugged and I returned his laugh. "How's that?" he asked, nodding in the direction from which Owen and I had come. By now I'd gotten close enough to see his face. Weathered. Wrinkled beyond what it should have been for someone his age. When he smiled I could see that some teeth were missing. "Good." I told him. "We appreciate it a lot." He grinned and continuing petting my needy dog for a minute and then turned to climb back up onto the machine. And as he turned I could see the words on the back of his shirt: County Prisoner. It had not occurred to me -- even with 19 years spent working in the criminal justice system, even though his t-shirt was the bright orange of work camp inmates -- that this man wasn't just another county employee doing his job. It also had not occurred to me to be afraid or even hesitant in his presence, probably a couple of miles from the nearest other person. We have a long history of law enforcement in my family. Deputies and police officers on both sides of my family had made me familiar and comfortable with the terminology long before I accepted a badge myself and, so, I knew that this man was what is called a trusty. An inmate who has demonstrated himself as able to be trusted or relied on, someone who can be given the privilege of leaving confinement temporarily to clean the courthouse, to carry out maintenance on government buildings, to scrape the roads. It's odd how, sometimes, life brings you a metaphor even when you're not looking for it. I've been thinking a lot about trust lately and here I was being given an opportunity to demonstrate it. The thing is, though, that in this circumstance I wasn't trusting my instincts, my experience, my knowledge. I was trusting somebody else's trust. That's not a thought that sits well with me. I've been accused more than once of having a control issue. I revisit over and over again the times in my life when my trust was ill-placed. I recognize on pretty much a daily business that "I'll do it myself" could be tattooed on my wrist. And, yet. What do I know about the COVID vaccine of which I've now received my first dose? What do I know about the combustion engine in the car I depend upon to take me everywhere? What do I know about the food I eat, the bank that holds my money, the walls and foundation of the house where I calmly go to sleep at night? In each incidence, I trust someone else's trust. And in complete ignorance. I can't say I welcomed the realization. It's going to require some loosening of control, some forgiveness of myself, and some accepting of help. And it's going to make me ever more conscious of the times and places when it's my trust that somebody else is trusting. Copyright 2021

Ahead of me Owen runs back and forth, jumping a ditch and immediately jumping back, playing a game with rules only he knows. His tongue dangles from the side of his mouth and every now and then he turns to make sure that I am still there, following. Back home, he darts from the orange ball to the green one and back again. He chooses one at random and races toward me. Unable to slow himself down, he slides to a halt ten or twelve feet behind me. I walk toward him and reach for the ball; he eases slowly toward my outstretched hand and, just as I curl my fingers to pluck the ball from his teeth, he dashes away. He never gets tired of it and, apparently, neither do I. Owen showed up at Sandhill on Halloween of 2017. My former law partner is named Hal, so Owen seemed an appropriate name choice. He practically house-trained himself and needed a leash for only a few weeks. He willingly jumps into the car and never complains about going to the vet. Owen knows a lot of things. He knows the commands for “sit” and “wait.” He understands that “let’s go” said from the porch means that we are going for a walk and that “let’s go” said from anywhere else means that it’s time to head home. He knows that if he shows up at Daddy’s about 7:30 in the morning he’s bound to get a little leftover egg and bacon. He knows that before I turn off the light in the laundry room every night he is going to get a piece of duck jerky. There are more pictures of Owen on my Instagram account than anything else. In fact, he has his own hashtag – #OWEdNesday – and every Wednesday I post a photo or video. His notoriety has grown so much in the two or so years since OWEdNesday was launched that he is now absolutely convinced that the big brown trucks and the big white ones with blue and orange letters on the side that come to Sandhill do so for the express purposes of scratching his neck and patting his head. To be honest, there is nothing extraordinary about Owen. Except, of course, that he is Owen. He belongs to me as I do him. It is the way of dogs and humans. There has not been a moment in the last year in which I have not been aware of the pandemic – its weight, its toll. To think of it on the anniversary of the date when the world shut down is to do so with some incredulity. How could it have been an entire year since we went to graduations and weddings and birthday parties with the innocence of children? How could twelve full moons have come and gone while we stayed inside? And how in the world shall we ever feel safe with each other again? When Owen tires of chasing the balls he simply folds his legs underneath himself and lowers his long face onto his front paws. He lifts his eyes toward me, a look I translate easily: “I don’t want to play anymore, but I will stay right here as long as you want.” It occurs to me that Owen has no idea that the last year has been different, that my goings and comings have been curtailed, that I’ve missed out on anything. He longs for nothing. He has everything he wants, everything he needs. I suddenly want to find that old leash and clip it onto his collar. I want to put him in the car and drive him into town, march him around the Courthouse and up Savannah Avenue, down Gentilly and past the walking trail, in and out of Edgewood Acres and down Fair Road. I want everyone to see this creature, this beautiful creature who is living today exactly as he was one year ago. I want to remind the weary among us, the grief-stricken in our ranks, the angry and faithless and forsaken that, while what we have lost is significant, what remains is significant, too. What remains are community and the common good, neighbors and neighborliness, sunrise and full moons, and, of course, the wisdom of dogs. Always. Copyright 2021

