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It's been over 30 years since my friend Deidre ran her sandwich shop and ice cream parlor. I couldn't say how many times I ate lunch there or how many birthday parties I attended there with Kate and Adam and their friends. Clifton's was a gathering place, a sort of alcohol-absent Cheers, and I knew when I walked in that I would get more than a meal. There are so many good memories associated with Clifton's and all I have to do to be transported back is to buy a loaf of raisin bread and make some pimento cheese. I'd never had that particular sandwich combination until Deidre put it on her menu and the moment I tried it I wondered why someone hadn't offered it to me before. It became my "regular." Years later, long after Clifton's was closed and I was left with nowhere to hang out between court appearances and client appointments, I sat at the counter of my friend Penny's kitchen and watched her make pimento cheese. It's not a hard dish to make, of course, but I'd never considered the idea that pimento cheese had ingredients and that those ingredients had to be mixed. There was something so soothing about watching Penny's hands move in circles with the spoon as the cheese and mayonnaise and pimentos slowly came together. At the last minute, she doused the mixture with a healthy splash of Texas Pete. I ate that pimento cheese, not on raisin bread, but with Frito's Scoops. I made myself a pimento cheese sandwich today. On raisin bread. And I trimmed it with Frito's Scoops. And in that strange way that food comforts and encourages, that sandwich and those corn chips eased some of the unsettledness that the pandemic has made a constant part of our days. That plate of food gave me perspective and helped me to imagine the time when we can break bread -- raisin or otherwise -- with each other again. I can hardly wait. Copyright 2020

A few nights ago Owen and I were walking around the front yard in the dark, hard dark -- no visible moon or stars because of the cloud cover. It's one of our favorite things to do. The heat of the day had dissipated and all the things I didn't get done that I'd promised myself I would get done had been moved to the to-do list for the next day. Owen can see better than I can in the dark and he often dashes off into the blackness like a greyhound after a mechanical rabbit. He always returns panting heavily and with his tongue dangling from the side of his mouth, looking up at me eager to receive a congratulatory pat on the head. On this particular night he had not yet found something to chase and was walking so close to me that our legs often entangled each other. I had just looked down to maintain my balance when I saw a flash of light in the western sky. It was gone as quickly as it came, a blazing dart lost in the distant stand of pine trees. It was, of course, a shooting star, a meteor. I stood for a long time looking at the darkness from which it had fallen, entranced by what is nothing more than bits of dirt and rock falling into Earth's atmosphere and burning up. I remembered one night on the beach at St. Simon's when a flurry of shooting stars lit up the sky over the darkness of the ocean. Like all magical moments, it was brief. I'd forgotten, when I saw the single shooting star over Sandhill, that the Perseid meteor shower was due to appear. I hadn't forgotten that it was July, that August was on the horizon, but I hadn't felt it. This summer has been hot and dry, like pretty much every summer in south Georgia, but the events, the activities, the gatherings that make summer summer have been absent. I guess there was something in my subconscious that assumed even the Perseid would be distancing itself. I am so glad that my instinctual presumption was wrong. I am so glad that there are forces and structures beyond this single pandemic-ridden planet. I am so, so glad that my forgetting something doesn't eliminate its existence. The American Meteor Society says that the height of the Perseid shower will be August 11 through 13. I intend to be outside, to be staring into the possibility of another reminder that the operation of the universe is not and never will be dependent on me or my memory. Copyright 2020

It occurred to me today, in the midst of so much fear and anger and way too much use of the word "unprecedented," that what the world needs right now (that I am capable of offering) is more poetry. More words that hold worlds. More phrases that roll off your tongue. More sentences that capture ultimate truth in five or six words. So, here you go. Poetry. My favorite poem. Those Winter Sundays BY ROBERT HAYDEN Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher. Copyright ©1966 by Robert Hayden. Reprinted with the permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Source: Collected Poems of Robert Hayden (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1985) Copyright 2020

