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The turkey is in the oven; the dressing has been made. The table is set, complete with a centerpiece featuring oak leaves turned the color of pennies and cotton bolls from the field right outside the door. The flag is waving in the bright November sun. I am ready for Thanksgiving. But the truth is that I've been ready since Monday. Because, on Monday, I made the congealed salad: Lime Jell-O, cream cheese, crushed pineapple, and pecans, shaped into a wreath by a Tupperware mold. I don't remember the first time Aunt Doris brought the congealed salad to Thanksgiving at Grannie's. It seems as though it was always there, in the 9 x 12 Pyrex dish wedged in between the sweet potato souffle' and Mama's creamed corn. Not everybody liked it, but to me it served as a sort of palate cleanser, a tart eye-opener between the butter-laden side dishes and the even-more-butter-laden desserts. The combination of smooth and crunchy, tangy and sweet made it my favorite -- well, one of my favorites -- on the holiday buffet. After the death of my grandparents, which coincided with a geographical spread of cousins and the arrival of yet another generation, their children began gathering in smaller groups, family units as it were, to celebrate Thanksgiving. The first time I ate turkey and dressing without congealed salad I realized a terrible mistake had been made and quickly got the recipe from Aunt Doris. Every Thanksgiving and every Christmas since then I've made it. Even if I was the only one who ate it. I suspect that every family has a dish like congealed salad, something that might not at first look as though it fits in, that offers a slightly different flavor to an otherwise predictable menu. In fact, that dish might not even have been food. It might be a person. Someone whose ideas, whose language, whose skin color is in contrast to everyone else's. Someone who stands out at first, but who eventually fits in, right there between the sweet potato souffle' and creamed corn and without whom the celebration just wouldn't be the same. I can smell the turkey now. In a few hours I will take it out and carve it. I will set out my own 9 x 12 dishes of dressing and macaroni and cheese. I will pour the vegetables into the bowls. And I will pull out the round glass tray that belonged to Grannie which is where the congealed salad will sit in the very center of Thanksgiving, a reminder that this national holiday is always a very individual one. Copyright 2020

The first leaf fell without notice. Loosened its grip on the branch and floated on unseen currents to the ground. The second leaf quickly followed, also without notice. Over a period of days, a week or two, others, many others, joined them and it was only after the back yard was littered with leaves that I noticed. Slow accretion is the way of nature. Nothing happens overnight; it just feels that way to people not paying attention. Falling leaves, fallen leaves are beautiful. Pomegranate red, pumpkin orange, yellow that is not the color of anything else, mottled like tortoise shell. The rustle, the rattle they make as I walk through them, intentionally shuffling, is like the crackle of a fire, the crunching of stiff paper being squeezed into a ball. When I catch sight of one mid-fall, twisting languidly toward the ground, I feel as though I’ve been touched by magic, visited by a fairy. And, yet, I can not fight back the sadness. The beauty is tinged with loss. The trees that have housed birds, shaded me, fed deer will soon be naked, asymmetrical armature silhouetted against a winter sky. Winter, especially this winter, this season into which we march like weary soldiers after a spring, a summer, a fall that force fed us isolation and fear, anger and contention – the four horsemen of some kind of apocalypse – reminds us of how very fragile we are. Fragile like fallen leaves. I hear a phrase in my head, “casting a pall.” That is what falling leaves, in all their beauty, do. They cast a pall, they drop a dark mood over something otherwise merry. Over the past couple of weeks two men that I have known and loved for years have died. One, the big brother of a childhood friend who I got to know in adulthood, and one, a professional contact whose humor and tenderness turned him into a dear compatriot. Hub and Saint Buddy were good men, husbands who loved their wives, fathers who loved their children, citizens who contributed to their community. Their loss, each and both, have cast a pall over us, over me. I can not know the weight of the loss on their wives, their children, but I do understand it. I understand that it is suffocating, that it is deafening, that it is too heavy to carry alone. Which, I suddenly realize, is why we need pallbearers. Not just solemn men who carry their own grief along with the casket, but the friends, the neighbors, the acquaintances who show up with food, who show up with flowers, who simply show up. With each act of acknowledgment of the sorrow, they become pallbearers, helping to carry the pall of the loss. The past nine months have left us all spent. Anyone who is not weary, who is not hungry for hugs and the fellowship of easy laughter, is suspect. That person, I would imagine, is not worthy of being a pallbearer, but the rest of us, those of us who have known loss and sorrow, are more than worthy. We are called. Called to walk alongside each other, to form a company of fragile souls who, recognizing their fragility, march on. Called to pay attention to the falling leaves and the broken hearts and called to search for and share the beauty in both. Copyright 2020