Minute. It is a minefield of a word for people whose first language is not English. Like a nine-year-old girl in south Georgia in 1964. A girl whose vocabulary, when she started first grade, included words like chimley, but not chimney; winder, but not window. Who didn't yet have the ability to understand that when her grandmother said she was going to "hope" someone she meant she was going to offer assistance, but also -- in a deep spiritual sense -- also meant that she was sharing her own expectation of better things to come. It is a word that, to this day, conjures up a specific memory of utter humiliation. We'd been assigned a report, to be presented orally, on aquatic life. Like every other assignment, I approached it with curiosity and zeal. There was nothing in the world I liked better than learning unless it was pleasing the adults in my life. We did not have a set of encyclopedias in our home and in fourth grade I'd not yet been exposed to library research. I would later learn to love the card catalog and the Reader's Guide To Periodical Literature, but those delights still awaited. The single resource available to me was a large dictionary purchased by my parents from a door-to-door salesman -- Webster's New World Dictionary: The Everyday Encyclopedic Edition. The volume contained far more than a dictionary, however. There were sections on scientific terms, business correspondence, civics (This was back when people still knew what that was.), principles of grammar, geography (including, before GPS and Google, the distances between principal cities of the United States and of the world), history, home economics, literature (including a section on the world's great books and synopses of all of Shakespeare's plays), mathematics, medicine, music, and space. And then there were the illustrations, beautiful hand-colored plates that opened the book -- "Rare Birds of Brilliant Plumage," "Plants of Great Commercial Value," "Principal Edible Grains," precious stones, building stones, Yellowstone. Of greatest interest to me at that moment were "Living Corals," "Fish of Unusual Interest," "Game Fish Caught with the Fly," and, what was to be my downfall, "Minute Life in Ponds and Streams." Several of my classmates were, I knew, going to report on the ocean and saltwater life. I'd never seen the ocean and, even at that young age, understood the writer's adage of "write what you know." I knew ponds. There was one right outside my back door. It was the water into which we threw stale bread to feed the fish. It was the water in which we swam in the summer. It was where Daddy taught me to bait my own hook, where he and I floated trying to catch supper. I worked so hard on that report. And on the day that I was scheduled to do my oral presentation, I took to school with me Webster's New World Dictionary: The Everyday Encyclopedic Edition. I had practiced holding it open so as to share the beautiful plates at appropriate moments. I was sure that my classmates would be impressed. And perhaps they were. But what I remember about that oral presentation, all I remember, is that when I opened the book and held up "Minute Life in Ponds and Streams" I pronounced the first word as though it was the one meaning 60 seconds of time. I had no idea that, in that context, the word was pronounced differently. That it meant something other than time. My assumption during preparation was that calling something "min-it" life simply meant it didn't live very long. Immediately, before I could close the book and bring it down to my side, my teacher -- standing at the back of the room with her arms crossed over her chest -- shouted: "My-newt. It's pronounced my-newt." Never had I been so ashamed. Things that happen to us as children, we all know, linger. Long after the moment. Long after the day. Long, long after they should linger. And that correction, that harsh, public correction in fourth grade is a big part of why for many years I struggled so mightily against being wrong. The burden was so great that often if something I said received a response of "Really?" or "I can't believe it!", I would backtrack. "Maybe I misunderstood," I'd say. Or, "I could be mistaken." Or, "I think so," even when I was absolutely positive. A few weeks ago, I wrote a column about trees and I wrote, "I remember something about a tree growing from its center." A few days later, my friend Missy -- who is a real botanist, one with letters after her name -- called me. She began by telling me how much she had loved the column, how much she appreciated my drawing attention to things like trees. And, then, very gently, she said, "I did want to tell you, though, that trees don't grow from the center. Do you remember learning about xylem and phloem? The area between them is called the cambium and it's in the outer layer of the tree. That's where it grows." I was tickled to death, first of all, that I did, in fact, remember xylem and phloem and, secondly, that my friend of nearly 60 