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Many years ago, long before ancestry.com and spit-in-a-tube DNA tests, I sat at the kitchen table of the little house on South College Street and asked my daddy’s daddy to tell me about his family.  Not us, all the grown-up aunts and uncles who used to be the children he bounced on his knees and threatened to, but never did, spank with a leather belt.  Not us cousins, who rushed in and out of the house like indecisive waves, the screen door sounding behind us over and over.  But his original family, the one into which he was born in the early years of the 20th century. I knew that he had lost his father when he was just a young boy, that as the baby of the family his mother eventually moved in with him and my grandmother, that he lived through what he called Hoover Days and was, as a result, a Yellow Dog Democrat, which he would remain until the day he died.  What I didn’t know, until that day, was the story of his sister Vera who, at the age of 17 years and one month, a newlywed expecting her first baby, succumbed to the flu epidemic of 1918. Pa told me the story that day, responding to my leading questions while staring off into the corner behind me, telling it as if he’d never told it before, as if some of the details slipping out of his mouth were things he never knew he remembered.  As if maybe he’d never allowed himself to remember them before.  He told me about the casket that they made right there on the place, a pine box that they lined with unginned cotton.  He told me about the two coins they placed on her eyes and he told me how hard it was for the mule to pull the wagon carrying her casket up the rutted dirt road. That was the day I learned to listen. Listening is a misunderstood skill.   It is introduced to us as a singular imperative – Listen! – on the first day we step into a classroom and we learn that it involves being able to parrot back to whomever asks what that person  – teacher, parent, coach, minister – has said.  “What did I just say?” many an exhausted adult has asked an inattentive child or uninterested teenager and walked away with a false sense of accomplishment when the child or teenager recites a series of words correctly. Listening involves not just auditory nerves and the knowledge of a particular language.  It involves sitting or walking slowly.  It involves being ready to be surprised, amazed, astounded at something you had no idea was there.  It requires letting go of preconceptions and the need for reciprocity. I started thinking about my Great-Aunt Vera a few weeks ago when someone compared the COVID-19 pandemic to the death that swept the world in 1918.  And those thoughts should probably have faded a little as things began to look more like the normal I knew before.  But they didn’t; I kept thinking about that afternoon at the kitchen table of the little house on South College where I learned to listen.  And, over the last few days as I’ve watched the world spin like a top losing its momentum, it has appeared to me that we, as a society, have been having an incredibly difficult time listening to each other.  Really listening. I’m not suggesting that everything – disease and poverty and injustice  – would magically disappear if we all just stopped yelling and took a nap, but I don’t think it would hurt. I’m a writer (which is nothing at all like a doctor or an economist or a politician and which requires me to be still a lot and listen a lot), and I like to hear from other writers about how they navigate the world, especially right now.  A blogger I sometimes read said this the other day: “Our work is to bear witness from where we sit, to be honest about what we see, and to believe people when they tell us what they see.” I think we can do that.  I have to believe we can do that.  I have to believe that we can learn to listen.

There has been a near-constant breeze at Sandhill since early March.  At times a gentle puffing that sends the rocking chairs back and forth in a detectable rhythm.  At times erratic gusts, moving in loop-de-loops across the open fields that look like skywriting in a language I don’t know.   And when accompanied by thunderstorms, wide bands that race toward the house and wrap themselves in the backyard trees, rattling branches like bones in a zydeco band. Not all the limbs manage to hold on.  After every storm there are at least two or three armloads to be gathered and tossed into the edge of the field where kudzu used to grow and where it is too low to plow, two or three armloads of slick sycamore twigs, branches, and limbs that made no sound in their breaking away. I gather them in my arms –  cradling them, really, like long skinny babies – , being careful as I lean over not to poke my eye out, my mind filling with images of every television western I’ve ever watched, each with its obligatory “gather wood for fire” scene which inevitably results in someone getting bitten by a snake or kidnapped by an Indian.  And, because I am so busy imagining myself as Laura Ingalls and Audra Barkley and Rebecca Boone, I don’t realize at first that it is only under the sycamore tree that I am daydreaming. Standing next to it, in a long row that lines the driveway, are two sawtooth oaks.  The three trees were planted at roughly the same time and are about the same height, but it is only the sycamore that regularly loses parts of its armature.  A quick comparison would leave me with the thought that the oaks, with their reputation for deep rootedness and strength, are simply better able to withstand the wind, whatever its frequency or force. One of the most dangerous things one can do, of course, is to base a conclusion upon a quick comparison, a truth I have learned over and over in the most public and private of arenas, and so I stop, arms still full, and take a closer look – at the limbs I hold, at the tree under whose branches I stand.  What I see, what I – not Laura or Audra or Rebecca, but Kathy – see is that not one bit of the tree that has been broken off and sent falling to the ground has anything green on it.  Not a leaf or a bud anywhere.  Everything in my arms is dead. The sycamore tree has lost nothing that wasn’t already useless. I am no longer imagining television westerns, but rather something out of a fantasy novel, one in which trees are animated and the broad branches of this tree are arms, opened wide to welcome the wind, inviting it to dance.  And dance it does, a waltz in the afternoon breeze, a tarantella in the thunderstorm, its joyous movement shaking loose everything that can’t produce fruit, making more room for that which can. I lower my arms and everything I am carrying yields to gravity, rolls to the ground.  Is the sycamore, I wonder, a reflection of what has been happening in us these last 50 days, these days of limited human contact and extreme self-protection? In cleaning out our attics are we shaking loose the dead branches?  In playing card games with our families instead of our phones are we making room for something to grow? In letting go of our schedules and the adrenaline rush that comes from thinking we are needed are we learning what it feels like to dance with the wind?