The deck at Sandhill rotted.  The boards softened and splintered and then disintegrated.  The posts and spindles lost their grip on each other.  The finials fell apart. The deck at Sandhill rotted, so it got torn down and a new one is being built. But before the sawing and hammering could start, I had work to do – pruning back the hydrangea, digging up and separating the lily and iris bulbs, and doing something about the beautyberry bush that had spontaneously sprouted under the deck and proceeded to take over one entire corner. The renegade bush had outdone itself this year.  Each of the long heavy branches was at least three feet long and the berries were a brighter shade of magenta than I’d ever seen.  In the early fall sun they glowed like a million tiny globes, perfectly round, perfectly smooth.  The thought of chopping them off, tossing them into the branch, was not a pleasant one. I have, however, done unpleasant things, encountered unpleasant choices, experienced unpleasant consequences many times over, so before I could get sentimental I grabbed the clippers and set to work.  The thinner branches fell cleanly, the thicker ones required two hands on the clipper handles.  The inside of the branches were still green, still alive. It is one thing, I thought, to tear down a deck of rotted boards, but it is quite another to do this – to massacre a thing of beauty simply because of where it grew. Because during the last few weeks I’d been inundated with robocalls and television ads and flyers filling my mailbox, all of which wanted to make sure I knew that America would be destroyed if the other side won in this year’s election, it didn’t take much for my thoughts to turn from the unfortunate beautyberry bush in my backyard to the unfortunate souls all over the world who don’t have to contend with robocalls and television ads and flyers.  Where the absence of the aggravations equates to an absence of freedom.  Where agency is a myth and representative government is a fairy tale.  Where the luxury of complaint is nonexistent simply because of where those souls find themselves growing. On Tuesday morning I drove down my dirt road, turned onto a county-maintained highway, crossed U.S. Highway 301, and followed the pavement to Union Baptist Church where those of us who live in the Sinkhole precinct vote.  I donned my mask, accepted a plastic glove, showed my ID, and proceeded to mark my ballot. I took a sticker and, walking outside to stand between the church cemetery and an oak tree that is probably only a few years younger than the republic, took a rare selfie. The deck at Sandhill rotted.  The beautyberry bush was cut down.  Living things, including democracies, are susceptible to rot, to destruction. That said, the deck is being rebuilt.  The beautyberry bush will probably grow back.  And I believe that this country, whatever damage may be done to it by political party, candidate, or election results, will also recover.  That, as I wrote on the inevitable Facebook post that accompanied that selfie,   all things shall be well and all things shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. Copyright 2020

For several days now Owen and I have been kept company on our walks by swells of butterflies.  Waves and waves floating and fluttering among the weeds and wildflowers that line the dirt road.  I don’t remember when I’ve seen so many, so many different kinds.  Except at the Butterfly House at Callaway Gardens.  And the one in Key West. And the United States Botanic Garden in Washington.  All places where the butterflies are tame, eager to light on an extended finger or an inviting shoulder. My butterflies are anything but.  The ones that dance through the ditches and the ones that play in my backyard are shy and skittish.  They dart from one flower to another like newborn colts.  They touch down for mere seconds and, at the slightest movement – mine, Owen’s, another butterfly’s – they skedaddle. I have fallen in love with the butterflies.  The delicacy of their wings, the tender tentativeness with which they fly on currents of air too light to notice.  And falling in love sends me to my Audubon book so that I can name them, each and all.   Southern dogface:  sulfur yellow with pale black smudges along the wings. Gulf fritillary: pumpkin orange trimmed with black spots and lines.  Viceroy: orange and black like a stained glass tiger with white spots along the edges.  Zebra swallowtail: striped like its equine namesake, with narrowing wings like its avian one. It is important to speak something’s name, to call it what it is, in recognition of its unique nature.  It is why my Audubon books contain what booklovers call marginialia, notes in my handwriting that record when and where and under what circumstances I saw butterflies and birds and wildflowers, even a couple of snakes. What I realize today, turning the thick slick pages of my Audubon book, pausing to read the Latin names, the habitat, the seasons of the butterflies I’ve found, is that there is a big difference between identifying and naming. When I call the viceroy butterfly a viceroy, I am identifying it –  recognizing what it is, what it was before I saw it, what it will be long after this October day.  