I made pesto today. I wish my friend Gloria could have seen me. The first time she offered me pesto, I was unable to get past the fact that it looked like chewed-up grass and politely declined. My palate has become at least a little more sophisticated since then and every summer I plant basil so that I can make my own. The recipe I use calls for pecans instead of walnuts, a substitution that makes it an appropriately southern dish for the dog days of summer. Today's effort was proceeding well until I got all the ingredients into the bowl of the food processor and the processor wouldn't turn on. I tried the pulse button, the low button, the high button. I tried a different outlet, thinking that maybe last night's thunderstorm had tripped the breaker. Nothing helped. So I started over with the assemblage of the machine that I admit scares me just a little bit. This time I inserted the "food pusher" as directed by the instructions, despite the fact that I didn't need it. And, of course, that was what it took. Every piece has a function. Supper was ditalini (It means "small thimbles" and is the pasta traditionally used in minestrone.) and pesto. It tasted like summer. It also tasted like an object lesson: Begin (and continue)any endeavor with the assumption that instructions have a purpose. Instructions like, Wear a mask. Instructions like, Don't believe everything you read on the internet. Instructions like, Treat other people as you would like to be treated. And, whatever you do, don't forget the food masher. Copyright 2020

Several years ago I was a part of a panel at the Decatur Book Festival.  I, along with another author, were set to speak on the topic of nature writing.  The other author was Drew Lanham, a wildlife biologist at Clemson University whose first book, The Home Place, had just been published.  The subtitle of Drew’s book is, Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. I bought Drew’s book and had him sign it for me.  Based upon the hour we spent in conversation in front of a room full of people, I suspected I would enjoy The Home Place.  It was only when I got home and read the epigraph: “For all who wander and love the land.” that I knew I would.  And I did. In the years since, I’ve paid attention when I heard or read Drew’s name and a few weeks ago, during one of my prolonged perusals of things on the internet that I have come to call “escape in the time of pandemic,” I came across a video of his keynote speech at the 2017 Audubon National Convention.  He spoke, in the speech, about range maps, that is, maps of specific species of birds that indicate where they can be found.  The range of a particular bird is always determined, he explained, by where the bird can find clean water, shelter, prey to forage, and others of their species. Even as I read the sentence I found myself racing ahead and asking, Do people have range maps?  And, then, as though reading my mind, Drew asked the question, “What sort of habitat requirements are needed for humans?”  Which led me to ask myself, What sort of habitat requirements are needed for me? I have long said that the land is my anchor and the ocean is my tuning fork.  Land and ocean share wide skies and a pulse created by the sounds of nature.  Land and ocean provide a scale by which I can measure my own smallness. Land and ocean gift me with metaphors that deepen my knowledge of truth. But there is more to a range map than geography.  There is – in addition to water, food, and shelter, all of which are geography-specific – the need for “others of my species.”  That is, we need the opportunity to be together, to engage in behaviors that enable us to find commonality. Anthropologists from cultures all over the world are in agreement that humans need ritual more in times of anxiety.  What, I wonder, is a ritual but an act done in unison with others?  And what is a pandemic but a time of anxiety?  What we need most has, by the very nature of the disease, been stolen from us.  Four months (to date) of truncated graduations, cancelled weddings, and family-only funerals.  Four months without the sacrament of communion, which by its very name calls us together.  Four months without the common thread of fandom – no Kentucky Derby, no baseball, no Summer Olympics. As I count the things I’ve missed – Easter lilies on the altar at church, fireworks at Mill Creek on Independence Day, the funeral of a family member and another of a friend of over 40 years – I realize that what I have done in their absence is to create my own rituals – lighting a candle as I sit down to write, keeping a vase of something live on my desk, sharpening pencils to a tender point before approaching the newspaper sudoku.  In doing so, I have recognized and acknowledged my range map. I can not live in a place without rhythm and order.  I can not live in a place where there is no distinction between days.  I can not live in a world without the solemn, healing ceremony of ritual. Baseball is back.  School, in one form or another, is starting soon.  We are beginning to put things on the calendar again, even if written in pencil.  We are moving, slowly and carefully, toward the day that our habitat is, once again, populated with each other.   And when that day comes I intend to approach each hug, each handshake, each wave as the life-giving ritual it is. Copyright 2020