The nest in my mailbox has become something of an icon.  It has appeared in so many stories as to have gained a life of its own – no longer simply a prop, a stage, or a frame for some epiphany into which I have stumbled.  It defies everything I know about nests in its placement, longevity, and resilience.  And just when I’ve become so accustomed to its dusty presence in the back of the mailbox that I reach in without thought, it makes another offering, something to wake me from my socially distanced daze. This week it gave me three abandoned eggs, Tiffany blue, each as big around as the end of my pinkie.  Tiny beautiful things.   I tried not to make up stories about what had happened to the mother – or to the fourth egg, crushed and oozing the sticky, yellow remains of what would have become a bluebird – as I gently eased them out into the bright light, into my cupped palm.  I did not know what to do with them, but I could not leave them there, vulnerable to a hurriedly stuffed roll of mail or an intrepid snake.  They would not hatch, but I would not allow them to be destroyed. Just a couple of days before, I’d walked out the back door to the shed and nearly stepped on a turtle egg -- empty, torn in half, lying beside a shallow hole, dug up and destroyed by an unidentified marauder most likely named Owen.  I didn’t see any other eggs, but I refilled the hole just in case, remembering the turtle who had been crawling near that spot a few days earlier and lying to myself about the likelihood that I had saved anything. For the first time in a long time we’ve had a real spring, temperatures that coaxed blossoms into view without scorching them within hours.  A real spring that we can hardly enjoy, however, since we are confined to quarters by a disease that didn’t exist until a few months ago. So I should not be surprised that the eggs showing up in my life these days have not been the candy ones hidden in plastic grass and delivered by the Easter bunny, but the real ones, the fragile ones, the ones subject to being abandoned and pillaged.  The ones that we optimistically choose to represent the promise of new life, but that are equally as likely to end up as empty shells. It has been 40 days since I was told that I needed to separate myself from others.  Forty days since I passed another human in a parking lot or grocery store aisle without flinching.   Forty days since I accepted a piece of bread and dipped it into the cup at the altar of my church.  Forty days since I felt the arms of one of my babies around my neck. At the end of 40 days on the mountain, Moses came down with tablets containing words both astonishing and eternal.  At the end of 40 days in the wilderness, Jesus was attended by angels.  At the end of 40 days of washing my hands until they are chapped, watching way too many Hallmark mysteries, and walking over 200 miles down the same four-mile stretch of dirt road, I am just tired. And a little crazy.  Obsessed with images of empty eggs. Bird and turtle.  Turtle and bird.  Holding the weight of every cancelled wedding and graduation and prom.  Every missed birthday.   Every missed chance to say goodbye. I want to know when the siege will be over, when the doctors and nurses will have faces again, when people stuck in apartments can go outside and see grass.  I want to know when I can go back to church, see my friends, hug my family.  But I want to know – more than anything – if, when this is over, we can possibly remember the weight of empty eggs. Copyright 2020

The full moon was supposed to be pink, but the clouds that had drifted back and forth all day, bringing an occasional breeze, had settled in over Sandhill like gauze.  There was the vaguest hint of light somewhere to the southeast but nothing like the big slice of pink grapefruit I’d been led to expect. Yet another blow in a spring in which the rhythm of life has been thrown completely off-kilter. I am safe.  I am healthy.  I have enough to eat.  I am able to communicate with the people I love even if I can’t touch them.   Still, in the strange new world where there is no Opening Day, no March Madness, no baccalaureates or graduations, no birthday party for either of my great-nieces, and, hardest to believe, no church on Easter, it is tempting to pout. I got into bed, but did not fall asleep.  I dozed.  I roused.  I changed position.  I turned the pillow over.  I took a drink from the glass of water on the nightstand.  I dozed and roused again.  A couple of hours into the futile efforts I surrendered. Getting out of bed once you’ve given yourself over to warmth, to softness, to gravity is not easy, but during a prolonged season of insomnia a number of years ago, I learned that the warmth and softness and gravity can quickly become wardens of a solitary prison and that it is best to take advantage of the unlocked door and leave. So, I left.  Got out of bed and, without turning on a light, started through the house toward the kitchen where I would search out a snack high in carbohydrates and hope that the process of digestion would divert enough blood flow from my brain to make me sleepy.  I had made it down the hall and one foot into the living room when I stopped. The entire space was flooded in light.   Moonlight.  The couch, the chair, the lamps, the little bookcase my friend Todd made me, all doused in silvery blue.  Their shapes sharp and three- dimensional.  