I am acknowledging that the viceroy butterfly exists without and despite my admiration, my wonderment, my delight. Naming has an entirely different purpose. In her book The Wind In The Door, one of Madeleine L’Engle’s characters explains that we name something, be it a person, a pet, or a star, to help it “be more particularly the particular [one it] was supposed to be. [T]here are parts of us that will never be fully ourselves until we are named.”   The viceroy is a viceroy.  Period.  But Owen would never have been Owen without me. The names that our parents so carefully consider, measure, fret over and then declare. The nicknames that form from indistinct syllables uttered by siblings.  The terms of endearment that swell from the deepest parts of our hearts.  Each one helps us to be “more particularly the particular” human we were meant to be.   I can’t help thinking that the epithet, the barb, the jeer has an opposite, but equally powerful, effect.   It is through connection and commonality, relationship and responsibility, and through calling each other by true names, not identifiers, that  we create and sustain our fellow humans, the world, and ourselves. The viceroy is a viceroy.  But there is something in me that wants to call him George. Copyright 2020

Long before the contractor's crew dug the footings for Sandhill in the middle of a peanut field, I'd already made most of the aesthetic choices -- gray exterior with white trim, white walls, white cabinets, green countertops in the kitchen (It was the 90s.), marble in the bathrooms. One thing I hadn't considered four ways from Sunday was the front door. When the time came, I chose a full glass oval. I had already chosen full-length windows and more light coming in through the front door seemed just right, but when I told the painter the color I'd chosen he didn't hesitate to tell me I was making a bad decision. I'd read enough issues of Country Living and Country Home (sadly, no longer a monthly publication) by that time to have learned that a red front door meant “welcome” in early American tradition. Travelers encountering a home with a red front door knew that they would be welcomed and safe at such a home. The red door ensured protection. "You don't want that," the painter told me. I assured him that I most certainly did. He asserted that I would grow tired of it. I assured him that I wouldn't. I refrained from telling him that it was none of his business whether I tired of it or not. In the end, of course, whether he believed that the customer is always right or not, he painted the front door red. At least five years later I handled a closing for a local woman and going through the closing papers I saw a photo of her house in the appraisal the lender had provided. "Oh," I said to my client, "your house has a red front door. My house has a red front door, too." "I know," she said. I gave her a quizzical look. This woman had never been to my home and it was highly unlikely that she would have "just been driving by." Even if she had, she wouldn't have known the house was mine. "My painter," she said, "was also the painter for your house. He suggested a red front door, told me he'd been your painter, and that it turned out really well." I laughed out loud. In the years in which friends and family walked through that front door I did my best to make them feel welcome, to make them feel protected from whatever was weighing them down, keeping them up at night, or hurting their hearts. If the notes they left in the guestbook were any indication, I was successful. I've often wished I knew how to contact that painter. I'd love to hear him tell me I was right. Copyright 2020

My family doesn't have many heirlooms. Not in the traditional sense. We have stories and legends and inside jokes. We have loud laughs and good hugs and lots of scripture and poetry and axioms memorized and available at a moment's notice. But when it comes to Great-Grandma's sterling or Sister's breakfront, you will have to look elsewhere. When I moved out of the trailer and into Sandhill I didn't, then, have a lot of furniture. As sweet a home as it had been for six years, the trailer was not furnished, with the exception of a pine end table I'd bought on sale at Macy's, with anything I wanted to take with me. I bought a bed, a nightstand, and a couch from L.A. Waters Furniture and figured I'd fill the rest of the rooms as I found things I liked. About the time I moved in, Mama suggested that I take her cedar chest. She didn't give it to me, but, rather sheepishly, asked if I'd like to have it. It had been the object of much covetousness as I grew up and was, occasionally, allowed to go through its contents -- the wedding dress she didn't wear when she and Daddy decided to elope, the tiny yellow satin housecoat that had been mine as a baby, her high school scrapbook, and the blue satin-covered baby book in which she had written every milestone of the first six years of my life. The story behind the chest was as fascinating to me as its contents. Mama had purchased it when she was a working girl in Savannah and living at the YWCA. She'd left her tiny little hometown after she graduated from Collins High School and moved to Savannah to take a job as a telephone operator with Southern Bell. My favorite phone call stories were the ones involving lonely soldiers at Hunter Army Air Field who would ring up the operators just to have someone with whom to talk. Once, when I was about 10 or 12, we went to Savannah and, for some bewildering reason, found ourselves walking down Whitaker Street after dark. Mama pointed out the Y to me and told me how, when she worked the night shift at Southern Bell, she had walked home alone, under the Spanish moss-draped trees, down the cracked sidewalks, past