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I spent some time with Mama this afternoon.  Just the two of us.  She sat in a chair while I mopped the living room floor and vacuumed the rug and opened my mail.  There wasn’t much real conversation though there was constant talking.  The disease that has been slowly taking her from us for nearly 10 years limits her verbal interaction to unending repetition of the request to go home and painful inquisition about things like my identity. When I moved into the kitchen and started unloading the dishwasher, her tone became sharper.  “You need to stop doing all that,” she said several times with the same inflection I remember from 50 years ago when she was reprimanding me and my brother. “It’s okay,” I reassured her.  “I’m just putting up the dishes.”  I closed the cabinet door, started pulling the canisters away from the backsplash, and squirted the countertop with cleaner. “You just need to stop that,” she repeated, through slightly pursed lips.  “Don’t you ever just take some time?  Don’t you ever just take half a day to do something you want to do?” The realization came quickly.  She may not, at that exact moment, have known who I was, but she saw, in me, herself.  She saw the wife and mother and business owner who was always scurrying.  Always doing laundry or sweeping the porch or scrubbing the sink.  Who did not sit down to watch television or read magazines or talk on the phone. A few weeks ago, at the end of the day on which I’d attended the funerals of two friends, a day that had worn me out in every way possible, Mama and I had been having another visit.  The same questions as always – When can I go home?  Who are you? – resulted in the same answers – In a little while.  I’m your daughter Kathy.  But she had other questions that day as well. Do you go to church?  Yes, ma’am, every Sunday just like you taught me.  Do you read your Bible?  Yes, ma’am.  Do you talk to Jesus?  Yes, ma’am, all the time. The answers appeared to be satisfactory as she nodded her head a little and leaned forward in her chair toward where I was sitting on the floor.  “Well,” she said, “you just keep caring, keep loving, keep paying attention.”  Those exact words. On the wall in my study is a hand-painted canvas on which I stenciled lines from Mary Oliver’s “Sometimes”: “Pay attention.  Be astonished.  Tell about it.”  My mother has never read Mary Oliver.  On my website the banner reads: “Attention-Payer, Storyteller, Writer.” My mother has never seen my website. For a moment there was no time, no space, no Alzheimer’s.  For a few seconds there was only my mother as she would have been had the disease not stolen her from us.  And me, understanding that while reasoning and logic, intellect and memory, facts and figures can be taken, the spirit can not. “You just keep caring, keep loving, keep paying attention.” I will, Mama.  I promise.  I will. Copyright 2019

Six white rocking chairs.  Along with one set of windchimes and the occasional wreath, they are the only things on the front porch.  The front porch that, 28 years ago, I had the builder make two feet wider than called for by the blueprints, two feet wider than normal.  I wanted a big porch for lots of rocking chairs. There is something about a rocking chair that speaks invitation and offers rest.  Sitting in one straightens your back, opens your chest, and makes you receptive to things like birdsong and bee buzz and deep conversation.   The sight of just one moving gently in the evening breeze, its shadow growing longer by the minute, can slow the most anxious heart; the sight of six, well, it can slow six anxious hearts. People I know still ride around in the country sometimes.  Ride around with no purpose other than riding.  And sometimes they tell me, “I went past your house the other day.  I started to stop, but ...” and their voices trail off with a wistfulness that makes me sigh.  I know what prompted the almost-stopping.  I know what was the invisible pull.  It was the rocking chairs. So, I was more than a little disappointed when my friends, evacuees from Savannah, arrived at Sandhill last Wednesday after I had already moved all the rocking chairs to a safer location.   I could offer food and drink and ice, clean sheets and electricity and a very friendly dog, but no rocking chairs. To be honest, I don’t think they noticed.  We played with dogs and took walks down the dirt road and made spaghetti.  We reminisced and told stories – including one I’d never heard before involving moonshine and driving a hearse from Texas –  and wondered about a lot of things without trying to come up with answers.  Had it not been for the never-ending stream of Weather Channel and WTOC reportage coming from the living room, one would never have known there was a hurricane somewhere nearby. When they left the next day, under a bright sun and a clear sky, I was feeling a strange kind of gratitude for the mandatory evacuation that had sent them my way. At the same time that I was sheltering my friends, my church was sheltering another group of evacuees, the residents of a children’s home from Glynn County.  On Sunday morning, the director of the home spoke briefly to our congregation of their appreciation for that shelter.  She explained that their intentions had been to be as self-sufficient as possible, to stay out of the way, to be no trouble.  But, she explained, everywhere they turned there was someone to help, to provide, to walk alongside. Then she shared something that shook me to the core.  “We wanted to not be a burden,” she said, “but at some point we just surrendered to the love.” The image of my empty porch advanced toward me like a wave, the truth I had known all along, but failed to acknowledge threatening to throw me to my knees.  Rocking chairs and clean sheets and open tables are just tools.  On their own they do not welcome or offer sanctuary or provide nourishment.  Only love does that. And when it does, the only response that makes any sense at all is surrender.  Letting go and giving in to the only thing stronger, more determined, and far far more predictable than a Category 5 hurricane. On Saturday the rocking chairs found their way back onto the porch.  Newly washed with soap and bleach, they look almost new.  They are waiting to do their job.  I am, too. Copyright 2019