years loved me enough to both correct me and to do it privately. Not long after that, I posted on Instagram a photo of some tiny purple blooms I'd found in the yard. I captioned it "First bloom, verbena." To be honest, I hardly looked at it. I was so glad to see some color in the yard I just assumed it was verbena that hadn't quite opened its little faces yet. A day or so later, my friend Annie, who I call "The Wildflower Whisperer," shared on her Facebook page a post from the truly-learned people at Southern Piedmont Natural History a photo identifying my little bloom as henbit. Not unopened verbena. A subtle -- and loving -- correction. Missy and Annie are generous and kind. And because they are, I am smarter than I was before they corrected me. I am also stronger than I was in fourth grade. Since that moment of humiliation, I've been wrong so many times and about so many things that being wrong is no longer the indictment of character I used to think it was. I've let go of the compulsion to be right. Being wrong is no longer a reason to blush and hide, but an opportunity to admit to my humanity, to take a load off, to laugh. I often think of life events as bookends. When something unpleasant, difficult, or hurtful happens, something else will come along -- a week, a year, a lifetime -- later to close it off, to bookend it. Something that will give meaning to the hurt, make a story out of the pain. That may not always be true, but it is helpful to think so in the middle time. An oral report in fourth grade and the sweet gestures of dear friends 55 years later. Bookends between which have been the volumes of a lifetime. Copyright 2021

On the morning after the rain, the day-after-day rain, a man on a Ford tractor drove slowly down the road in front of Sandhill. Pulling a blade, he scraped away the evidence – flattened the ruts into smooth planes, filled and leveled the puddles. He sat the way farmers do, one hand on the steering wheel, the opposite arm propped on the back of the seat so that he could swivel between watching the road ahead and the work of the blade behind him. The sun was just high enough to throw a spotlight on his back; his face was in shadow. I raised my hand in greeting, in acknowledgment of his presence, his offering. Slowly and smoothly he drove out of sight toward the river, the road transforming as he went. Gratitude for this man I did not know rose from the soles of my feet, which had been sucked into ankle-deep mud when I had tried to walk the day before. This man I did not know was making the road walkable. There are places, though, where the road was still a little slick, places where a wrong step could send me flailing, so I paid close attention to where I stepped, which is how I became mesmerized with the tire tracks. The most obvious were the Vs of the tractor tires. They curved out a little at the top like they were designed by an engineer with an affinity for fancy fonts. They were wide and thick like the thighs of a weightlifter. A little closer to the middle was a tread made of square links, large alternating with smaller, that made me think of the Greek key pattern often used in textiles and architecture. I decided that the one with two sets of matching curves on either side of a straight line that looked like waves breaking over a seawall was my favorite. There were lots more. One that looked like rows of ric rac trim on the hem of a little girl’s dress. One that made me think of a herringbone blazer I had once. A grid of tiny squares, a set of parallel lines. Importantly, it seemed, I – someone not familiar with such things beyond knowing that occasionally I have to buy new tires – could not tell from looking at the tread which way the cars, the trucks, the four-wheelers had been going nor how fast they had been traveling. There was no way to know what or whom they carried. The mystery made me thoughtful, sent me wondering about the other things I can not know. Over the past year we have been reminded endlessly that “we are all in this together.” But the truth is that none of us knows what our neighbor carries, how fast our co-worker is moving, whether our friend is arriving or leaving. What we see of each other is only the tire tracks left behind when we travel over hard terrain. Mud, snow, ice. We can guess, but we can not know. This is what I’ve learned in this time that is not over: Miseries are not written in comparative language. Trauma can not be categorized. Tragedies are not ranked on a scale. Pain is pain. Loss is loss. The rain always stops. The sun eventually comes out. Somebody scrapes the road. And then the travelers show up, an endless line of people to whom we raise our hands in greeting, in acknowledgment, in gratitude for the company along the way. Copyright 2021

Was it third grade? Fourth? When did we widen our eyes and open our mouths in amazement at discovering that the age of a tree is determined by counting its rings? And why did it never occur to us, to me that the only way to count those rings is for the tree to die? Owen and I are walking down the field road toward the pond. To our right a deep flutter of wings breaks the quiet, but not the sky. Whatever bird has been rustled from its rest by our approach remains within the keep of the woods. A softer scurrying close to the ground, a sound that would normally send my hyperactive dog bounding into the underbrush, goes ignored and fades. We have already walked two miles, to the crossroads and back, but the brisk afternoon has beckoned me again, a reminder that February days of temperate weather and light wind are outliers, that the cold and rain that mark this shortest month will not be denied their rule and tomorrow I am likely to