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What now? The string of holidays tumbling one right after the other like puppies down a hill is over. The unexpected magic of a new year snowfall has melted and left behind thousands of digital photos, but little else. The joie de football created by high hopes and provincialism has faded with the disappointing scores. So what now? What is going to keep me alive through the dead of winter – when the last dangling hydrangea leaves are slimy and brown, when the rain has left ruts dried into deep ditches, hard shards of clay that crunch beneath my feet like glass, when the wind rattles the trees, the windows, and even my bones? There is not much I like about this season. Homemade soup, Russian tea, high school basketball. That’s about it. I am not much of one for the whole curling up with a book and a blanket thing or the curling up with Netflix and a blanket thing or, really, curling up at all. It gives me a headache to hunch my shoulders, to curve my spine. So, instead of turning up the heat and closing the shades, opening a bag of Oreos and grabbing the remote control, I go outside. Make myself go outside. Force myself to face down the chill and the wind. I turn myself into a clothing lasagna. Cuddl Duds and tights and socks, Cuddl Duds and undershirt and sweatshirt, coat and gloves and earmuffs. I cross the threshold, cross the porch, and walk. Into the wind and away from the place where the sun is setting in bleached-out colors, I don’t see much worth noting. There is no animal movement. Not even the birds. The fields are all cut over. The landscape is one wide swath of beige. What now? The question returns, an uninvited companion, and I have no idea to whom I am directing the inquiry – Myself? God? The trees that arc over my head like flying buttresses? I do know it is not just a new year’s resolution-type question. I do know that it’s not about the next hour or day or week. I know that what I am asking has nothing to do with what is written on my calendar and everything to do with what is written on my heart. And what might that be? If I believe all the Bible verses given to me for memorization by Sunday School teachers over the year, there is a great deal of scripture written there, but I suspect there is something more, something written in my own hand. If I am to move through this cold and dark season with any purpose, any hope of survival, I have to know what it says. Right this minute I’m not sure. Behind me the sun has set quickly, the pale lavender sky melting like butter on toast. Movement is keeping me warmer than I’d have thought when I started out, but my toes are beginning to tingle. The interminable stream of interrogatory sentences is beginning to slow, along with my breath. Time to go home. Unpeeled of all the layers, I warm up walking through the house as I check my phone. I notice a friend’s new Facebook profile photo in which he is sporting a sweatshirt from his alma mater. It takes me a moment to realize that the photo was taken in a mirror and “Georgia” is written backwards across his chest. Readable, but disorienting. I pause and close my eyes, aware suddenly that there is a discovery to be had somewhere amid the pixels and computer code. Could it be that I have just been disoriented, like a hiker caught in an avalanche? That what is written on my heart, the instructions that are meant to get me from here to there, are still readable and still exactly the same as they have always been? That I can trust my ability to see what is true despite its appearing to be the mirror opposite? Eyes open, I look around. There is a wall of books. There is a painting of the marsh on Saint Simons. There is a photo of me holding my great-nephew. With every turn of my head the answer grows clearer. What now? This. This breath. This moment. This life. Copyright 2018

“Watch for deer.” It is an admonition that – along with, “Be sweet,” and “Tell your mama and them hey,” – initiates among my people the standard ritual of goodbye. I don’t remember too many times in my life in which I have taken leave of someplace that I did not receive one, two, or all three of them. My required response, the response of anyone departing, is the simple, “I will.” It reminds me a lot of the marriage vow. Several years ago I had been to Nahunta to the visitation for the grandmother of two of my dearest friends. It was dark and late and the way home was two hours on two-lane highways. I made my way around the funeral home bidding all the various loved ones good night and assuring them that I’d be back the next morning for the service, and, to a person, every single one of them said, “Watch for deer.” And I did. All the way back up Highway 301 through Jesup and Ludowici and Glennville and Claxton and all the way to my driveway. I was within a few yards of the carport when I heard a boom and felt a rattle that, to one schooled in such