I did not, like most southern girls, learn to cook at the knees of my mother and grandmothers. In fact, I didn't learn to cook at all. When I left for law school, after four years of living in the dorm and having all my meals provided for me, Mama sent me off to my first apartment with two things: an index card on which she had written how to make grits and a small cast iron skillet. Amazingly, I survived. Not until I was in my 40s did I gain any level of confidence in the kitchen. Up until that point I had, probably, five or six recipes that I could -- with great care -- put together when called upon to bring a dish, but most of the time when somebody asked, "What are you taking to Thanksgiving?", my response was, "The centerpiece and my sparkling personality." COVID-19 and social-distancing have found me, like everyone else, spending a lot more time in the kitchen. Chopping onions and garlic, melting butter, and cracking eggs have been soothing and meditative, taking me out of my head and the strangeness and uncertainty of the weeks-turned-months. I've found myself paying much closer attention to the shape of the spatulas, the sharpness of the blades, the heft of the pots. And I'm taking more time in the actual preparation. Which is how I came to notice for the first time the markings on the back of that little skillet Mama gave me. A quick Google search enlightened me to the fact that the Griswold company started in 1868 making door hinges and became one of America's largest and most respected cast iron skillet manufacturers, producing them until 1957 under a variety of brands and logos, including two made specifically for Sears and Roebuck. Mine, according to the photos on the website, is circa 1939 to 1957. Mama was born in 1935, which makes me think that the skillet belonged to Grandmama and was given to Mama when she and Daddy got married in 1954. There is, sadly, no way to know. Grandmama died in 1994 and whatever Mama could have told me is hidden somewhere in the deep cave that is Alzheimer's. The loss of whatever history is held within the well-seasoned cast iron burdens me. Every time I fry an egg or make a grilled cheese sandwich I think of all the other eggs and sandwiches, all the butter and bacon and bologna that have sizzled in its depths, and I am struck again by the importance of story. Every object, every day, every person has one. It will be remembered only if we tell it. [If you haven't yet discovered the delightful cooking videos of Brenda Gantt on Facebook, introduce yourself with this one on cleaning and seasoning iron cookware.] Copyright 2020

What is it about spider webs? This one’s anchor points are the ugly green plastic trash can that I roll to the road every couple of weeks and the pointy brick corner of the stoop.  Its design is one long, looping strand ending in a bundle of filament that, at first glance, appears to be a miniature dandelion.  It trembles the slightest bit as I bend over to examine it more closely, my breath a breeze that sends it swaying like a tiny trapeze. I don’t generally bother spider webs.  Don’t swat them out of hand to clear a corner. Don’t whisk them away from the window sill with a broom.  Only when their residents are long gone, the strands caked with dust, can I bring myself to break their tenuous grip for the sake of tidiness. This one, as far as I’m concerned, can dangle right here until a stiff wind comes barreling across the field or a rain cloud throws itself under the eaves of the carport.   I reach for the handle on the aluminum can that holds Owen’s dog food.  My curled fist inadvertently brushes the long strand and the web collapses onto the back of my hand.  And in that second, that half second I am bereft.  Something beautiful and amazing has been lost.  And at my hand.  I can only stand and stare. What is it about spider webs?  Even the most ordinary –  like the one I’ve just destroyed, the ones that aren’t large and showy geometric marvels, that aren’t tiny delicate jewels sprinkled with dew that sparkles in the morning light – are beautiful.  Is it the fragility that so resembles our own?   