be imprisoned. So I am walking again, strolling really. Purposeless but for the intention of being as close to the world as possible. Tossed to the side of the road, having laid there long enough for scrub grass and various vines to have grown up and around it, is a tree trunk. It was a couple of years ago that the tree fell in a storm. It’s hard to tell why a tree falls. This one may have been old and rotten. The wind may have been, as the meteorologists call it, gale force. I suppose it’s possible that a tree can just get tired and want to lie down. For whatever reason, this one fell and in its falling took out a power line. In the otherwise complete darkness, the rotating yellow lights of the linemen’s trucks threw strange shadows into the woods as they sawed the tree off near the ground and tossed it to the side before restoring power. They didn’t, however, toss it far enough. They left it in the path of the center pivot irrigation, which necessitated another assault, a carving of the trunk into pieces that could be pulled completely out of the way. From where I stand I can see the tree’s rings. They are uniformly narrow, indicating the sandy nature of the soil, and, while I’m not dressed to go tramping into the sharp deadness of the branch to count them, I can guess that there are somewhere between 75 and 100. Staring at the rings, endless circles with no beginnings and no ends, I remember something about a tree growing from its center. How the outermost ring is the oldest and how it stretches as growth takes place deep inside. How the tree remains healthy as long as its heart is vital, producing the sap that sends water and nutrients to the branches and limbs and leaves. I am not a tree. I compute my age not with rings, but with months and years. Not with endless curves, but straight lines that begin and end. But what if I was? What if I was a tree, my heart wreathed with love received, friendships made, beauty observed, obstacles overcome, tragedies survived? What if each beat of that heart pumped sap into the farthest reaches of my hands, my thoughts, my words? And what if on the day that I am felled by wind or lightning or fatigue those rings remain visible to passers-by? Glistening in the light of the sunset, testifying to a life measured in far more important ways than years. Copyright 2021

I tried to walk today. Despite the fact that the humidity was 87 per cent and the temperature was 74 degrees and the sky was gray and low. I tried to walk, but I didn’t get far. I was no more than half a mile from home when the pine trees on either side of the road began singing. They sing a lot, these trees so tall that on a sunny day I have to squint my eyes to see their tops. They catch the breeze in their topmost branches and begin swaying like young girls on the edge of the dance floor sending their needles swishing like taffeta ballgowns. On clear days, they sing in the high-pitched voice of schoolchildren inviting me to sing along. On cold days, they run the scales of a baritone, in a range I can not reach. On days like today, warm and humid, they tend to be silent, as though the moisture in the air is too thick to penetrate with their voices. Unless rain is on its way. And when it is, the singing begins at the edge of the woods and builds as it sweeps across the forest, down the fire breaks and across the hills. It swells like an aria, seductive at the start and then frightening in its passion as it reaches the final notes. That’s what I heard today, the beginning notes of the aria. I called for Owen and turned to head back home. “I know your voice,” I said to the woods. “I have lived here long enough to recognize that song.” It was 47 years ago this month that we moved to the farm. I was 17 and, despite a sash full of Girl Scout badges, woefully unprepared for farm life – the acrid smells of animals and diesel fuel, the rules of the road on meeting a tractor pulling a twelve-row plow, how to drive on dirt roads after a three-day rain. I had never seen a field being burned off, flaming tongues of orange and red reaching halfway up the sky. I had never gotten a pick-up truck stuck in a plowed over field and walked home two miles in the dark. I had never heard a fawn crying for its mother. And I didn’t know that pine trees sing. There have been hundreds of lessons in those 47 years, but just a handful of truths: The closer you live to the earth, to the seasons, to the sky, the smaller you become. The smaller you become, the bigger becomes the world. The bigger becomes the world, the clearer becomes your perspective. And with perspective comes freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. I don’t always remember that. Sometimes those truths are drowned out by angry politicians, each of whom espouses the faulty idea that he or she alone is the guardian of civilization. Sometimes they are overshadowed by my own arrogance in thinking that if I work, argue, pray hard enough I can overpower another’s free will. Sometimes they are buried under fear and duty and laziness because it’s just easier to give in. But when I do remember I find myself gasping at the grace of a ladybug dangling from my fingertip, crying over a full moon pulsing almost within reach, stopping my stride to listen to woodpecker’s telegraphing far above my head. When I remember I can hear the pine trees sing. Copyright 2021