a funeral home. I was amazed at her bravery. I saw adventure and fearlessness in the woman in whom I'd only ever seen duty and protectiveness. She had, amazingly, once been young and carefree. She had also been imagining another life, the life of wife and mother, and toward that end she saved up enough money to buy a hope chest, the very same Lane cedar chest that was such a treasure trove for the daughter she would one day have. So, of course, I'd like to have it. And in the back of Daddy's pick-up it made the very short journey from their house to mine, a testament to Mama's youth, a symbol of my adulthood. Today the chest sits at the foot of my bed. It bears the smell of cedar, a stamp listing the patent numbers given to the Lane Company, and a couple of short red Magic Marker strokes made by one of the many children who have knelt at the chest with paper and pen to draw a picture. It holds the quilt made for me by Mama and Grannie, a crocheted bedspread that Mama started when I was a small child and finished when I was 35, the American flag jacket given to me when I was chosen to carry the Olympic Torch in 1996, and the quilt I started (but never finished) in college. Scratched, faded, and watermarked, it is a container for memories, not the least of which are memories of the woman my mother used to be. Copyright 2020

I say things on paper that I would not say otherwise.  As a result of having done that a couple of weeks ago, my friend Gena called me and said, “I can give you the ocean.”   And she did.  For 24 hours the ocean was mine.  I walked on the beach and breathed the salt air and climbed over driftwood to get a better look at the horizon.  I watched waves chop against docks and a solitary boat bounce through those waves.  I felt my eyes water in the wind and my hair spring loose from attempts to tame it. The summer, it turned out, was not completely lost. So, gently, gratefully, I made my way back to the dirt that is mine –  ready, if not eager, to face, if not embrace, the fall. I didn’t wait long. Two or three days later I noticed that the angle of sunrise light had shifted, that sycamore leaves were littering the backyard, that the grass, which should have needed cutting by now, didn’t.  And, of course, that walking outside after dark required a jacket.  Not much of one, but something to cover the bare arms that had grown brown in the long days of summer. My jacket generally hangs from the closet doorknob this time of year because taking the time to hang it up between trips to the mailbox and trash can and Owen’s food dish doesn’t make much sense and having it within view when I start out the door to walk makes it far less likely that I’ll get all the way to the road and realize I’ve forgotten it.  It is a perfect jacket – lightweight, machine washable, and my favorite color – except for one thing:  its pockets.  Or, more correctly, its pocket. There is only one, a narrow slash pocket just wide enough for my cell phone, but not quite deep enough to keep the phone from falling out if I decide to jump a ditch or climb over a log.  Nothing else will fit in the pocket.  No rocks or acorns, of course, but also no feathers or leaves.  For someone in whose house you are more likely to find bowls of pine cones and jars of seashells than wooden plaques calling out, “Happy Fall, Y’all,” this is problematic. It is also fortuitous.  Since I can’t carry the roadside treasures home with me, I have to stop walking long enough to stare.  I have to slow my movement and my thoughts in order to absorb the smoothness of the acorn, the sharpness of the pine cone prickle, the pungent smell of the first yellow asters.  I have to hold them.  And then I have to put them down. Same with summer.  And people.  And anything that captures our hearts.  The only way to know them in such a way as to recognize them as treasure is to stop and stare.  To look long and hard.  To soak up every moment, every expression and then, without anger or envy or resentment, resist the urge to grab, to push whatever or whomever into a pocket that will never be big enough to hold it all. I brought not a single seashell home with me from the beach.  Not the slenderest sliver of driftwood nor a single sandpiper feather.  It is the first time I’ve ever come home with empty pockets.  And, yet, I carry with me the scent of the marsh and the crunch of the sand beneath my feet.  I am learning, I think at long last, that I don’t have to keep things – or people – in order for them to be mine. Copyright 2020

From the beginning I wanted Sandhill to feel like an old house. One with roots deep in the earth. One that reflected my family's history with this corner of the county. One that told a story. Or stories. To that end I rejected a brick exterior, included a front porch and a fireplace, and set aside the idea of a separate dining room. I wanted a kitchen table, one where people could sit and talk to me while I cooked for them, a place where I could read the newspaper and still watch for the boiling pot, a spot for game-playing and puzzle-solving. And when it came to the mantel, I knew exactly how it would look. Shortly after we moved to the farm, Daddy began tending the farmland of our neighbors. About a mile up the road, at the crossroads that was really the only landmark to give people who wanted to find us, sat the old homeplace of Mr. Dight and Miss Marian Olliff. The house hadn't been maintained, but, even with its broken windowpanes and rotting floors, it had remained a popular place for Miss Marian's