It could have as easily been high noon as midnight.  The clouds, it would appear, had cleared. I went to the front door, turned the lock and stepped out onto the porch.  One, two, three, four steps and my toes were dangling off the edge.  There, exactly where it was supposed to be, was the full moon.  Not pink, not as big as it would have been had I seen it earlier, but there.  Round as a biscuit. The clouds hadn’t actually cleared.  They were still there.  They were moving slowly back and forth like sliding doors.  For a few seconds, they had opened to reveal the moon.  Now they were hovering, waiting to silently glide back in the other direction to hide it again. There was nothing to do but stand and stare.  To be present and be reminded that the full moon’s rhythm never changes, that its pull on the ocean –  forming waves and creating tides that can be predicted down to the minute – also pulls on me.  To teach and learn again the lesson of waxing and waning. To allow myself a transfusion of wonder and amazement and, on the edge of Easter, a promise of resurrection. Copyright 2020

If I am still and quiet I can hear spring. Bees, fat like overstuffed cigars, are humming over the shrubbery. The wind chimes are ringing lazily in a breeze that swoops over the just-cut fields and brakes quickly with the resistance of the house. Two long, yellow road scrapers roar slowly past the house like soldiers in review. Wild mustard has sprouted up and down the road in erratic bouquets, bursts of yellow that match the pine pollen covering anything stationary. The carport is carpeted in pine cone seeds and the hydrangea bushes I never got around to pruning in the fall are covered in buds. The as-yet untouched fields are covered in sorrel and lobelia, one wide smear of dull red and pale lavender. I am always glad for spring, always glad that once again light has overcome darkness, but this year. This year is different. This year there is the coronavirus. Not that much is different about my daily routine. Here in the woods I practice social distancing without trying. When I do make forays into town they are purposeful and efficient. But for missing out on the occasional lunch with a former colleague and getting over the awkwardness of being a single-person congregation to a live-streamed pastor, my life hasn’t changed much. Except that it has. The past few days I’ve found myself with the same sensation as during the summers of my elementary school years when someone would ask me what grade I was in. Ever determined to be truthful, I never knew what to say. I was no longer in the fourth grade, but I was not yet in the fifth. I was between the two, neither one nor the other, in the middle. My grown-up life has proven over and over that the middle is an awkward, even difficult place to be. Like when I found out I’d passed the bar exam in June, but because I had a summer job in north Georgia, couldn’t be sworn in until August. Was I a lawyer or not? The middle is unfamiliarity in the midst of the familiar. It is extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary. It is the most uncommon idea, occurrence, or thing in the midst of the common. That is where you are when you walk into Walmart and see your aunt, your neighbor, the mother of your child’s best friend and you can’t hug or shake hands or get close enough to see that she’s got that new yogurt you were thinking of trying in her buggy so you can ask her what she thinks about it. That is where you are when you know it’s right to stay home and you have absolutely stayed home, but you still can’t help feeling out of place. There is no more a cure for the middle than there is for the coronavirus, though when the latter goes, so will the former. I am bothered by the thought of no Easter lilies and I am so disappointed for the high school and college seniors and Olympic athletes. I am heart-broken for my loved ones in health care and, especially, for those suffering from the virus and the families of those who have died. But I am rejoicing because it is spring. Spring when the bobwhites start calling as the sun goes down. Spring when the pine trees suddenly drop cones as I walk by just to get my attention. Spring when the same toad shows up two nights in a row at the bottom of the back steps as a reminder that neither he nor the pine tree nor the bobwhites are afraid. To hold bother, disappointment, and heartbreak in the same embrace as joy is what it means to live in the middle. It is what it means to be human. To be alive. Copyright 2020

The sky was a turbulent gray –  low-lying clouds of various sizes teasing each other, rushing forward and falling back.  The wind was darting back and forth across the wide swath of green in awkward starts and fits like our blind cow when she managed to escape from the pasture.  Somewhere in the crowd filling up the home bleachers were my parents, my brother, both sets of grandparents.  None of them with umbrellas. The band had already turned in their uniforms, so it was that instead of marching onto Womack Field to the verve of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance,” the Statesboro High School Class of 1974 walked across the football field to the beat of Emma Kelly on the electric keyboard.  