I had not considered, until shortly before I reached into the bag to draw it out, that the people to whom I was about to show the object might not know what it was.  That’s how it is with familiar things – we unconsciously assume they are familiar to everyone and when, through circumstance or wondering, we stumble across the idea that they are not, well, things happen. This particular circumstance was a recent Saturday morning on which I was giving a writer’s workshop to a group of Girl Scouts in Atlanta.  After having given the obligatory inspirational talk and read a snippet of my own work, we’d begun a writing exercise, the workshop equivalent of audience participation.  The object was to write an autobiographical paragraph, the subject of which did not necessarily have to be oneself. The twist – and there is always a twist to writer’s workshop exercises – was that each sentence of the paragraph had to include an object that I would draw out of a bag.  I reminded the participants that some words can be used in many different ways.  “For example,” I told them, “if I pull out a foot remember that foot can also be used to describe not just an actual foot, but also the foot of a bed or footing the bill.” The first object to be withdrawn from the bag was a Tiffany blue die cast model car.  The girls bent their heads and wrote furiously.  The second object was a tarnished silver friendship heart on a red silk string.  Once again they bent and wrote.  The third and fourth objects, a large gray and white feather and an hourglass, received only slightly longer glances before the girls set to writing. It was the fifth and final object that gave me pause as I reached into the bag.  Curling my fingers around its smooth curves, I slowly pulled out a deer antler. Immediately the whispering began.  “What’s that?” echoed all over the room, front to back.  One or two girls whispered back, “Antlers!” with an urgency normally associated with the warning of an approaching contagion. “Y’all city girls don’t know what a deer antler looks like?” I asked and then laughed out loud.  I walked up and down the aisle so the girls could see the antler more closely. “You can tell a lot about the animal just from this antler.”  I could feel the writing exercise morphing into a biology lecture.  “It’s obviously male because female deer don’t have antlers and he was a young male because the antler is still pretty small.  And see here at the bottom?  You can see where the antler broke off.  It didn’t just fall off as antlers normally do.  He may have gotten into a fight or he may have gotten his head stuck in something and the antler broke off as he escaped.” I watched their faces, so open, so fascinated by something that is completely common to me. I felt the way I feel when I’ve given someone the exactly right present. Their hands went back to their pencils and the scribbling resumed.  In just a few more minutes our time together was over.  It is highly likely that I will never see any of those girls again, but driving home that afternoon, through traffic thick as cane syrup, I kept going back to the absolute delight I experienced in sharing with them my familiar, my everyday, my ordinary.  And I realized that an equivalent delight always comes when someone shares his or hers with me. We work very hard these days to dress-up the ordinary with special fonts and custom play-lists and signature cocktails.  I wonder what would happen if we stopped playing dress-up.  If we understood again and for the first time that the beauty of the world and of our lives needs no embellishment and that the ordinary is anything but. Copyright 2019

Just above the horizon the sunset looks like a kaleidoscope – light like diamond shards of glass moving left and right, up and down, changing shape at the whim of a giant hand.  Even if I had no calendar, I would know it is October just by looking at the sunset. A few nights ago the colors were warm peach wrapped in lavender and palest pink.  And two weeks ago the sky was bright orange pulled like taffy across the purple of a deep bruise.  Tonight's sky throbs with mango and lemon and blood orange edged with indigo. I am generally curious about such things.  Things like what makes the colors in an autumn sunset, but tonight I am not.  It is enough that the colors exist, that they drape themselves over my little piece of earth and invite me to stand still and marvel.  Which is exactly what I do.   I also take a photo.  I have no idea how it will turn out.  I’ve grown accustomed to the idea that the camera on my cell phone, regardless of the claims of its manufacturer, will never capture the exact hue, the perfect clarity.  There is no artificial lens in the world that produces what my very human, very near-sighted eyes produce. Click.  The image is saved to the smaller-than-postage-stamp memory card in the phone.   It is only later, when I am examining the photo to determine if it is social media-worthy, that I notice the sunset –  the glorious, show-stopping sunset –  is not nearly everything the camera captured.  In the foreground is Owen, his nose to the ground, as entranced by some scent as I am by the sky.  There is the wooden fence marking the corner of my parents’ yard, its boards leaning a little, sagging a little more.  There is a field of plowed-up peanuts, the vines turned brown and brittle awaiting the picker.  In the distance is Sandhill. In just a few weeks it will have been 29 years since I moved into Sandhill, 29 years since I began the ongoing process of creating a home.  I had one bed, a nightstand, and a couch on order from L.A. Waters Furniture.  No kitchen table, no desk, lots of books, and a television antenna that picked up three Savannah stations and, occasionally, when the cloud coverage was just right, one in Augusta.  There was no deck, no rocking chairs, no shed. The holly trees that anchor the corners of the front porch weren’t there.  The saw-tooth oaks and sycamore that now tower over the roof weren’t there.  The mailbox, the hydrangeas, the bird feeders weren’t there.  