It is about six inches square and edged with crocheted lace.  The fabric from which it is made is soft and thin.  In one corner, stitched in tight loops of blue thread is the initial D. I am clutching it as though it can staunch something other than the tears that pool, fall, and then slide down my face toward the jaw that is looser than it used to be. Clutching it as though, if I were to somehow los e it, I would lose also my ability to sit still and would, instead, jump from this church pew and race out into the sunlight gasping for air.   Clutching it as though it is the shaft of a spear in some medieval memento mori, capable of defeating death. Though I have had days now to absorb, it still seems impossible that two men who have been my friends for most of my life, two men born within a few months of each other and of me, have, within the span of 24 hours, died. I am not alone in the disbelief.  From First Baptist at the north end of Main Street to First Methodist at the south, virtually the same g roup of mourners will join me in making my way from one ceremonial goodbye to another. And by the end of this day I will have stood in two long lines to grasp the hands of two strong women to say the most impotent of things – I’m so sorry. I will have listened to two well-crafted sermons reflecting on the too short lives of two good men.  I will have hugged dozens of men and women who were the boys and girls with whom I played dodgeball, learned long division, dissected frogs, and decorated for the Junior-Senior prom. And through it all, I will have held this, this blue and white handkerchief. It is not mine.  It belongs to the wife of one of those boys with whom I dissected frogs.  One of those boys who became the man who is a pallbearer today.  At both funerals. The next day I am standing at the ironing board, pressing the newly washed handkerchief back into shape, stretching the square, smoothing the lace, feeling the heat.  You can not tell now that it has ever been anything but clean and smooth, warm and flat.  You can not tell that it was, in my hand, twisted and knotted, wet and stained. There is probably a behavioral psychologist or anthropologist somewhere who knows why, in moments of fear and distress, humans instinctively seek to hold something.  Does the baby grasping her security blanket sleep with the collective memory that open hands make her vulnerable?  That it is only the clinched fist that can defend? I fold the handkerchief gently to minimize creases and I slip it into an envelope with a note.  The note extends my thanks.  It is adequate, but only that.  I have exhausted my vault of words in a multitude of 10-second encounters with people whose faces wallpaper my memories. Tomorrow I will return the handkerchief to the wife of the boy when we will be together again, this time at a wedding.  A wedding at which the father of the bride is yet another of those same boys. From mourning to dancing.  Where does one end and the other begin?  We move in a Celtic knot, a complete loop with no start or finish.  Eternity as lived out in loyalty, faith, friendship, and love.  Made with one single thread. Copyright 2019

Last week I came within a few inches of putting my hand on a rat snake that had wound itself around my outside faucet.  After the startle, I stood and marveled at the sinuous curves, the gravity-defying balance.  The same day a tree frog jumped over the threshold of the back door, jumped just once and stayed there long enough for me to notice his outlandishly large feet before gently shooing him back outside.  A few days before, as I walked around the yard after dark, I ran up a small rabbit from beneath the holly shrubs  and watched him run-hop in such a way that he could have been propelled by coils.   On Saturday I took my great-nephew Jackson and one of his friends on a walk around the small town where he lives.  We followed the sidewalk past the deserted bank building, the post office, and the American flag flapping briskly in the summer breeze over a flower bed.  “Look!” one of them cried and pointed at our feet where a beetle lay dead.  A long black horn extended from his head, his green shell was mottled with black shapes that could be Rorschach blots.  He sprawled on his back in the midst of a throng of scurrying ants. On Tuesday, once again out walking, but this time alone, I happened upon another unusual insect, a large moth, wider than my index finger is long.  Golden yellow with its own set of splotches, rusty brown.  I tried to get her to climb on to my finger, but she refused, edging delicately away and scattering wing powder as she went, a centimeter at a time.   All of them – the beetle, the moth, the snake, the frog, the rabbit – , such ordinary creatures. But their ordinariness did not keep them from grabbing my attention and taking my breath.   Ordinary.  As I type the word I am reminded that, in the church year, this – these months of heat and humidity, of planting and looking toward harvest, of long days and clear-sky nights – are a part of Ordinary Time, the days between Pentecost and Advent set aside for everyday living.  The use of the word “ordinary” doesn’t connote plain or common, but “ordered for” or, more convicting, “ordained to.”  That is, these days, these months place a calling upon our lives to examine the quotidian tasks of eating and sleeping, bathing and cleaning, walking and resting as acts that answer the question, “What does it mean to be human?”   They turn tasting a tomato sandwich on white bread into communion and diving under an advancing wave into baptism and turning a dead beetle onto his feet an act of compassion.  They turn sunrises and sunsets and meteor showers into manifestations of divine whimsy.  They turn the harried and hurried into the holy.   A few months ago my niece gave birth to her first child and I was fortunate enough to be present.  