grandsons, boys who went to school with me, to bring their friends to camp out. In the field beside it sat another old house, even more dilapidated. The Olliffs told Daddy to do with it what he would. And what he would do was tear it down to make a bigger swathe of open acreage, a bigger space in which to plow straight rows without the necessity of maneuvering large equipment around it. While tearing the house down, he came across a couple of huge heart pine timbers, close to 20 feet long and as thick as a grown man's shoulders. A few years later, when my brother and sister-in-law built a house on the farm, they used half of one of those timbers for their mantel. And a couple of years after that, I didn't have to think twice about what to use for my own. There was no way to know just how old the timbers were or how old was the tree from which they'd been cut, but the house itself was at least 70 years old and, most likely, older. If that didn't give my house (I'd not yet settled on the name Sandhill.) an air of history, I wasn't sure what would. I told the contractor about the timber and explained to him how I wanted the mantel to look. He drew a rough design on the newly hung drywall and from that came the mantel on which, at Christmas, I would place the ceramic angels given to me by my friend Bonnie, hang the teddy bear chain that Adam and Kate made when they were about 5 and 3, and string white lights through branches of holly from the trees at the corner of the porch. In the years to come it would hold acorns and pine cones, bird nests and magnolia leaves, sea shells and sand dollars, each a treasure. Candles placed among those treasures would light birthday parties and high school reunions and quiet conversations. Almost without notice, Sandhill has become that old house that I wanted it to be. It needs some attention, as old things often do. There are walls that need painting and windows that need replacing and lights that do work anymore. But the mantel? It remains the same, a constant reminder of the durability of the heart. Copyright 2020

It was the day the first load of lumber was delivered to the site of what would one day be Sandhill and, being 10 and 8, Adam and Kate's immediate response was to climb to the top of the mountain of 2 x 4s, 1 x 6s, and assorted other lengths and widths. If I'm honest, I probably told them, as I snapped this shot, to look excited. There was no such thing as a selfie in 1991 and since I couldn't record my own sense of anticipation I would record theirs. In the background is the mobile home where I lived at the time and, as I look back on the creation of the structure that has been my home for the last 29 years, I'd be remiss if I didn't also look back on the place that was my home for the six years before. I'd made up my mind pretty soon after Adam was born that somebody would have to run me off from the farm to get me to leave. At the end of every day at a job that I hated, I would stop by to marvel at the blueness of his eyes and the tiny cleft in his chin that mirrored his mother's. I would let him pull at my hair and my glasses and spit up on the shoulder of my suit jacket and wonder how I'd ever made it through the days before his arrival. By the time Kate was born, the die was cast and I'd planted my flag forever into the sand of Adabelle. They were 5 and 3 when the trailer, built to my specifications, came rumbling down the dirt road and sunk into the plowed field that had been a pasture. It had a front door on which they never bothered to knock, a cookie jar that was always full of Oreos, and a bedroom on one end that -- they would tell anybody who asked -- was theirs. In that, my first home that cost less than the last car I bought, they helped me decorate my first Christmas tree. Adam recited the first voice mail message I ever had for the telephone number I still have and Kate played dress-up with the silk blouses and scarves I thought made me look like a lawyer. They rode their bikes in wild circles in the front yard and sat on the concrete steps to drink Capri Suns. The two of them, more than any furniture or dishes or linens, made that mobile home an actual home. I used to joke about the trailer. I laughed at the fact that no matter how provoked I got I couldn't make any of the doors slam. I rolled my eyes at wallboard printed to look like wallpaper. I chuckled to myself every single time I went to hang something on the wall and the nail went through the sheetrock with one very gentle tap. I used to joke about the trailer, but I don't anymore. It, with help from Adam and Kate, taught me what I wanted in the home I would build -- lots and lots of windows through which I could see the sun and the fields and however many generations of children came to play in the yard, a big wide porch high enough that they could use it as a launching pad, and a ceiling high enough for a Christmas tree that would hold a lifetime of ornaments and shelter a sleighful of gifts. Sandhill's beginning wasn't the day the footings were dug or the lumber was delivered. It was the day that Fleetwood settled in and, with it, so did I. Copyright 2020