I stepped under the goalpost, holding my mortarboard on with one hand and my honor graduate stole with the other just as she struck the first chords of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” Those images remained crystalline nearly 46 years later as I walked into a room full of the adults those boys and girls clad in flimsy blue and white graduation gowns became. After the raucous greetings, warm hugs, and lies that nobody believed, Jim, our class vice-president, offered a welcome, proffered some thanks, made an announcement or two, and then glanced my way.  I was to offer a few words in memory of our deceased classmates. I said something about not necessarily remembering all the names on the list except for seeing them on layout pages of the yearbook, but understanding – after so many years of living – that I did know them.  They grew up in the same place I grew up.  They went to the same schools and were a part of the same community.  Theirs was the same culture.  That while I may not have been able to tell you on what streets they lived or what buses they rode or their siblings’ names or where their daddies worked, I knew them and I know them still. Because they were part of us and they still are. At least I think that’s what I said.  It’s hard to say such things when you are looking into faces you have loved for your whole life. The list of names will be longer next time.  And still longer the time after.   I know that.  But I also know that with every list of names the ones I will remember are the ones called out loudly, in alphabetical order,  from a wobbly portable stage on a soggy football field, the ones that floated gently up into those low gray clouds, each drifting off in a different direction. Copyright 2020

Week One of the Rain: The pond at the crossroads breaches its banks and rushes across the road  creating a canal a couple of feet wide and six or eight inches deep, deep enough to rattle your teeth if you hit it going faster than 10 miles an hour.  On the other side it hurries down into the branch along the vine-lined gulley that curves into the deep woods. I n the 46 years I’ve lived in this corner of the county the pond has always, before now, managed to hold its water.  Even in 2004, when the rain of three hurricanes fell in rapid succession, the tiny bowl surrounded by pine trees and scrub oaks that make it all but invisible if you don’t know it’s there managed to contain all it had received. Fifteen or twenty yards up the hill a dead tree loses its grip on the earth and falls across the road.  I watch as my brother and two men in the truck behind him hoist the trunk and its severed branches, tossing them to the side, a skeleton straddling the water-filled ditch. Week Two of the Rain: The clouds break long enough for me and Owen to venture forth.  I feel the wet creep into my shoes and through my socks as I tip-toe back and forth across the ruts searching for the best footing.  We make it past the fallen tree, the overflowed pond, the deep circles that someone on a four-wheeler has cut in the intersection.  Ignoring the fact that he has clean water at home, Owen gulps from ditches and puddles all the way to the bad curve. Heading home, I hear the sound of heavy machinery somewhere ahead of us.  (Not a tractor – it will be weeks before the ground is dry enough to hold up a John Deere.)  Owen runs ahead and greets the men on the county road equipment.  One is shoveling wet dirt into the wash-out; the other is addressing the dead tree.  We share a brief exchange before Owen and I continue on toward home. Week Three of the Rain: I am no longer asking Daddy how much rain we got.  He is no longer looking at the gauge.  I don’t remember the last time I came to a full stop at the four-way; I just lift my foot off the gas and take a quick right-left glance as the slick mud propels me through the intersection like some kind of carnival ride. The road crew returns during a momentary break in the rain just long enough to scrape the road, to leave small hillocks of damp red dirt in long lines on either side.  It takes less than 24 hours for the hillocks to dissolve into mud. My brother tells me that the two dirt roads just past Kennedy Bridge are both under water.  And that reminds him of the story our grandfather used to tell about when you had to pay a toll to cross Kennedy Bridge, about how the toll was operated by two women, about the day Pa went to cross and tried to pay the 3-cent toll with a nickel and the women didn’t have any change, and about how they told him to go on across and they’d settle up when he came back the other way. And, then, Daddy is prompted to tell the story about the time it was so wet that a mule got bogged down in the field – “I saw it myself.” – and when I ask him why in the world anybody would let the mule get that far out, he just shakes his head. The sky is gray and heavy as a wet quilt.  It is going to rain again.  That is for certain.  And as I make my way home I wonder what stories this rain will become. Copyright 2020