I watched the nurses, the doctor moving calmly about the room, speaking in what I could only think of as dulcet tones.  I watched Kirck, attentive and calm, soon to be a father and with no idea what that change in status would mean.  And I watched Kate, so strong, so ready.   Adria Jane Viana arrived with a squenched face and clenched fists.  She came with ten fingers and ten toes and two eyes that blinked tightly in the dim light that, to her, was extraordinarily bright.  She was born a perfectly ordinary human. Which is, of course, exactly that for which we had hoped.  And prayed.  And waited with such anticipation that, if one did not know otherwise, one would have thought that she was the first human rather than simply the most recent of millions and millions of others.   A perfectly ordinary human, ordained to being born here, now, into this family, this circle of love and memories and unavoidable expectations.   And, because of that, she grabbed my attention and took my breath away. Copyright 2019

This is the old road.  This is the narrow, two-lane road that winds and loops, rises and falls.  This is the road they call Ocean Highway.  It transports me from Georgia to South Carolina over a bridge that is crowded by marsh, its greenness almost psychedelic in the August heat. Just over the bridge I see a sign announcing the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, a place I didn’t know existed.  Slowing down, I am struck speechless, or as speechless as one can be when one is alone, and I move my head side to side to absorb, to the extent that any human can,  the immense beauty of this humanless place. There are reasons we take the old roads. I have left one gathering of friends on one island to go to another on another.  I am slowed by nostalgia and urged forward by anticipation.  I am in no hurry, but I can hardly wait to get there. One of the friends I have just left was with me the first time I saw the ocean.  The moment that the awkward, eager 13-year-old me stood on the flat white sand and felt the arms of the Atlantic embrace her, heard the waves whisper, “See?  All of this is for you.” About 20 miles into South Carolina, State Highway 170 merges into US Highway 17 – four lanes and more traffic, a good portion of it pulling boat trailers – and I grimace.  Then, almost before I can grieve the loss, 170 veers off, un-merges, and I am back in a tunnel of oak trees. There are reasons we must not be too quick to mourn. About an hour and a half after starting, the GPS on my phone announces, “You have arrived.”  The old road did its job. Over the next couple of days my friends and I will do what women do at the beach.  We will sit in the sun and talk.  We will walk along the beach and talk.  We will stay up late playing word games at the kitchen table in our condo and we will talk.  And laugh.  And cry. On the last night we will walk along the beach at sunset and watch the sky explode in pinks and oranges and purples that will never find their way into a Crayola 64 box.  We will watch the explosion spread across the horizon as though smeared by a giant hand.  And we will turn our heads to see the nearly full moon ease its way out of the ocean and hover across the way from the setting sun like a tennis partner awaiting serve. Then, as the sky darkens and the only light is that of the moon and its fluttering reflection in the water, we will sit on the lifeguard’s box and sing to each other songs about the moon. In the days to come, when all the things we put aside temporarily in order to be here, in this numinous moment, rise up demanding attention, we will remember the flaming sunset, the shimmering moon, the sound of our voices mingling with the salt air and falling on our heads like a blessing.  And in the memory will come the strength, the patience, the will to carry on. There are reasons we look up.  There are reasons we sing. Copyright 2019

Within sight of the Frederica River, its blue-gray water moving slowly against the marsh grass, we sat talking about stories – collective stories, communal stories, the ones we all knew despite the fact that we came from different places. The particular story that had caught our attention that day was the story of Milledgeville and how, in a certain time, the once-state capital had been reduced to something like a threat. “You keep acting like that, boy, they gonna send you to Milledgeville.” “You ‘bout to drive me crazy! I ‘bout as well drive myself to Milledgeville.” Today I received an email from a friend who was part of that conversation, a link to an article written about the State Mental Hospital at Milledgeville and its infamous history. It has been closed for years, its buildings abandoned, falling in on themselves. There are fences and signs saying, Keep Out! They don’t seem to make much difference. A single paragraph at the close of the article describes the hospital cemetery where over 25,000 patients were buried between 1842 and the hospital’s closing. Each grave was originally marked by “a small, numbered iron stake like an elongated teardrop,” but in the 1960s the stakes were removed by groundskeepers to make it easier to mow the grass. In 1997, the stakes were discovered in an overgrown field by a group of visitors. Only 2,000 of them remained. A memorial that included the stakes was eventually established, a sad and cautionary vision of what happens when people are forgotten. My family loves cemeteries. In general. Not just the ones in which are buried the people who share our names and from which we got our best stories. Any old cemetery will do. As a child, my favorite part of Thanksgiving Day, after sweet potato casserole and Aunt Doris’s lime congealed salad, was the moment when all the dishes had been washed and Saran Wrap carefully tightened over what would be the second coming of the meal we’d just eaten and somebody said, “Y’all want to go ride around?” The question required no verbal response and meant only one thing. While Daddy, his brothers and brothers-in-law, and Pa stood around the yard talking cars and playing pitch penny, the women and children pressed themselves into the closest Buick or