Perhaps that is the answer.  I am certainly fragile this morning.  I am grieving the loss of someone I loved, still love and the drooping mass of protein seems just the metaphor.  I wonder if standing here, staring, I may somehow absorb its meaning. Because books are my solace, because I eat, digest, and metabolize their words, because they so often hold truth when it can’t be found anywhere else, I find myself thinking of Charlotte’s Web –  philosophy, theology, and poetry disguised as a children’s book – , wondering if in its words there is some way through the grief. Charlotte’s Web is, of course, a story of unlikely friendship between a pig and a spider.  As they are getting to know each other, Charlotte the wise spider tells Wilbur the naive pig that her web, delicate though it may be, is not easily broken.  It “gets torn every day by the insects,” she points out and “a spider must rebuild it when it gets full of holes.”   Later, after she has saved Wilbur’s life by spinning words into her web, she tells him, “I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. ... By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.” Charlotte’s Web is, in the end, story of purpose, a story of enlightenment, and, perhaps most importantly, a story of redemption: a pig bound for slaughter saved by a spider unafraid of death. I took a photo of the web before I destroyed it.  I stare at the record of what is no more and remember its tender vulnerability, its gentle tension, its yielding without giving in. Copyright 2020

Scene 1: A snail shell sits still and alone on the concrete of the carport at Sandhill. It is about an inch and a half long, the color of coffee diluted with lots of milk, with the slightest sheen. I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen one. I am entranced. I pick it up to ascertain whether it is occupied. If it isn’t, I will take it inside and set it somewhere – the window sill in the kitchen, most likely, but maybe the bathroom counter or on a little dish on my desk. If it is occupied, I will simply put it down. It is occupied. Four days later I return from a weekend in the mountains. I see the shell again. It is about eight inches away from where it was before. It brings new meaning to “snail’s pace.” I have a lot of things to unload – a too-full suitcase, a bird’s nest fern, a tote bag, a pocketbook, trash. I want to be careful not to step on the snail, so I move it out of the path from car to back door. I make one trip. Two trips. Back and forth. I get distracted. I hear the sharp crack and jump. For a moment I can not make myself look down. The fragile shell has shattered beneath the weight of my shoe, the weight of me. The gelatinous clump that was the snail makes a small stain on the concrete as I cry out, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I can’t believe I did that! I’m sorry!” Scene 2: There is nothing more beautiful than a peanut field at full maturity. Rows of emerald green stretching to the horizon, unrolling like ric rac in smooth, even curves. The beauty is short-lived though. The tractor idles in the field road, diesel engine coughing. It eases into the first row and lowers the peanut plow, long thin fingers of metal that will gouge the earth, reach deep into the roots of the peanut plants and hoist them from the cool dampness into hot dry October. The green disappears, hidden beneath the browns and grays of peanuts and dirt. The curves flatten. The sun absorbs the moisture, turns the vines dry and brittle. They shrink and fall into flat piles. They die. Scene 3: It is any day on the farm. I will find a feather or an acorn or a leaf. I will pick it up and look closely at its barbs, its cap, its veins. I will run my fingers over its surface. Each one – the feather, the acorn, the leaf – will have fallen from where it started. It will have lost its grip. In a few weeks I will celebrate Sandhill’s 26th anniversary. Twenty-six years since the last nail, last shingle, last wire magically melded to create a house. Twenty-six years of sitting on the porch watching deer graze on peanuts, standing at the kitchen window watching sunsets, sitting at my desk watching the moonrise. And twenty-six years of watching corn twist in drought, roads wash out in flood, trees explode in lightning strikes. What one learns from such observation – extended and intense – is that beauty is found not just in the beautiful. It is found in devastation and destruction, in darkness and death. In dull middles and painful endings. In losing what you can not live without. In living with what you can not change. In settling gently to the ground like a feather. An acorn. A fallen leaf. Copyright 2017