The light lingers longer and the darkness develops a shyness about announcing its presence.  It is still winter according to the calendar, but out there, at the very edge of where my vision and my desire reach and meet, is spring.  I can hardly stay inside. I walk, down the road toward the river at first, then back behind the house where the field falls toward the pond.  It is sandy there, white sand like the beach, and the run-off from all the rain last week, along with what is left of tractor tire prints, has made something akin to miniature dunes.  Sawed-off cotton stalks and dead weeds take the place of sea oats.  I feel my feet sink with each step. Ahead of me, Owen darts in and out of the brush at the edge of the pond, nose lifting and falling, unable to catch clear scent of anything worth chasing.  Occasionally he glances back to make sure I am still there. The light of the half-moon reflects off the pond and brightens the sand.  I look back over my shoulder and see it dangling in the midst of a handful of stars.  Funny, I think to myself, how I never see stars in the company of the full moon, how –  with nothing but  reflected light – it drowns out the millions of stars shining under their own power.  This half one, though, this waxing half-moon pasted on the winter sky, seems perfectly happy to share the space. I have long been enamored of full moons.  I’ve done all kinds of things to find, observe, wallow in, stare in amazement at them.  I’ve walked on beaches and dirt roads, stood on balconies, climbed onto roofs.  I’ve gazed alone, in groups, and, on a few occasions, with a single other human for whom words were not necessary. But, until tonight, I don’t think I’ve ever been besotted by half as much. I walk on.  Away from the house toward the fencerow, the rusty, fallen-down line of demarcation between what we call ours and they call theirs, the barrier over which I can and do easily step in daylight to wander under a canopy of pine trees and scrub oaks looking for gopher tortoise burrows and deer scrapes and clarity. I stop before I get there.  I am brave, but not that brave.  Not brave enough to go wandering in the woods in darkness that blots out moonlight.  Whatever emotional or spiritual clarity might be awaiting me among the burrows and scrapes will have to wait until I have visual clarity. I turn and walk back toward the light of the half-moon, the white sand, the pseudo-dunes.  Toward the back steps, the back door, the inside. It is only later, days later, that I remember something I read somewhere: Sometimes we want greater clarity when what we need is deeper trust. I stopped what I was doing long enough to consider what it might mean to somebody standing on the edge of deep woods, somebody with light behind her and only darkness ahead of her, somebody accustomed to full moons and complete answers and full assurance that what she was doing, where she was going was the right thing, the right direction.  I stopped to think about the fact that everybody ends up walking in the dark sometimes, even if it’s not by choice.  When that happens, a person can pout and cry and bemoan the fact that there is no full moon or a person can keep walking, trusting that half will be enough. Copyright 2020

If I sit still, very still, and quietly, very quietly –  so still that I can feel the locket around my neck and so quietly that I can hear my breath – I am aware of the heaviness of the rain.  In thousands of individual drops it holds the house to the ground.  Like a paperweight. Years ago, when Daddy grew Vidalia onions, January often found him turning on the irrigation, the fake rain, in front of advancing cold.  The dropping temperatures froze the water clinging to the onion plants, providing insulation against what would otherwise have killed the tender stalks.  It feels a little like that tonight. January is a hard month.  It is hard because it is cold and rainy and particularly syncopated after all the speed and noise of December.  It is also hard because it includes the anniversaries of the deaths of two of my dearest friends.  And it is hard because it includes my mother’s birthday which she no longer remembers. Yet, I sit, in the stillness and quiet of this January quickly dying, content. Sandhill is 28 years old.  And for 28 years the living room ceiling has leaked.  The cedar planks that form a perfect V in the center of the room are stained with Rorschach blots from sudden deluges, three-day rains, and successive hurricanes.  And despite numerous roof replacements, chimney adjustments, and gadget installations, every time excessive water began falling from the sky, I found myself creating a multi-layer patchwork quilt of towels across the living room floor. Until three days before Christmas when, the towels pressed up against the tree skirt and concerns about drips reaching the lights on the tree making me anxious, I reached my Peter Finch in “Network” moment and, much to the relief and delight of my metal roof-selling nephew, decided that the time had come. Over a period of three days in January a crew of three strong and lithe men crowned Sandhill with a new roof.  The first time it rained I forgot that I didn’t have to be anxious and kept walking through the living room, running my hand across the wooden floor checking for dampness.  The second time I felt the knot in my belly start to rise at the sight of the gray cloud and then remembered I didn’t have to worry.  And tonight? Tonight I sit in the darkness broken only by a lamp and I think.  Think about what rain sounds like on a metal roof.  Think about how hard it is to let go of the triggers that have been our companions for years.  Think about the paradox of freezing plants in order to save them. Is that what January, every single January, does to me? for me? It freezes me in order to save me.  It calls my attention to the difficult things, away from the many distractions outside my doors and toward the tiny cells multiplying at the heart of who I am.  Then it insulates the tender shoots against the harshness of the winter. January is a hard month.  Long and cold and hard.  And beneath its roof I am warm and safe and dry. Copyright 2020