Oldsmobile – those models generally offering the largest seating capacity – and set forth to explore the final resting places of people we may or may not have known. Generally one of the aunts had performed reconnaissance in the weeks leading up to the holiday and had a location in mind, probably one at which she’d recently attended a graveside service and noticed some particularly interesting funerary art. The fondness with which I remember those afternoons – just chill enough to require a sweater, bright sunlight angled sharply through the trees, the quiet broken only by the rustling of leaves and the respectful murmuring of gentle reminders to the youngest among us not to step on the graves – is a stark contrast to the discomfort that has intruded upon my day as a result of the image of the forgotten graves of Milledgeville. Beneath that ground lie not just the physical remains of depressed wives, alcoholic husbands, children who today would be called behavior disordered, but also their stories – their remembrances of Thanksgiving Day, their voices singing hymns as they hung out their clothes to dry, their laughter drifting across a playground. We will never know what books they read, what made them cry, who they missed most when they left home for Milledgeville. The answers are all buried in unmarked graves. All the answers but one. The only question left for those whose lives bore a stigma most of us will never know, whose offerings to the world were rejected, whose suffering has ended, but whose significance remains, is this: Who is going to teach you not to step on our graves? Copyright 2019 74 views

The shovel sinks into soft earth and two and a half days’ rain collapses in around it making the noise that always comes to mind when I read the words “sucking chest wound.”  I wiggle the shovel back and forth, pull it out, and repeat the motion until I’ve created a circle around the alder tree that has had the audacity to plant itself in my flower bed. I have one flower bed.  Only one.  My singular effort to manifest Grandmama’s green thumb.  It is L-shaped and borders two sides of the deck that looks out over the branch through which, in the winter, I can see water.  One leg of the L is planted in lilies and irises, now overrunning themselves and the cement edgers that I installed to contain them and the mulch that once-upon-a-time I actually kept in place.  The other leg I spent years planting in perennials that grow in unruly clouds – verbena and lantana, salvia and Mexican petunias, coreopsis and creeping jenny.   My favorite, though, is Russian sage. Russian sage grows tall and slender, its color a muted gray-lavender.  It leans into the breeze, drapes itself over all the other plants with a kind of noblesse oblige.  And the scent, oh, the scent is a fragrant greenness both sweet and spicy.   It is hearty and independent and tolerant of the benign neglect that is the hallmark of my gardening philosophy.  I express my gratitude by sighing extravagantly as I clip its blooms and drop them nonchalantly into pitchers and antique vases. And now an alder tree seedling, along with a thorny weave of sticker bushes that stretch up and into the deck railings like the castle hedge meant to keep out the handsome prince and a tangle of vines that has enveloped the shepherd’s hook on which the hummingbird feeder hangs and looks as though it has every intention of finding its way up through the summer sky to the giant’s house, is threatening to overtake my singular flower bed. For 30 minutes I dig.   And dig and dig.  Alder trees, apparently, have an elaborate root system and the rain-softened dirt is not the ally I assumed it would be.  Another 30 minutes and a pull that nearly lands me inside the wheelbarrow results in the expulsion of the alder tree.  And also results in the discovery that its failure to respond to my repeated jerks and yanks and snatches was, at least in part, due to the fact that its roots had been engulfed by those of something else.   Wrapped around and around the roots of the alder, like a new color of yarn added to an wound ball, are the roots of Russian sage. I don’t know how long I stood there, leaning on my shovel, staring at the discovery.  An archaeologist uncovering an Egyptian artifact in a Kansas cornfield could have been no more surprised.  My Russian sage, my favorite, has embraced my nemesis, has wrapped its skinny, but surprisingly strong arms around the thing that threatens the entire flower bed.  There is only one thing to do.  It, too, must go.   And so I keep digging.  The tears that tremble in tiny pools awaiting the blink that will send them falling are not just the result of the sweat that has run down my forehead and into my eyes.  They are the memories of every other time I have had to dig up Russian sage, every other time I’ve had to let go.   But not just let go, which feels like passivity dressed in fatigue, but actively wrench from my heart the roots of a habit, a relationship, an emotion that no longer served, that had grown from a lovely to look at, sweet-smelling flower to a noxious weed. I wipe my eyes with the back of a dirty hand and plunge the shovel back into the damp, black dirt.  I will not finish in one day, but I will finish.  This is my one flower bed.  And I am going to take it back.  Copyright 2019