The lights in the arena had gone down and the musicians on stage were well into their second or third number.  The people around me were still talking in loud voices and the aisles were full of people, late-arriving people, trying to find their seats in the dark.  Their silhouettes bobbed across my field of vision like the ducks in an old-fashioned arcade game, but I was without the pop-gun that would knock them over and clear the view. And, yet, watching this particular opening act, one would guess that they weren’t bothered at all by the late arrivers, the loud talkers.  He threw his head back and sang as though laughing.  She opened her mouth and the notes ran out like water over pebbles. They played, they sang, they moved about the stage with an insouciance that made it clear they would be making music just like this if their only audience was themselves. This was, of course, before COVID-19 closed down all the arenas, the schools, the churches.  All the places where people gather to do things together.  All the places where all the things about being human are celebrated.  The places where we sing and laugh, where we run and play, where we praise and pray. It is hard to do some things alone. But I’ve noticed something over the last couple of months: A lot of us, in our aloneness, have been moved to try. Singers, actors, preachers – people who are accustomed to standing in front of large groups of people and sharing the essence of themselves in one way or another – have toggled the button on their phones to selfie mode and awkwardly set forth to sing, perform, preach to an audience of none. It is not easy.  I know this because my pastor asked me to do a closing blessing for a Sunday morning service; it took me something like 25 attempts to get a 61-second offering.  After I finally managed to get the video transmitted to the church I couldn’t help wondering why all of those singers, actors, athletes, preachers were so eager to expose themselves without the normal masks and accouterments of their callings. Somewhere in all that, however, I stumbled across the Instagram account of that opening act I’d seen in that arena, the husband and wife music-makers who are also the parents of three tiny children.  They were inviting people –  ordinary people, the kind of people who need 25 takes to make a 61-second video on their phones – to join them in making music.  To join them in the midst of a pandemic, the end of which is not in sight.  To join them in a house full of children, one still nursing, one being potty-trained.  To join them in doing the only thing they knew to do when the only things they knew were certain are exactly the things that have always been certain – love and beauty and art. The end result of that invitation was what they called “Song With Strangers,” five extraordinary songs that would never have been birthed, never have been sung, never have been gifted to the world had Abner Ramirez and Amanda Soldano not sat down to sing without an audience they could see. The world has opened up a little.  Whether that is a good idea or not remains to be seen.  I hope it does not mean that I forget how sweet can be the taste of a cake baked for no one but myself and at the same time I hope it does not mean that I forget how bitter are the tears shed for friends to whom I never got to say goodbye. I hope the opening world means only that we are all more grateful and careful in our safety and more generous and flagrant in our solitude. Copyright 2020

Before me lies a fallen tree. Broken branches mimicking compound fractures.  Pieces of bark scattered in a distinct spray pattern like the blood from a gunshot wound.  The scene reminds me of nothing so much as a KFC box of gnawed-over bones and extra-crispy crumbs. I have come here, to the back of the field, to the place where cultivation meets woods, wooed outside by the balminess of the first day of what passes for spring, because I can stand the imprisonment no longer.  I am parched and starving for light and warmth.  I am done with winter and its endless rains.  I am craving signs of life. And what I find is death. I have walked along the edge of the field, the place where it meets the pond like the rolled-up cuff on a pair of pants, straddling the washed out places that were not there in the fall and not caring that my shoestrings are collecting cockleburs, to get to the woods.  To the place where the cell coverage is bad and the traffic noises are no louder than the hum of a bee.   Where I am more likely to meet a deer than a person.  Where I will find nothing has changed. Except it has. I stare at the tree, its needles already brown, and wonder which storm, exactly, it was that felled something so old, so rugged and stout.  Was it the storm that woke me from my sleep and kept me awake wondering about the leak in the living room ceiling?  