The night falls fast. Like a proscenium curtain – heavy, velvet – loosed from its restraining ropes and tumbling to the floor of the stage. Just moments ago there was still a thin line of neon orange trembling along the horizon. Not now. Now it is hard dark. On the other side of the sky, as though its rising forced the orange line to sink, is the full moon. In the presence of wispy clouds it looks as though it is shivering, as I am, in the cold. Just a little shiver. A little chill. A little like Christmas. I have visitors tonight. Adam and Jackson are silhouettes in the spill of light, hands in pockets, booted feet spread wide. I have become accustomed to the invisible fingers that grab my throat every time I see them like this, every time I have to blink at least twice to remember that the man, not the boy, is my boy. Jackson and his sister and their cousin are the great delights of my life, this strange season of my life I’ve yet to understand, but there remains a deep poignance to the memories of their father, their mother as children. Especially at Christmas. And it is moments like these – not the twinkling light moments, the tinkling glass moments, the jingling and mingling moments – that feel most like Christmas. The minor chord moments, sad and plaintive, a little out of tune, are the ones that draw me toward the manger with its overwhelmed teenagers and astonished shepherds. Inside, where the only decoration is an advent wreath with cattywampus candles, Jackson proclaims that he and I can get the tree from the shed. That we don’t need the help of his dad, the heft of the big-tired, extended cab pick-up truck. Armed against the night and what might be roaming armadillos with nothing but a flashlight, we shuffle across the wet grass. “Whoa!” he exclaims when he sees the boxes of ornaments stacked on plastic shelves. “You’ve got a lot of decorations!” “Yep,” I tell him, “but first the tree.” The artificial pine comes apart easily. Jackson hoists the top two sections over his head like the Stanley Cup and starts toward the house; I follow with the fatter bottom third, the flashlight swinging, throwing weak shards of light through the bare tree branches, guiding this boy, who is also mine. The tree goes up, the lights come on. We carefully hang the ornaments. Jackson picks his favorite – a blown-glass nautilus shell studded with glitter and rhinestones. He gasps when I show him one that is 45 years old. To hang the star, he climbs my highest stool and leans in as far as he can. My job is to hold him steady. He climbs down with a big smile and a bigger sense of accomplishment. I feel it moving through me, the minor chord progression to major. Even now the manger is expanding to make room for exultant angels and extravagant magi. Even, I pray, in a few days, me. Copyright 2019

Today is Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.  It is not a federal holiday, but flags across the country are flown at half-staff in remembrance of the 2043 service members and civilians killed on Sunday, December 7, 1941, when the Japanese made a surprise attack on U.S. military installations on the island of Oahu.   A few weeks ago I was there.   For several days, as a member of the Georgia delegation to the National Humanities Conference, I listened to stories from native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders about open ocean navigation and traditional medicine.  I visited a reconstructed worker’s village that told the history of the sugar cane plantation industry and watched a native welcome ceremony.  I walked both the exclusive beaches of Waikiki and the hills of the Kalihi Valley, an area outside Honolulu with the largest concentration of low-income housing in the state.  And I was amazed at the breadth and depth of us, the conglomeration of people who are Americans. Then, on the next to last day of the trip, I went to Pearl Harbor.  It is a quiet place.  It is, despite the movement of crowds of people, a still place.  And, despite the stillness, it trembles with something like sacred energy.   I read some of the plaques, some of the names.  You can not read them all.  It would take days. It would break your heart. I stared at the museum exhibits, the black and white photos of ships and planes and people, people with faces.  Faces that bore resemblances to somebody somewhere.  Faces that had no idea what was about to happen within days of their staring into the camera. I stood on the USS Arizona Memorial, that stark white bridge-shaped monument built over the ship that remains where she fell, submerged in about 40 feet of water just off the coast of Ford Island.  I looked down into the water at the sunken decks of the ship that is the grave for 1102 American servicemen. The irony was not lost on me: my visit to Hawaii that had been for the purpose of celebrating the humanities was ending with a look at what happens when we lose sight of our humanity. Tomorrow is the second Sunday in Advent.  Like Pearl Harbor Day, it comes around once a year. It is worth noting, though, that this year the two days are back to back.  The day on which the  worst of us was manifest in death and destruction, the day that President Franklin Roosevelt correctly proclaimed would live in infamy, is followed immediately by the day on which those of us who believe, as Frederick Buechner did, that the worst thing is never the last thing, will light the candle of hope. Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day asks us to look toward the past.  The second Sunday in Advent asks us to hope for the future.  They are not contradictory requests.  They are not oppositional directives requiring a choice of one or the other.  They are, instead, a single manner of living held in tension, held together by the hinge of a single moment – this moment. Remember as you hope.  Hope as you remember.  The worst thing is never the last thing. Copyright 2019