My friends are selling their house.  And it makes perfect sense.  The boy child just graduated from law school and has an apartment in Atlanta that looks like no apartment I ever had.  And my namesake is living her best life in Manhattan.  Who needs all those exquisite hardwood floors and two-story porches and windows that reach to the floorboards? I remember my friends’ first house, the bungalow in an old neighborhood in Atlanta where the driveways were cracked just enough to display an appropriate amount of insouciance.  It was about the time someone made up the word yuppie and, though it made my friend the wife cringe to even consider it, that’s what they were – young and professional and, by virtue of the fact that they lived in the 29th most populated city in the country, urban.  They also owned a Volvo. I remember the apartment to which they moved when they decided that Savannah, the pre-college home of my friend the husband, made more sense if – big if – they were, in fact, going to have a family.  There were big trees dripping Spanish moss along the perimeter of the complex and I think I may have slept on a pull-out sofa. And this house –  the house whose walls are hung with the gilt-framed birth announcements of the boy child and my namesake, the house whose needlepointed footstool is always stacked with books borrowed from the Chatham County Public Library because my friend the wife is nothing if not thrifty, the house they are selling?  I don’t just remember it. I couldn’t tell you how many meals I’ve eaten at that house, how many walks I’ve taken to the bluff, how many Christmases I’ve sung carols and had cider at the lighting of The Great Tree.   I have always left with something – books or jam or, most valuably, a reminder of my place in the world.  One time, a late Saturday afternoon when Owen had been bitten by something we weren’t sure wasn’t a snake and I’d frantically driven him to the emergency vet, I left with a bowl of water for my dog, lethargic and under the influence of some serious canine narcotics, and yet another reminder for myself, still under the influence of some serious adrenaline, of Robert Frost’s idea of home being the place that takes you in. That place or those places are not, though, wood structures or brick buildings.  They are the arms and hearts that open with your approach.  They are the eyes and  faces that reflect yours.  They are the days and nights in which conversations are had and memories are made. I know this.  And with every birthday my knowing grows deeper.  So why am I sad? My friend the wife texts me.  My namesake is home for her birthday.  The boy child and his girlfriend have also arrived.  Will I come to dinner?  Of course, I will. We laugh and tell stories and eat good food and all the while I am trying to ignore the sign in the front yard and the news I’ve received that the house is under contract, that there is a legally binding document now requiring them to follow through with what I’d hoped was a vain threat.  “We didn’t expect it to sell so quickly.  We have no idea where we’re going.” Funny thing, I think.  Neither do I. A week later my friend the wife is sending me photos of other houses.  Smaller houses.  Farther away.  She is excited.  And I unexpectedly find that, somehow, I am, too. Somehow in the days in between I’ve managed to separate the past from the future without tossing the past.  Looking at the photo of a different kitchen counter I can see the same crock holding the same dish towels.  Looking at empty rooms, I can see the birth announcements hung on a different wall.  I can see the crocheted tablecloth on a different table and a different return address on the birthday card that will come my way in October. “It’s lovely,” I write in response. “I can see myself on that porch.” And I can.  I really can. Copyright 2019

Just past the grain bins and the spot where the fuel tanks used to sit, about a hundred yards beyond the line where a barbed wire fence may or may not still stand in places marking the property line between us and our neighbors, there is a deer trail.  It generally follows the run of the fire break gouged into the earth some years ago and, to be honest, I couldn’t tell you which was there first.  Did the deer adopt the fire break or did the folks on the big yellow earth-moving equipment just follow the winding path beaten down by generations of deer? Either way, we all know it is there.  And during certain times of year we know to be extraordinarily careful when topping the hill as we are more than likely to encounter not a single deer, but multiples of our graceful neighbors crossing the road like harried and hurried pedestrians in some large city. A few afternoons ago Owen and I were spending the last sunlit moments of the day making our usual trek up the road and back.  He often rambles off to follow some scent or sound of which I have no detection and I didn’t really notice that he was not prancing along beside me until I heard a cry off in the woods.  The cry of a baby calf. There was, of course, no baby calf in the woods, but the sound of a baby calf is familiar to me and that is what I recognized in the horror-stricken wail that broke the near-silence of insect hum and low bird song.  In the time it takes for the vibration that is a sound to travel through my ear, register on my brain, and be interpreted thereby, that is, less than a second, the baby calf cry became a baby deer cry and I understood that Owen must have come up on one, very likely newly born, and was – like the animal he is, the wolf he once was – chasing or, worse, attacking. I began screaming.  Screaming loudly.  Calling for Owen over and over and over.  I had no idea where in the vast stand of pines and just-burned undergrowth he was.  I could not go to him, could only hope that somehow the sound of my voice would override the instincts suddenly aflame in his brain and bring him toward me, away from the deer. I heard the rapid rustle of scrub oak and palmettoes and the sound grew louder.  I kept screaming.  Owen!  Owen!  Owen!  And, then, just as I thought my voice was gone, Owen leapt from the woods about five feet in front of me and directly behind him, close enough that I could have touched had I leaned forward, was the mama deer.  She chased Owen down the open road about 25 yards before he abruptly turned and headed back toward me.  The mama deer bounded back into the woods, back to the baby trembling somewhere in the undergrowth. We, Owen and I, did not finish our walk that day.  We immediately turned and headed for home – Owen breathing heavily, his tongue dangling like a flag left out in the rain, and me trembling all over. We were far enough from home that I had time to think about the encounter – to consider how close that mama deer had come to me and the risk she’d taken in doing so, to remember that the only one of the characters in the action thriller who had lines was the baby deer, and to realize that in order to protect the one she loved the mama deer had to leave it. I was also reminded that, in truth, there was nothing unusual about what I’d seen and heard, what I’d felt and was still feeling.  