Or the one that knocked out the power until nearly morning when I was abruptly brought to life by all the lights in the house coming on at once? Or some other storm, one I slept through, the result of which was a tree falling without a sound? There is no fence at the spot where the tree has fallen.  In fact, there is very little fence left anywhere on the fencerow, only a couple of stretches of rusty, square-holed wire no more than three or four feet long, attached by equally rusty staples to splintered gray stobs that lean at precariously acute angles, old and tired.   Yet, we still call it a fencerow.  It still is a fencerow.  It still represents the separation of field from woods, cultivation from wildness, one man’s land from another’s. Eventually I leave the tree, keep walking, find a couple of gopher tortoise burrows and a whole series of anthills that look like those stamped Christmas cookies – sandy domes imprinted with the hooves of deer.  I see a handful of early wildflowers, tiny purple faces pushing up through the dirt, and just enough yellow jessamine to make me think that I will probably survive until t-shirt weather. And as I walk, I think about the fencerows in my life, the people and things, the memories and dreams that have changed form.  That started out with a name or purpose which, upon close inspection, probably no longer fits, but which will always be that to me.  Favorite food.  Lifelong dream.  Best friend. One of the things I like best about words is that sometimes we get to define them for ourselves.  I can’t eat shrimp anymore because I developed an allergy, but it is still my favorite food.  Some of my lifelong dreams haven’t lasted my life long.  And best is a superlative that, I’ve learned, puts way too much pressure on creatures who are, at best, just human. Someone will probably put up a new fence one day, unroll a shiny bale of wire and weave it through the broom sedge and palmetto scrubs.  A new fence, but the same fencerow.  Always. Copyright 2019

The grass needs cutting.  The flower bed I started tearing out a month ago is still only half torn.  The baby barn swallows have left the nest their parents built in the porch eaves; they’ve also left behind a mess.  There is so much work to do. Just a couple of hours ago Owen and I walked west, toward the sun that had fallen into a cradle just above the horizon, a bulging egg yolk of orange dangling above the treetops, not ready yet to be broken.  Now the sun has disappeared and I am walking east, into the dark, into the moon that shimmers behind the thinnest scrim of clouds.  With so much magic in the sky, how can a person be concerned with tall grass and weeds and bird droppings? I love the fact that full moons have names and I love, especially, that this one – July – has several.  Full Buck Moon.  Full Thunder Moon.  Full Hay Moon.  Full Wort Moon.   Take your choice.  Any one of them is evocative enough to conjure up a little sky magic of its own.   It is Full Buck Moon that sends me off on a contemplative tangent as I stroll slowly under its muted light.  I remember a summer, a long time ago now, when a group of my friends and I spent a few days at a cabin in the North Carolina mountains, laughing and talking and watching fireflies from Adirondack chairs on the deck.  The creek that ran musically just a few feet from the front door was named Buck Creek. There were four, then six, then – after the death of our beloved Margaret who as the oldest among us took liberties no one else would dare take – five.   A few weeks ago the five were in the mountains again, this time in Tennessee, laughing and talking and watching, from rocking chairs, the artificial lights of the city come on in the valley far, far below us.  Being there, being with them was, as always, life-giving. It should be said that we don’t just laugh and talk and sit.  Sometimes we stand.  We’ve done a lot of standing.  Standing in church to watch daughter-brides and son-grooms walk down aisles.  Standing in rousing applause for well-deserved recognition.  Standing at gravesides for parents and – oh, God! – once for a grandchild.   We stand up, stand tall, and stand by.  We stand witness, stand our ground, and stand up for what is right. We do a lot of standing. Not one of the other four is close enough geographically to stand with me tonight.  Close enough to join me in tilting back my head and gazing up at the Buck Moon, seeing shapes in the wispy clouds, feeling memories creep up behind me and fold themselves around my shoulders. The magic of the full moon, though, does not require proximity.  In space or time.  The magic of the full moon is that it is full here and there.  Then and now.  Over them and us.  In clear skies or cloudy.  The full moon is always full. The tall blades of grass tickle my legs on my way back inside and over my shoulder the Buck Moon shines on. Copyright 2019