I opened the back door a few mornings ago and, overnight, the weather had changed.  A breeze was dancing in the branches of the trees and that breeze did not carry any moisture.  It was as simple as that. There is always a morning, every year, when the tease of fall makes an appearance.  A morning on which you can breathe without inhaling air so thick and hot that you wonder why you bothered.  A morning on which a sleeve of some sort is needed.  A morning on which the simultaneous dryness and stickiness of the previous three months is nearly forgotten. A tease, however, doesn’t stay.  Fickle and selfish, by mid-afternoon she is on her way and the yard is full of dragonflies –  the heat having risen sufficiently to warm the flight muscles that enable them to hover, dart, and hover in endless repetition.  Watching them in a swarm from the front porch I can pretend it is still summer, will still be summer for a while yet. It is not that I don’t like fall.  I do.  Harvest and the smell of just-turned peanuts, the drone of the cotton picker and the mesmerizing sight of plowed-over fields being burned off.  The taste of apples not grown thousands of miles away and an excuse to wear a turtleneck.   It is not that I don’t like fall, but I dread winter.  The winter that comes cold and wet and mean after the Christmas decorations are all put away.  The winter that is stingy with daylight and too generous with biting winds.  The winter that turns rocking chairs into skeletons. On this day, though, it is not even the dread of winter that has draped me in melancholy.  It is, I realize as I watch the trees dance, grief.  I am grieving summer, the summer that wasn’t.  The summer during which I never saw the ocean, never breathed salt air, never stared at the sand in search of pieces of sand dollars.  The summer during which I never got on a boat, never felt the bounce of the wake beneath me, never watched the sun break into diamonds on the surface of the water.  The summer that held me, held us all hostage to what we knew and couldn’t control. I am shamed, for sure, that I am even calling this feeling grief.  This summer has held real grief for far too many people.  But I also know that denying the effect the pandemic –  with its social distancing and masking and washing my hands until they are raw – has had on me, on all of us, is not helpful either. So I grieve.   I remember something I wrote once about there being only so many full moons in one’s lifetime and I realize that there are only so many summers, so many days so long that there is time to daydream, so many hours in which to sit rocking on the porch while condensation rolls down a glass of something sweet, so many minutes in which to watch butterflies float and to discover a praying mantis in the basil. I know better, though, than to remember and ponder for too long.  I have grieved before, people and relationships and opportunities, and I have learned that at some point I must box the grief, wrap it in beautiful paper, tie it up with beautiful ribbon and set it aside.  It will always be there, but what I didn’t see, smell, taste this summer must not keep me from loving what I did. Copyright 2020

A mother and her kit stood at the very edge of the road, on a mound of red dirt that had been pulled from the ditch by the big yellow machines belonging to the county.  The mother wore the usual red ruff about her neck; the baby was completely gray. Here at this spot we call the bad curve I am accustomed to encountering my neighbors, but not usually in the middle of the day.  Raccoons, rabbits, opossums, the occasional bobcat have all crossed my path at this place of thick trees and even thicker vines, but it is in the bright glow of headlights that they are most often caught and frozen for a moment, their eyes reflecting halogen and a plea that I slow long enough for them to move on.  None of them are daytime wanderers.  The foxes, for some reason, on this day at this time were. My approach did not, apparently, frighten the two.  They stood still as I approached, the motor of my vehicle humming its unnatural tune.  Since I’d never since foxes out in sunlight I supposed that they may have never seen an SUV.    They were, I decided, curious.   As was I.  Watching them slowly slide off into the woods after getting a good look at me and my machine, I asked myself what would have brought a mother and child out into the open unnecessarily. The explanation upon which I landed centered upon the fact that for the last week or so our road has been being worked on by the county (When I say county I mean county employees directed by the county manager who answers to the County Commission, but at least in this part of the rural South, we tend to anthropomorphize institutions in a way that prevents us from blaming or getting aggravated at people we meet in the grocery store or sit across the aisle from in church.).   In dragging the ditches, the road at that particular spot has been widened a bit and the creek that runs under it has been diverted a little as a result.  I decided it was most likely this disturbance of their habitat that flushed the two foxes from their lair. There is, of course, no way to confirm or disprove my theory, but it made even more sense when I found a webpage maintained by the Wildlife Land Trust indicating that foxes, while generally living in areas that are a combination of brushy woodlands and forest, also live near farmlands and have adapted to the proximity of humans, perhaps as a means of protecting themselves from predators.  That is, they have decided that I am less scary than a coyote. I am not, of course.  I, in the communal sense that I represent humanity, am not less scary than a coyote.  Coyotes can kill or maim a fox, but they can not destroy the fox’s habitat so that no other fox can ever live there again.  The harm a coyote is capable of inflicting is limited by the length of the coyote’s life.  