That, other than my presence as audience, the scene is replayed over and over every day in the acres that surround me.  Deer flee from predators, birds build nests, snakes go sidewinding across the road leaving waves of sand in their wakes. I hope, though, that it will always be unusual to me.  That the sound of a woodpecker high in a pine tree will always make me stop and listen and that the scent of honeysuckle will always make me smile.  I hope that no matter how many full moons I see crest over Sandhill, how many summers I feel easing in on May breezes, how many pairs of Canada geese I watch glide through the sky above me I will always tremble as though a mama deer has just rushed by. Copyright 2019

Last night, just as the sky had turned to the color of dark-washed jeans, I walked outside onto the porch and felt spring’s hand on my shoulder, pushing me gently out into the darkness.  I paused a moment to draw in a long deep breath of green-scented air and, just as I did, I saw a barn swallow perched in the eaves.  Absolutely still. He ignored my acknowledgment and remained as he was. He could have been a dec oy, so calm and unmoving, up on the ledge, up against the haint blue ceiling.  Owen and I walked around the yard  – along the edge of the road, down the driveway, across the branch line, up along the field, over and over – for about 30 minutes.  We saw a sharp splinter of moon dangling in the western sky and a small patch of Johnson grass sprouted in a field awaiting planting.  We discovered the branch of an alder tree bent to the ground beneath the weight of a bird feeder I’d overfilled.  We played fetch with a rubber ball missing a chunk of rubber.  And when I walked back inside, it didn’t occur to me to look for the barn swallow. This morning, just as the sky was brightening to the color of a favorite chambray shirt, I walked outside onto the porch and heard the flutter of wings above my head.  Two barn swallows swooped and dove from one end to the other, out into the open and back again, their movements tatting a lacy air-web within inches of my face. It didn’t take a tremendous amount of ornithological knowledge to formulate an assumption that the two were a pair and that they’d chosen somewhere on my porch to build a nest.  It didn’t take a tremendous amount of any kind of knowledge to figure out that they didn’t want me messing with it.  Wherever it was. I let my eyes glide over the tops of the sturdy square columns that hold up the porch roof.  No evidence of a mud daub nest.  At least none that I could see.  And, yet, it had to be there.  These two would not be flying sorties if it wasn’t. Barn swallows are beautiful birds – their backs the deepest indigo blue, their chests a rusty orange, their long split tails trimmed in white dots that remind me of an ellipsis.  These two are also, it seems, incredibly prompt.  The research I couldn’t resist doing informed me that my friends winter in South and Central America, leaving there in February so as to arrive at their summer breeding grounds, in this case, Sandhill, by late April to early May.  And here it is the first week in May. I’ve thought about George and Virginia (Yes, I named them.) off and on all day.  I’ve found myself wondering where that nest is going to be and how many eggs she is going to lay.  I’ve contemplated the way they flew – not side by side, but in complementary patterns.  I’ve marveled at the thousands of miles they managed to fly before arriving at Sandhill and finding each other. The only conclusion to which I’ve come is that none of my questions or contemplations mean the first thing to George and Virginia.  Or to the herd of deer that moved slowly, like a funeral cortege, through my backyard last week.  Or to the family of geese that my brother shepherded across the road the other day.  They are not interested in or affected by the thoughts, intentions, or desires of those who observe them. Which raises the question of how often have I, in making a flight plan, allowed the opinions of spectators to influence my route or destination?  How many times have I tried to match my gait to someone else’s only to find myself out of breath or so far out in front that I was, in reality, walking alone anyway?  How frequently have I sat still, still as a decoy, in an attempt to go unnoticed, doing my best to hide my shiny indigo coat? I want to be more like a barn swallow.  And over the next two or three weeks, while George and Virginia build their nest and lay their eggs and hatch their babies, I’m going to pay close attention and learn everything I can.  Copyright 2019

My friends and I, the five of us, communicate most often by group email.  We are scattered geographically and are physically in the same spot only once or, at best, twice a year.  Those emails, the ones that are written in a unique vernacular developed over years, keep us close, remind us of who we are and where we’ve been. This week one of us, the one who spends her days riding trains and mucking about bogs, shared recent adventures with her grandchildren who live in south Alabama.  She, her daughter, and the daughter’s children were frolicking on Dauphin Island when they encountered a crab who was, as Annie put it, “hopelessly entangled in seaweed and fishing line.” Hiking mountains and mucking about in bogs have turned my friend into someone who is not going to walk past an entangled crab, so the four of them began the difficult task of freeing the crab from her imprisonment.  “We've all seen the photos of sea creatures tangled in plastic and such,” she wrote.  “This was my first real life encounter with it and I was so angry.  Crabs have eyes, you know, and this one kept looking at me, angry, confused, and suffering. We thought we lost her twice before finally getting the last knot undone.” My imagined vision -- the four of them hovering intently over the small crab – brought to mind a gold chain I had not long ago retrieved from my suitcase and which, despite my careful packing, had knotted itself into a limp mess of shimmering links.  