Not yet. Staring at the photo I remember without wanting to remember – the table set for Thanksgiving; the Christmas tree in the corner of the living room; the faces of visiting friends, talking late into the night and waking to the creeping light of sunrise through the guest room windows.  They all seem so far away in this strangest of years.  And, yet, they are all right here with me, captured in memory.  That, like the sunset, is also a marvel. There is reason to believe that the end of life in the time of COVID is not yet.  There is good reason to believe that, despite fervent wishes to the contrary, it will be a while yet before there are friends waking up in the guest room of Sandhill, rocking on the front porch, gathering around the table to tell stories and pass the peace.     I will not, however, pout.  Pouting, I used to tell the little girls on my softball team, is neither attractive nor productive.  (And, I might add, it is even less attractive and less productive in a grown woman.)  What I will do, every chance I get, is stand in the middle of the dirt road and stare at the October sunset pouring itself out flagrantly over the tall trees and the wide fields and my own little house. Copyright 2020

It's a dreary day in south Georgia, the kind of day on which I'm more apt to be still, to actually read with intent, to give myself a break from the constant drive to DO. I need -- though I do not necessarily wish for -- days like this. I am weeks weary. My mother's death came on the heels of Thanksgiving and at the beginning of Advent. Amongst the gift-buying and the house-decorating there were thank you notes to write, brief words attempting to express my family's gratitude for what had been done for us in the midst of our loss. As the year turned and within a period of five days, six people to whom I had a personal or professional connection died, two of them from COVID. A week later a sweet, gentle man that I've known since I was a teenager succumbed to the disease. As if the personal burdens weren't enough, the storming of the Capitol on January 6 (Epiphany, for heaven's sake!) pounded on the shards of my broken heart and sent me, after too many hours of multi-channel television watching, outside where I walked and walked and cried and cried. I kept thinking of what it means to take an oath, to speak a vow, to make a promise. And, at some point, maybe it was at the crossroads where I had a choice of three different directions to take with my steps, I started questioning whether words mean anything at all in this strangest of times. I made it back home without an answer. So on this dreary day in south Georgia (Did I mention I woke up with a headache?), I was far less likely to go looking for encouragement than seeking out justification for my dark mood. Alas (and gratefully), I found instead an article written by a Jesuit priest titled God's Voice or Mine. The priest, clearly smarter and more in tune with spiritual things than I -- wrote, "When you feel despair, don’t listen to it; when you feel hope, follow it." Staring at the words, reading them over and over again, I felt my heart grow still. I felt my breath reach deeper in my chest. I felt the gray from the day and in me lift just a little. And I remembered Wednesday, when a 22-year-old with learning disabilities, a 22-year-old who had resisted the human tendency to turn down help and had accepted the accommodations offered her, a 22-year-old who used that help to find her way to the most venerable educational institution in the country, stood on the steps of the United States Capitol and intoned loudly and convincingly enough for us all to hear, "there is always light, if only we're brave enough to see it; if only we're brave enough to be it." There is always light. Always. Even on days when the rain is hard and heavy and cold. Even in moments when our mothers can no longer hold us. Even when the crossroads that lies before us is unmarked in every direction. There is always light. The rain has stopped. The sky is still gray. The rain will return. But so will the light. Copyright 2021

The laser, the neurosurgeon explained, was only slightly cooler than a microwave. It would, in a process that sounded like something out of one of the Isaac Asimov novels in the junior high school library, travel through the needles, through a layer of skin and to the nerves. The nerves would then – as I imagined them – sizzle like a struck match and go out. Out as in incapable of producing the cervical migraines that had prevented me from sleeping for months. Vertical I was fine. Horizontal I felt as though a jackhammer was making its way through my brain. Needles in my neck and a microwave-hot laser sounded like a good idea. And it was. That very night I slept. Soundly. I had become what amounted, in my mind, at least, a lab rat as a result of degenerative disk disease which I told the doctor I suspected it had something to do with the fact that, on three different occasions, I’d been involved in rear-end collisions. He smiled and shook his head. “No, this is from 38 years of bending over a desk practicing law.” Sigh. Whatever the cause, the laser did its job and, except for the temporary numbness on the injection sites and the unsteadiness that required me to sit with the office manager until I was clear enough to drive, the surgery was a complete success. Additionally, there have been no side effects. Except one. I am suddenly hypersensitive to the labels in my clothes. All of them. Labels that heretofore had never even been noticed. Labels in cheap clothes and in expensive clothes. Labels made of cotton and labels made of polyester. Labels that slide across my skin with the slightest of movements