One should not take new shoes on vacation.  New shoes, no matter how cute, are never comfortable enough for the rigors of walking tours, souvenir shopping, or sprints between terminals at an international airport.  New shoes are nearly always going to let you down. I know this.  I knew this as I packed the new shoes in my suitcase.  I justified their presence inside the suitcase, along with the TSA-mandated one-quart plastic bag of 3.4-ounce toiletries, by noting their classic style and neutral color.  I suppressed the memory of every pair of espadrilles I’d ever owned causing blisters the first time I wore them. Three days later I was in the Kalihi Valley, a low-income neighborhood outside Honolulu, where a community non-profit provides an after-school program focusing on native traditions and cultures, a farm-to-table initiative, and comprehensive medical care, including care in the native traditions.  Over the next four hours I would see handmade canoes constructed by children, taste fresh sweet potato noodles and lemongrass tea, observe a sacred space built of pili grass and stone, and visit the recently-completed apothecary where medical treatment, including lomi lomi (traditional Hawaiian massage), is administered.   I would also develop blisters.  Hot, stinging blisters. Back at the hotel I put Band-Aids on the blisters.  I also put on different shoes.  With socks.   Over the next four days the thought of blisters was far from my mind.  I walked miles and miles up and down a beach very unlike the ones I know.  A beach where trees grow close enough to the water that you can sit in their shade and use their scaly trunks as support.  A beach where the sand is, in places, the color of light brown sugar and is everywhere the consistency of cornmeal.  A beach that is not edged by sand dunes and sea oats, but sidewalks. On the fifth day I got home.  After 13 hours on an airplane all I wanted to do was take a shower.  I dropped everything – my suitcase, my backpack, the big shopping bag of Honolulu Cookie Company cookies in various packaging options – in a big pile and stepped under the hot water.  As I dried off, the adhesive on the Band-Aids finally let go and slid off in my hands.  Stuck to my skin, stuck to the open skin of my heel in little rows, were tiny grains of sand.  Brown sugar sand.  Cornmeal sand. It is hard to carry things on our furless bodies.  Unlike our animal kin, we don’t generally transport anything inadvertently, no sprigs or seeds or soil. But here I was, 4648 miles away from Hawaii, a place I had been, but was no longer, and I had brought home a part of it.  Brought it home in my wounds. Sigh.  Ain’t that always the way? The wounds of a well-traveled life are invisible and the souvenirs something other than sand, but the blisters, backaches, and broken bones are the repositories for the only relics worth keeping.  For it is only in the places that hurt – acutely, severely, chronically –  that the sprigs of character take root, that the seeds of memories fall, that the soil of love is turned.  Things that matter can not grow on the surface. It was foolish, of course, to pack new shoes and it was painful to wear them, but I do not regret either. I came home with keepsakes worth every grain of sand. Copyright 2019

On New Year’s Eve,  I went walking under the cover of buzzards.  Twelve.  I counted them when they were still at least half a mile ahead of me, looping through the sky like braces freed from a keyboard and animated by some perverse magic, swirling in an ever-narrowing funnel toward the ground where some rotting carcass awaited their ravenous hunger. As I and my hyperactive dog drew closer, they did not, as I expected, aloofly disburse into the bright blue sky until we passed whatever dead animal they’d claimed and then, with great calculation, return to their Danse Macabre.  Instead, they followed us.  Moving in that same funnel through the tunnel of trees lining the road, diving and lifting, never too close, but always overhead. I have lived in the country –  close to wild animals, witness to their lives and deaths – for a very long time, so I was not frightened by the buzzards’ behavior, but I did find it odd.  Odd enough that I took out my phone to write it down, noticing that the time was a little before 3 o’clock, the time of the mid-afternoon prayer called none.  It rhymes with bone. Owen and I had reached the bad curve, turned, and, in our daily repentance, headed in the opposite direction when my cell phone rang.  The time was, I would find out when I looked later, 3:27.  “Where are you?” my friend Debra asked. It has been my experience that that particular question does not bode well for what comes next.  