It is autumn.  Things are letting go.   Leaves and acorns.  Petals and pine cones.  Releasing their tenuous grips on branches and stems and falling to the ground, twirling on the current of cool breezes or dancing madly like jig dolls, joyously riding the wind.  They do not fight the pull of gravity. If there is a season of silence, this is it.  Sandwiched between summer’s fireworks and winter’s jingles is this moment.  It is as though nature has paused to catch her breath.  Even in the arenas where human voices gather and rise – football stadiums, sidewalks on Halloween – they are softer than they would be otherwise, the damp air tamping them down to a dull hum. The silence is not complete, though.  It is broken at uneven intervals by a flock of geese slipping across the sky at dusk, the soft rustle of a covey of quail lifting from the broom sedge like a puff of smoke, the heavy drizzle of four inches of rain falling off the roof. I went to visit one of my friends this morning.  She is 92 and recently had an accident that has intruded upon her independence.  She did not need my encouragement toward recovery.  She is as determined and self-motivated as she has ever been, but it can not be denied that, if a single life has seasons, my friend is living in her winter.   Neither can it be argued that I am not living in my autumn.  I confess to shuttering a little at that thought which, without invitation, took roost in my mind as I left my friend.  Autumn. The season of being quiet and letting go. But then I remembered the butterflies. A few days ago, on All Saints’ Sunday, I wandered around the yard for a few minutes ruminating over the list of names I’d just heard read from the pulpit.  The name of one of my dearest friends.  The name of one of the kindest gentlemen I’ve ever known.  The name of a man who read everything I wrote in this newspaper and used it as ammunition to tease me unmercifully. A chime had been rung, a candle had been lit for each of them.  Acknowledgments of lives lived well through all their seasons, some not as long as others, but each one complete. Just as I was about to turn maudlin, I saw a butterfly.  A little bigger than a silver dollar, it was flitting from the tight flowers of the verbena to the open flutter of the Mexican petunias, petunias that grew from bulbs shared with me by the tease and his wife.  Following it in hopes of getting a photograph, I spotted two more.  Three butterflies, all different, darting from one bloom to another in the chill sunlight of the first week in November. Seasons are funny.  We think we know what to expect from them.  We think we know how to dress, where to travel, what there will be to eat.  But then seasons surprise us.  A cold snap freezes the peach blossoms in April.  Kids start school in flip flops.  And butterflies appear in November.   I am willing to embrace silence and let go of the things that no longer have life.  But I am not willing to live as though that is all there is, as though all that lies ahead are colder days and stiffer winds.  I am not content to huddle and hunch and crouch against the growing darkness.  I want to live my autumn in constant anticipation of being surprised. Copyright 2019

The ivy is probably the only thing I have ever planted that did exactly what I wanted. It started as a single snippet of vine about six inches long in a square plastic pot about 3 inches deep. I bought it to serve as part of a centerpiece for a wedding shower that I was helping host and when the shower was over I brought it home and planted it at the corner of the carport.  It was stringy and spindly and I suspected that it would not live, which proves I didn’t know much about ivy. The hope was that the ivy would grow and spread and create ground cover for a spot that never dries out completely during the winter.  The hope was that it would create a long mound of pillowy green the length of the carport, a broad swathe of leaves that look like arrowheads, an optical illusion suggesting that I actually spend time tending things in my yard.  Never has hope been so well-rewarded. It has been, I think, about 20 years (Though, to be honest, it could be anywhere from 10 to 35 - I am not a gardener who keeps records.) since I planted that orphan ivy.  It has grown like the kudzu that lurks not too far away in the branch and it has done far more than originally asked. On any number of occasions I have gone outside with clippers and gathered enough to surround a punch bowl or drape along the mantle or, in one special instance, make a bridal bouquet for my niece. Despite its utility, however, ivy can be, if not exactly a problem, at least a pest. With its Velcro-like tendrils it can bind itself to wood and masonry and, if not monitored, the wood will rot and the mortar between the bricks will crumble like shortbread cookies.   