The harm that I, we, human beings can inflict as we imperially exercise dominion over the earth is limited not by time, but only by our will.   Poor foxes, they have no idea. I have lived out here among the wildlife for over 45 years.  I understand that they can not be treated like pets, that some of them are, in fact, pests.  I understand – though I do not participate in – the sport of hunting, and I won’t turn down a plate of corn dodgers and redbreast that recently swam in the Canoochee River.  I understand that deer can ruin a peanut crop.  I also know that two conflicting ideas can be held in comfortable tension, that I can want to save the animals and my family’s crop just as I can love someone and disagree with his or her behavior. Last night I went outside to call Owen in and, just as I opened the front door, an armadillo crossed the bricks at the bottom of the steps.  He, like the foxes, appeared to be totally nonplussed by my appearance.   And I felt simultaneously an aversion to his presence so close to my realm and an appreciation of the perfect symmetry of his scutes shining in the floodlights. Coming back inside, I realized that being forced these last five months to keep my distance from my own species I have grown more observant and more tolerant of the ones who are my neighbors.  I have slowed down long enough to see the beauty in an armadillo, the curiosity in a mama fox and her baby, the gracefulness of deer eating acorns in my backyard and leaving hoof prints the size of my hand.   I am more grateful for their presence and more protective of their place.   And I suspect that by being more observant, more tolerant, more grateful for each of them that I shall, in the days to come, be more observant, more tolerant, more grateful for my own kind.  Whatever – masked or unmasked, Democrat or Republican, black or white – they are. Copyright 2020

I love paint chips. I love that their names are so evocative. Nonchalant White and Jersey Cream. Flamingo Feather and Equestrian Green. Borrowed Light and Cabbage White. I love the ones that have five or six shades of the same hue, dark to light. Surf Green fading into Composed into Hazel into Waterscape into Dewy. Down Pour melting into Leisure Blue into Respite into Take Five into Balmy. I love the way, when you fan out a manufacturer's deck of chips, you can see all the colors in the world. And, yet, all the walls at Sandhill are white. There is a very good reason for that, of course (There was a very good reason for every design and decorating decision I made while building Sandhill, often to the chagrin of the contractor and subs.). The fact is that white is never just white. As we learned sometime in elementary school, white reflects all the colors of the prism, so a white wall changes with the kind and amount of light it reflects -- from the soft pearly light of morning to the bright yellow light of noon to the smoky lavender light of dusk. Sandhill faces south. The sun rises in the bedroom windows and sets in the living room and kitchen windows, which means that the white walls actually change color throughout the day. And throughout the year. By choosing white for the walls I actually chose an entire spectrum of colors. But how to choose which of the hundreds of whites? Despite the fact that I'd spent years adding torn-out pages from magazines into a notebook, I'd never come across any instructions for answering that question. I was, then, dependent on my own ingenuity, which resulted in attaching to first one Sheetrocked wall and then another the paint company's brochure of all available whites. I don't remember in which room I started, but I took the time to go over to the house-in-progress at least three times at different hours on a given day to look at all those whites. One by one I drew a line through the ones I didn't like in that room and in that light before moving on to the next room and repeating the process. After a couple of rounds I'd narrowed it down to Pittsburgh Paints Vanilla Milkshake. Fifteen years later when I undertook some repairs as a result of wind damage from three hurricanes in a row -- Charley, Frances, and Ivan -- the white was Benjamin Moore Decorators White. This time, it looks like it's going to be Sherwin Williams Ice Cube. The life lesson in all of this -- because a highly verbal, slightly bossy first-born is going to find a life lesson in everything -- is, first, that I clearly prefer cool whites and, second, that different people (or companies) are often going to call the same thing by different names. And while I think that names, for everything from babies to fingernail polish, are significant, it's important to remember that a name can't reflect everything there is to know. About a baby. Or fingernail polish. Or paint. Or a grown person whose parents favored names from 19th century British literature. You have to get to know him or her before you can make a real choice as to whether Ebenezer or Honora is for you. You have to spend time with Algernon and Louisa-Margaretta in different circumstances and different lights to know if you'd like to invite them to your birthday party. You have to, in a way, pin them to the wall and live with them for a while. And, then, when you pick, it's a choice you can live with for a very long time. Copyright 2020