It generally means, I am about to share with you something horrible, so tell me now if you need to sit down, leave the room, stop the car. There was nowhere to sit, no room to leave, no car to stop and so I kept walking. The shocking, incomprehensible news that Debra had to share was that our friend Emily –  our friend of 40 years, whose smile brought light to the often gloomy days of law school, whose eyes literally, not in a lazily metaphoric way, sparkled –  had died. Time slows down, of course, in such moments and I remember very clearly my brain searching for words.  Neurons bouncing around like a harried assistant pulling out file drawers, sure that the document just requested by the boss is there somewhere if she can just remember where. “Oh, my God.”  Those were the words I found.  “Oh, my God.”  And I repeated them over and over.  “Oh, my God.” Saint Faustina, who was canonized by the Catholic Church in 2000, reported having conversations with Jesus.  In one of those conversation he was said to have taught her a specific prayer to be prayed at none, at 3 o’clock:  “O Blood and Water, which gushed forth from the Heart of Jesus as a Fount of Mercy for us, I trust in You.”  It is called the Prayer to the Divine Mercy. If I had known that prayer, if it had been somewhere in one of those file drawers in my brain, maybe I would have prayed it. Instead, what I found was, “Oh, my God.” It’s been over two weeks.  Long enough to consider whether the buzzards were a sign.  Or a reminder.  Or just one of those things that happen in a world where life and death are perennial dance partners. Over two weeks.  And I still haven’t found much more to say than, Oh, my God. I’ve decided that is enough.  Copyright 2020

Given the incorrigible nature of everything else of late, 60-degree mornings in mid-June should not have come as a surprise. And, yet, they did.  Dressed in a fleece and leggings, I kept my appointment with the world and walked east toward the sun. The morning glories, misunderstanding the temperature, remained open, vines spreading over the edge of the ditch and white faces thrust toward the light from a reclining position. They reminded me of untended children – eager and vulnerable. It was a revelatory moment the first time I realized that morning glories and passion flowers grow in roughly the same place, just on opposite ends of the day, as if they were estranged relatives sharing the same house. Not a mile up the road I started hearing songbirds, lots o f them, their voices floating through the cooler air in cleanly clipped notes, nothing like the thick hum that moves wave-like in the heat, a choir of indistinguishable voices. I noticed one bird, in particular, balanced on a power line just above my head and realized that he was singing three completely different songs, one after the other. I watched until he flew away and as he spread his tail feathers I identified him. A mockingbird. The impressionist of the avian world. It struck me in that moment that he carried a most unfortunate and, in fact, incorrect name. The talented chorister was not mocking at all, not in the sense of making fun, teasing, insinuating that there was something inferior about the songs of the other birds that he so blithely performed. Mimicking, yes, but not mocking. Engaging, I decided, in what we call the sincerest form of flattery – imitation. Imitation, of course, has its own issues. In a world where branding is the goal, imitation becomes an adjective that means artificial, fake, inferior in some serious way to that which is labeled natural, genuine and/or authentic. In a world where true communication is the goal, imitation is a noun and its primary definition is the action of using someone or something as a model. My mockingbird was using the latter, finding her fellow forest dwellers as creatures worth modeling, singing songs deserving of sharing. I confess that I am probably guilty of anthropomorphizing. I tend to do that when I’m trying to make sense of human behavior. I look at the world around me – animals, plants, weather – and, in observing the manner in which it manages to keep turning and giving us seasons (admittedly a little less predictably than in the past) and sunrises and sunsets, I wonder if there isn’t something there for us. Some creature worth modeling. Some lesson worth learning that will finally ... finally ... finally enable us, each and all of us, to work in sync to save both the world and ourselves. There will always be Democrats and Republicans, mask wearers and mask haters, morning glories and passion flowers. And we will always share the same fence rows on this small planet in this large universe. When we learn to appreciate the song regardless of which bird sings it, when we learn to model instead of mock, we will also have learned that saving the world is saving ourselves.