Ivy is, like some people, beautiful in photographs, but a booger to encounter in real life. Thus, a day or so ago on the prettiest afternoon I have seen since the previously prettiest afternoon I have ever seen, I decided the time was right.  Time to attack this thing that I had invited to make itself at home. Cut back.  A common phrase.  We cut back on spending.  On carbs. A couple of weeks ago a large employer in a neighboring county implemented cutbacks, turned the verb phrase into a noun meant to carry a connotation slightly less negative than the word layoffs and to avoid completely any use of the word firings.  Interestingly, none of those usages involve a literal cutting.  Attacking my ivy did. I grabbed as many vines as I could in one fist and thrust the other fist, the one holding the pruning shears, into a web of leafy loops.  The blades clicked as they bit into the woody stems.  Clicked again when I eased the grip.  I developed a rhythm of thrust, cut, pull.  The amputated vines came loose in my hand, the intact ones maintained the tension of connection to which I responded by backing away and pulling harder.  It felt a lot like the resistance of a trout on a line. Tension.  Resistance.  It is an essential part of cutting.   I wish I knew how to do it otherwise.  I wish I knew how to rid my yard, my mind, my heart of overgrown things, things that no longer serve, things that if left in place will eventually crumble my foundation, without feeling the painful stretch of muscles I haven’t used in a while. It took about an hour to make a pile big enough to fill the wheelbarrow.  I carted it off to the edge of the branch and dumped it out, the leaves – severed from the roots that keep them alive – already curling on the edges.  From there I could see how much I’d accomplished: enough to provoke a feeling of satisfaction, not enough to mean I could stop.  For today or forever. Copyright 2019

Jim Croce wanted time in a bottle.  I’d settle for weather.  This weather. The moon, a capital D with the middle filled in, is already high in the sky while the sun lingers at the horizon, lazy and languid, making my shadow a good 30 feet long.  The air is dry and there is the slightest whisper of a breeze.  Banks of yellow asters and goldenrod fall all over themselves and each other to bow and curtsy as I walk past.  On this day I am royalty. The peanuts that grew in long straight lines in the field right outside my kitchen window have been harvested and the ground is flat and gray, littered with brittle vines already turned black.  The cotton on the other side of the house will not be far behind.  The hydrangea heads I never bothered to cut and bring indoors look like wrinkled faces, their stems skinny bodies standing at attention. Autumn, it would appear, has arrived. When I was a child the season manifested itself in the purchase of new school shoes.  I began each year at Mattie Lively Elementary School wearing the white Keds that had been bought in the spring, but a month or so in, about the time the construction paper on the bulletin boards turned orange and gold and brown, Mama and I drove downtown to find saddle oxfords.  And knee socks.  And, maybe, depending upon how much I’d grown, new Buster Brown turtlenecks. It is, I guess, developmentally normal at that age to process the change of seasons through the selfish lens of new shoes and socks, but – from the vantage point of an adult who can not prevent herself from occasionally doing the math and contemplating just how many more autumns I will be allowed to observe – I can’t help being a little wistful.  I have an excellent memory for the details of my childhood, but I don’t remember everything.  And the fact that I remember so clearly the blue rubber label on the back of my Keds and the tiny holes on the “saddle” part of the oxfords, but remember only one of my Halloween costumes (gypsy, back before it was politically incorrect) is bothersome. How many piles of leaves did I jump into, run through, toss in the air of which I have no memory because, obviously, I was more concerned with my shoes?  Why is the only thing I remember about all those years of fair parades the year my Girl Scout Troop marched and I carried the flag?  Who was the longsuffering parent who, year after year, led that pony around and around and around that tiny circle at the Halloween Festival never once complaining? Why did it take me so long to learn that fall is full of magic? I want to open Jim Croce’s bottle and dive into time as it wafts its way into the air of this moment.  I want to find that child, that little girl in the saddle oxfords, find her and kneel down in front of her as though in prayer.  I want to take her hands and look into the eyes that are my eyes and tell her that shoes will never be important, that labels mean nothing, that the colors of falling leaves can not be captured in construction paper. I want to tell her that remembering takes effort, but it is so worth it to be able to call up the smell of burlap, the sound of the chain on the flagpole beating in the wind, and the flash of sunlight catching a baton thrown high in the air on the days that are sure to come when you wonder who you are and why you are alive. I want to tell her, tell myself that  the most important thing she will ever do is pay attention. Copyright 2019