I held it in the palm of my hand for a few moments, staring with great intention as though my gaze could magically unloose the knots, and then, forced to acknowledge my impotence, sat down at the kitchen table with a straight pin and set about the laborious task of eliminating the tangle. I slowed my breath.  I steadied my hand. I took my time.  Link by link the necklace spread.  Loop by loop the knots loosened. The two images froze side by side like a split computer screen.  Annie and her family on one side, me on the other.  A sunny day on the beach, a sunny day in my kitchen.  Four blonde heads, one brunette.  And then I saw it.  The similarity.  The sameness.  The common element between the events. The work, the undoing, the redemption was happening in shadow.  In both cases, bent heads and hunched shoulders had formed a circle within which the bright light, light that can be blinding, had been filtered just enough to make the problem three-dimensional, just enough to give depth and heft to the work at hand, just enough to ensure that the liturgy, the work of the people, would result in salvation. That is an important thing to remember.  We are told so often to be the light, bring the light, live in the light, that it would be easy to forget that shadow has its place as well.  Hostas, hydrangea, and coleus grow best in shade.  Photographs are developed in a darkroom.  Seeds sprout underground. Annie finished her story by telling us that when the final knot was undone,  the crab skittered off.  Out of the shadows, into the sunshine, into the water.  “I assure you,” Annie said, “she stopped, turned to us, and waved that claw before leaving.” I believe her. Copyright 2019

I will never understand rain. Never understand how it falls so straight, drips so musically, runs so swiftly downhill. Never understand how it begins so quickly, stops so quickly, puddles so perfectly still. I will forever be amazed at the scent of rain in summer, the feel of rain in winter, the taste of rain in springtime foretelling tomatoes and okra and corn. Its slick softness and soft slickness and mirror-like reflections of sunlight. Its sound on leaves and roofs and roads, under feet and paws and tires, the splat and splash and slosh. And I will never become accustomed to, but forever be prepared for the sudden and fierce rushing that it makes sweeping across the open fields in the middle of the night, unhindered and unencumbered, like an unbroken stallion. I was almost home, with less than half a mile of just-plowed dirt road between me and the driveway, when the stallion galloped toward me. In less than 30 seconds the way was transformed from gloomy, but visible to white and impenetrable. I felt the dirt-turned-mud grasp at the tires and pull them back and forth like a child waving a flag on the Fourth of July. The water pelted against the windshield in hard bursts as I loosened my grip on the steering wheel, holding it just firmly enough to ease the car away from the ditches that felt far deeper than usual. With only a few yards left to navigate, sliding on the stretch of road where the ditches disappear and there is nothing but low furrows between the road and the fields, I let go of the breath I’d held for what seemed ten minutes just as the car swung sideways and moved toward the plowed dirt. In some miracle display of physics, it swung back around and into the driveway. Not for the first time I thanked God for a carport. An hour later the rain was gone. In the distance the sky was still a dull pewter color, like a plate left outside, and the air was full of moisture, but nothing fell. I walked around the yard and felt the water from the grass seep through my tennis shoes and then through my socks. Making my way through the backyard, under the sawtooth oaks and the sycamore that guard the northern perimeter, I saw that, as usual, the sycamore had lost a lot of branches. Long and skinny and knotty like an old woman’s fingers. Most of them were a couple of feet long, but one I picked up was taller than I am. As wet as they were, they managed to rattle a little in my hands as I held them together and walked toward the branch to toss them away. It was on my way back, I think, that I noticed how full the sycamore had grown in the last week, how green its frothy leaves had become, how shady it is going to be come summer. I stopped under the long limbs and realized that, despite all the branches it had lost, it was still whole. And then it came to me that all the branches I’d picked up, all the ones I’d tossed away had been leafless. Not a one of them had born a single leaf. The rain, the hard hard rain and its accompanying wind, had not broken off one branch that was running with sap, that was producing life, but only those that were dead. I’ve had a few things fall at my feet lately. Fall in response to sudden storms I didn’t see coming. I’m just now realizing that the ones that fell were the dead branches. The ones with life, with promise are still hanging on. They are producing leaves and catching a breeze and I can tell it’s gonna be a shady summer. Copyright 2019