In just a few weeks major repairs and minor renovations will begin at Sandhill. And, yes, I am going to be living in the house while all this is done. A previous repair/renovation was done in 2006 and I proved my mettle, i.e., ability to quell my OCD tendencies, when I spent an entire week with the contents of my closet spread out on the floor while painting was done. I'm ready. Getting my heart right about the upcoming disarray started me thinking about the soul of Sandhill, how 29 years ago this summer I began the process of creating my home -- right in the middle of a peanut field! I came home every day from work to inspect whatever progress had been made, make sure that my instructions had been followed, and dream about what it would be to actually live inside the four walls that were, at the time, nothing but studs. It was an exciting time. It was long after dark the night I came home to find the subfloor had been installed. It was one big flat surface and my immediate thought was that it looked like the scene from "Seven Brides For Seven Brothers" where the barn-raising turned into a dancing-free-for-all. I climbed up the temporary steps and began walking from room to room. The studs weren't up yet, but I'd practically memorized the floor plan and knew where every wall, every doorway would eventually be. As I moved from room to room, I paused to whisper a prayer of dedication over each one -- a promise that I would be generous in opening my home to others and a petition that each of those who came would feel welcome and safe. Over the years I have had confirmation after confirmation from visitors to Sandhill that that is exactly how this small house with a big heart makes them feel. And as I set out, again, to tend to its needs, that prayer remains the same. I know that I am not unique in wanting my home to reflect me -- my priorities and preferences -- and because I've been asked by a lot of people how I made the construction and design decisions, both original and subsequent, I thought it might be useful to share that here in a series of blog posts. And once I've covered that long-ago planning and decision making, it should be about time to chronicle the "new and improved" Sandhill. As I do, I intend to follow the mantra that always leads me back to my true self: "Beauty is everywhere. Simple is better. Quiet is a gift." Those are the overwhelming principles I used in building Sandhill all those years ago and they continue to reflect what I want for this place I call home. *Note: The photo at the top of this post is me and my sweet Ginny, our first Christmas at Sandhill. Copyright 2020

Completely unintentionally, Owen and I walked in the rain yesterday.  When we left home the sky was clear blue with high puffy clouds.  Since the temperature was 95 degrees, we headed in the direction of the river, well-shaded in late afternoon. About two miles in, we had just turned around and were headed for home when the first drop fell.  I tilted my head to look at the sky – still clear blue, still high puffy clouds.  In the distance I could hear the roll of thunder and thought, simultaneously, of Garth Brooks and the devil who was clearly beating his wife. Within a mile of home, the rain was steady, but light.  It was as though I was walking at the very edge of a lawn sprinkler’s radius.  Within half a mile of home, the rainbow appeared.  It was so faint I almost missed it.  The slightest arc of color stretched over Sandhill and reaching the ground just at the edge of the branch.  Like a ghost, it didn’t show up in the photo I stopped to take. Third or fourth grade was probably when I learned the science of rainbows – reflection and refraction and water droplets.  But even in third or fourth grade I already understood magic.  Or, at least, the magic of the natural world.  I knew that curiosity and beauty, wonder and  astonishment and serendipity are the things that create rainbows, that lead us to the edge of what we know and then dazzle us with everything we don’t. It’s interesting, I think, to note that the sky is the palette for so much of nature’s efforts at providing amazement.  Rainbows and meteor showers, full moons and solar eclipses, constellations that create dot-to-dot drawings of archers and lions, comets that show themselves once every 6,800 years.  And it is more than interesting to note that in order to experience their magic we have to lift our heads. I was picking up sticks in the back yard a few weeks ago.  A stiff wind had run through the sycamore and the sawtooth oaks and rattled loose a handful of dead branches.  Under the umbrella of the sycamore’s sagging limbs, I looked up for any that had broken off and gotten caught in the leaves.   I was aware of the exposed roots of the sycamore, but I was looking up, not down, so when I stumbled over one of them and fell, I fell hard.  Nothing to break my fall. I am just now able to breath without pain.  The point being that, obviously, sometimes we need to look down.  We have to watch our steps when we are on bumpy ground or in unfamiliar territory.  Like the past five months. The danger is that when the ground becomes level again, when the infection rate goes down, when the vaccine is available we will have become so accustomed to looking down that we forget how to look up. We can’t let that happen.  There is too much at stake.   We must, even as we don our masks and wash our hands, glance skyward, look for comets, watch for rainbows.  We must let curiosity and wonder and amazement have their way.   The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun and the rainbow melted.  Owen and I shuffled across the yard through grass in need of cutting.  We walked under the place where the rainbow had been and into the house guarded by a sky where magic lives. Copyright 2020