and cause pinpricks to dance across the base of my neck like a foot that falls asleep and refuses to wake up. So I’ve had to start cutting the labels out. Last week, on Wednesday, I sat in my quiet living room on my quiet farm and watched, saddened and horrified, the television images from Washington, D.C., that were anything but quiet. I watched the building we call the seat of democracy and the people we elect to guard it become the objects of an angry, unrestrained mob, many of whom were wearing labels of one sort or another. As the night wore on and the Senators and Congressmen returned to the floors of their respective chambers, I noticed it again. Everyone who stood up to speak was identified on camera not just by name, but by label. As if an R or D was determinative of something. As if it told me whether she is honorable, whether he cares about the same things I do. In those moments I realized something. Life is better without labels. People are more approachable without labels. Things get done, progress is made, conflict is avoided when we lose the labels and look at people as, well, people. When we lay aside pompous rhetoric and speak the truth. I also realized that I don’t want anyone assuming that he or she knows how I feel about something because of a political affiliation, so, for what it’s worth, let it be known that I have no political affiliation. I am an American and a Georgian. I am a lawyer and a writer and a Christian. I am a daughter and a sister and an aunt. I will always be a friend. Beyond that, I bear no labels. And I am sleeping just fine. Copyright 2021

If I might have a moment of personal privilege, please. A moment to speak of the week at Sandhill in terms that don’t include a description of how the colors of the fallen leaves change when they are flattened by the rain or how the wind kicks up those leaves and slaps them against the house and the car and the garbage can like window decals. A moment to speak of a pain so sharp and a hurt so deep that the best metaphor in the world can not reach it. At 4:30 a.m. on Monday, November 30, the moon was full. At that precise moment the moon was fully illuminated for the first time in 28 days. I have a thing about the full moon. I’ve written about it over and over, called it a fingernail and a scythe and an apostrophe. Described it as a pumpkin-colored ball, a cream-colored poker chip, a poaching egg. I like to walk around in the dark with nothing but the full moon to light my way and when I know the full moon is near, I leave the blinds to my bedroom window open so that the light will keep me company in the night. I remember a lot of full moons, but I will never forget this one, the one at 4:30 a.m. on Monday, November 30, because as best we can tell, it was right about then that my mother died. My mother died. I have practiced saying the word, avoiding the euphemism in the many telephone calls I have received, the texts to which I have replied, the conversations in which I have engaged because to pretend otherwise denies her the dignity she deserves. She did not pass away, morph into some wisp and float into the ether. She died. She died when, as a result of Alzheimer’s disease, she could no longer walk or speak or, ultimately, breathe. Many years ago when my grandmother, my mother’s mother died, I discovered a song that Carly Simon had written after the death of her own mother. I wept as I heard it, imagining how Mama must be feeling and feeling safe in knowing that it would be a long, long time before that moment came for me. And now it is here. I spent hours on Monday going through photos, some of which I’d never seen, including photos of Mama and Daddy when they were dating. I searched their faces for the adults, the parents they became and, though I found resemblances – her curly hair, his dark eyes –- , the teenagers in the photos carried an impishness, a naivete, a daring that, by the time I learned to look at them as people, had been softened by responsibility and time. There were photos of Mama holding me, a newborn all scrunched and swaddled, my fists punching at the air as though I had some autonomy, as though I was not dependent upon her for everything. Photos of her holding other babies – my brother, his children, his children’s children – and always there was nothing but delight on her face. It was those photos – the impishness of the teenager, the delight of the mother – that caught my grief and held it. Held it like a magnet because it had been so long since I had seen that Mama, so long since her eyes danced, her mouth smiled. So long since she’d been Mama. Sitting at my desk, the light of the full moon shrouded only slightly by clouds, I remember the Carly Simon song, the song that ends with the words: “I'll wait no more for you like a daughter. That part of our life together is over. But I will wait for you, forever ... like a river.” Like a river that flows from its source to sea. Copyright 2020