The air is chilly.  Again.  The birds I heard yesterday morning, at least four different kinds, have retreated to their nests to avoid the wind.  The sky that was so blue as to almost hurt my eyes has faded to gray.  Spring is such a tease. Lifting my eyes to look across the porch, across the yard, across the road, then across the field, I see the woods.  Loblolly pines, thick and bristly, tower over  oaks which are just filling out their branches with leaves.  Trees I can’t identify from this distance –  tall skinny ones with irregular branches,  short fat ones with indistinguishable foliage, willowy ones along the edge bending gracefully in the breeze  – have burst into every shade, tint, and hue of green on the Sherwin-Williams paint wheel. For a moment I am overwhelmed with gratitude that I am the one who gets to see this, that I am the one who gets to absorb the exquisite loveliness of all the lines and angles, the light and shadow.  That I alone, out of all the people on earth, am standing right here right now. A couple of years ago I spoke to a group of people who are involved in conservation in coastal Georgia.  The topic of my presentation was “How to Make an Environmentalist.”  I shared with them how I came to love the outdoors, the land, the water, the things that made me open to that love.   I started with a memory. I am 4 or 5 years old. My arms are curled tightly around my father's neck. His arms are wrapped around my waist. We are standing in the Ogeechee River, wide and dark, brown as coffee. The trees that grow along its banks are tall, heavy with branches that hang over the river,  dripping Spanish moss. On the sandbar just a few yards away, my family – aunts and uncles and cousins, grandparents, my mother, my brother –  move around in a cone of sunshine, a spotlight cutting through the canopy of cypress and pine and scrub oak.  They are laughing and talking.  The children are running back and forth, splashing at the edge of the water. It is bright and noisy where they are.  But where we are – my father and I – it is dim and quiet.  It is peaceful.  It is a different place.  This is my first, my oldest memory of not just being outside, but being IN the  world. In that memory I found a template.  In that memory I located the source.  In that memory I figured out the combination of gifts that would, many years later, end up with me on my front porch in a state of marvel. I was young enough that my family was still my entire world.  Where they went, I went.  What they liked, I liked.  What they honored, protected, appreciated, I would learn to honor, protect, and appreciate. I was safe, held securely in the arms of someone I trusted implicitly.  I was so completely comfortable that I could absorb the sensory elements of that experience, absorb and retain them for the rest of my life. And I was in an ordinary place.  The river whose proper name was never used by the people who made their way there to fish and swim.  The river that was just down the road from home. The river that belonged to us. Those ingredients – innocence, safety, and familiarity – made me a plowed field, prepared for the seeds of curiosity of wonder, seeds that grew into a craving to know the names of trees and identify the songs of birds, seeds that blow across the landscape of every single day.  And sometime between that summer day and this spring morning, somewhere between that river and this porch, I fell in love with the world. Copyright 2019

At the end of a long drive bound by neatly manicured grounds, behind a trim brick building, lie the remains of the stockade that was Camp Sumter, better known as Andersonville Prison.  I first learned about Andersonville from Carene Mallard, she of the tight perm and tighter smile, she who bore no foolishness in her attempts to educate the adolescents of Bulloch County in the broad strokes of American History.  I did not miss the point that Andersonville was an awful place, a horrible, frightful place, but still I wanted to see it.  And I have ever since. Today my friends who live nearby have served as genies and granted my wish. The exhibits, the films, the displays tell the story of all American POWs, not just those of the Civil War, and as we make our way through the chronological hallways I begin to see familiar things.  Television screens flickering with black and white images of serious-eyed men in jungle fatigues, cigarettes dangling from their lips.   MIA bracelets engraved with the names and dates of disappearance of real men, men with parents and wives and children.  The flight suit of the first American female pilot ever taken captive, its sleeves fitted with zippers to accommodate the casts of her two broken arms. Discreet signs along the road direct us to the cemetery where the soldiers are buried.  Identified originally only by number, all but a few of the thousands of graves now host simple white headstones bearing names and regiments.   In even rows that move up and down the rolling hills of the coastal plain they look like a strange crop. A little over 60 miles away, in Macon’s Rose Hill Cemetery, is a similar harvest.  Soldier’s Square, a plot of nearly 600 – as opposed to Andersonville’s thousands – similarly shaped and inscribed monuments mark the final resting places of men, most of them boys really, who bore arms for the other side. We used to go there, my friends and I, to escape the closeness of campus that even the happiest of college students can stand for only so long. After a visit to Duane and Berry’s hallowed sites and a quick drive-by of the mausoleums nearest the railroad tracks that were said to be frequented by covens of local witches, we would respectfully and slowly wend our way past the graves of those we assumed, in our ignorance, to have died brave and valiant deaths. Sixty miles is not such a long way.  Not now.  Not when I can drive it in less than an hour.  But sixty miles, when one is tired and hungry and suddenly not sure what it is exactly that one is fighting to preserve, well, sixty miles might as well have been 600.  Those wearing gray and those wearing blue had absolutely no idea how very close they were. It has been said that if women were in charge there would be no wars.  Maybe there is truth in that.  I don’t know.  Women have never been in charge.  But every day we get a little closer and I wonder how we’ll do. Whether we will be better than anyone else has been in keeping the peace, better than any other gender or generation has been in finding common ground, better than our ownselves have been so far in recognizing that we, all of us, are, as Maya Angelou wrote, “more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.” On one of the walls of the Andersonville Museum hangs a quote from a speaker at a reunion of Union and Confederate Troops held at Gettysburg in July, 1913: “We have found one another again as brothers and comrades ... enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten.” Amen.  May it be so. Copyright 2019