On Christmas Eve the skies are heavy and gray, pregnant with rain that will not come. The wind is hard and erratic. It picks up leaves, thrusts them into the air, and then drops them violently. It is the only sound – low and mournful – that I hear. The birds, the rabbits, the squirrels have burrowed in somewhere, hiding from the cold in a way that makes me envious. Only one more week, I think, one more week in this dreadful year. The year that started so optimistically with perky hashtags – #perfect vision – and not just plans, but expectations. We know, we thought, how the year goes. How winter literally melts into spring, how accomplishments and milestones are celebrated, how companies operate, what is required of friendship. We didn’t know. The road is wet, but not muddy. The treads on my tennis shoes make sharp-lined chevrons that dissolve quickly into soft curves. My hands are as deep in my pockets as they will go, but my face confronts the wind and the cold unprotected, bare and raw. Turning a page. Of all the cliches about the end of one year and the beginning of another, this is the one that has rooted into my brain on this holy day. Seems appropriate for a writer, but I can not play with it as I would normally. I can’t find a way to tear it apart and make something lovely and hopeful. I can only see a literal page, one where the page break separates a sentence leaving it incomplete. I sent more sympathy cards in 2020 than I remember ever having sent before. And, then, of course, I received many more than that. I don’t know the number of events I’d planned to attend that got cancelled. I spent hours and hours staring at my computer screen and grids of faces. I walked so, so many miles. I am weary. I am not alone (In the figurative sense, of course. We are all far more alone literally.). But, despite my fatigue and protestations, Christmas has come anyway. Church services and nativity scenes have been cancelled, but Dr. Anthony Fauci has proclaimed that Santa is COVID-free and can safely propel himself down all the chimneys in the world. My sigh is overcome by the wind. No one, not even myself, can hear my sadness. I am as unsure of 2021 as I have ever been. Sudden movement draws my eye upward. Directly above me is a hawk. Gliding, sliding, climbing then falling as if riding the currents is the easiest thing in the world. As though yielding to the cold wind, the damp air is a thing of joy. Many years ago during a leadership exercise on an isolated island off the coast of Georgia, each of us was asked to name the animal that best described us. I said I was a red-tailed hawk – resident of the countryside, comfortably independent and solitary. Watching the one above me now, I realize that statement was simply aspirational. What I am is a border collie – constantly in need of a job, an activity, something to keep me busy. Is that why 2020 has been so hard? Because the busyness that makes me feel useful, loved, worthy has been stolen from me? Because I have been forced to be realistic about what and how much I can and can not do? Because being powerless is as frightening a thing as any of us can know? I am a border collie, but I want to be a hawk. I want to glide and slide and climb and fall with the currents, yielding to the ebb and flow I will never be able to control, allowing the wind to turn the pages as I read on. Copyright 2021

The door on my mailbox rusted off years ago. And because the mailbox itself is encased in a brick structure that looks a little like a gnome house, neither the door nor the entire mailbox can be replaced without significant destruction. Without a door, it has long been an inviting locale for birds, spiders, and the occasional lizard and I suspect that more than one rural mail carrier has been accosted, as have I, by a winged, multi-legged, or scaled creature. My mailbox should be approached, I imagine it is obvious, with caution. I have always loved mail. During the summer, when I was home in the middle of the day, I watched the mailman slowly edge his car off the road, lean across the front seat, and, in the black metal box that perched on a two-by-four at the edge of the road, leave for us like Santa Claus bundles of paper that connected us to the bigger world. I would run across the yard in bare feet, feeling the heat of the day on my shoulders, to pull out the sale papers, magazines, and things I didn’t know were bills. It was one of the great delights of summer. When I was ten I met my friend Sandra at church camp and we began a correspondence that continues 54 years later. When my Uncle Steve was sent to Vietnam we exchanged letters, his including the occasional trinket and Vietnamese money, mine including not much more than a series of how-are-yous and I-am-fines. I collected addresses like some children collect dolls. In 1992 I wrote my first Christmas letter, continuing the practice for over twenty years before I decided cards might be a better use of my recipients’ time. I’ve been thinking a lot about mail the last couple of weeks. My mailbox has been fuller than usual, stuffed with political flyers, requests for year-end donations to worthy organizations, and, of course, Christmas cards. It has also been stuffed with sympathy cards and notes of condolence. Handwritten messages. Words of encouragement, scripture references, and reminiscences of my mother. Some of the return addresses I recognized. Some caused me to inhale sharply and suddenly with surprise. Each one has gone into a box where it waits to be acknowledged by a reciprocal handwritten message, a thank you note, a few lines in which I will try to express the depth of my appreciation that someone took the time. The postal service has been fairly universally maligned in this strangest of years. One woman I saw yesterday as I went into the post office to mail a package to Sandra from church camp stopped in the middle of the street to tell me, “You’d might as well not mail it! It’s not going to get there!” Maybe she has reason for her frustration. Maybe she hasn’t recently been enveloped in grief and been handed a momentary reprieve by an envelope with a cancelled stamp. Maybe she hasn’t, as so many people have done for me, taken the time. Maybe she should. Maybe she should write a letter, send a card, buy a book of stamps and see how quickly she can use them. I have always loved mail. And in these moments of mid-winter, when the days are short and the air is cold, I love it even more. Copyright 2020