things, was instantly recognizable as the sound of a grown deer running head long into an SUV. The deer, mercifully, died and I, fortunately, had excellent insurance coverage. Done and done. Except that now every time someone tells me to watch for deer and every time I turn into my driveway late at night, I get a little jolt of adrenaline, half expecting another encounter with something racing through the dark. Interestingly enough, walking around outside in the dark has, over the past year or so, become one of my favorite things to do. It is something to which I look forward, an activity that produces inspiration rather than requiring it. It is a daily comfort, a dependable solace, a soothing balm. And, until just the other night, it never occurred to me to watch for deer. I often hear them rustling in the branch or get a glimpse of them leaping along the horizon under the light of a full moon, but those deer, the rustling and leaping deer, are disembodied, ethereal, practically magical. They are not the same as the deer about which I have been warned, for which I must always be on alert, of which I must force myself to have some fear. One night a couple of weeks ago Owen and I were walking the perimeter of the yard, just along the back line where the saw-tooth oaks and the sycamore grow, when suddenly, with only the faintest rustling of fallen limbs and dried grass, a deer came running at full speed directly across our path, no more than 25 feet in front of us. I stopped hard and focused as best I could in the pale yellow cone of the yard light. I could make out the curve of antlers resting like a crown on his head. His white belly flashed like a semaphore with each jump. He was about as tall as I am, hoof to tip. And in two, maybe three, seconds he was gone – across the driveway, into the field. I was surprised that Owen didn’t chase him. Instead, the two of us stood very still staring toward the spot where the deer had disappeared into the darkness as I realized he’d followed the same route as the deer who had hit me three years ago. The exact same route. It was as though there was a ley line cutting through the backyard. All through Christmas and on to New Year’s, as the weather got colder and the moon grew larger, Owen and I walked. And I kept thinking about the deer, both of them. It was as though I’d been handed a knot to unravel, a code to break. Then, just as the moon reached full, an egg yolk threatening to break, I figured it out. “Watch for deer,” was more than an encouragement of safe driving. More than a reminder toward diligence. Every time my grandmother, my mother, my friends had said, “Watch for deer,” it had meant far more than just, “Be careful.” It had meant and would always mean, “Pay attention. There is more happening here than you can see.” Watch for deer and you may find yourself face to face with wildness. Watch for deer and you may realize how little there is to fear. Watch for deer and you just may find magic humming through the ground beneath your feet. Copyright 2018

Chambless is five. Her future career goals include being a mermaid. At a recent Georgia Southern football game, she excitedly noted that all of the cheerleaders had golden hair – “just like me.” She also knows and uses words like cornucopia. Just the other day, she sneaked up from behind and saw her mother placing an Amazon order. It happened to be an order for a highly-coveted Christmas gift. Alerted somehow to her precocious child, Jennifer quickly turned the situation to parental advantage and said, “Your dad and I were going to get you this for Christmas, but now that you have found out I guess we won’t. If you still want it you will have to write a letter to Santa and ask him.” The letter was quickly written and dispatched and shortly thereafter I received a request for the use of my very important Amazon Prime Two-Day Free Shipping account on behalf of Santa Claus. Click, click, done. The incident got me thinking back to when I was Chambless's age and my highly-coveted Christmas present was a Ginny doll, a hard plastic doll with jointed limbs and the availability of an extensive wardrobe of fashionable clothes. Several weeks before Christmas my mother sent me to get something for her from her bedroom. I had already demonstrated at that point the personality traits that more benevolent friends and family now describe as diligence and organizational skills (and which would ultimately lead to my self-diagnosis of OCD) and when I could not find whatever the now-forgotten object was whatever place Mama had indicated it would be found, I began searching in other places, intent upon not disappointing her by saying I couldn't find it. Being a first born is hard. Inside Mama and Daddy's bedroom closet was a cardboard box, nearly as tall as I, in which Mama, a child of the Depression, kept remnants. She never threw any piece of fabric away, convinced that one day they could be used. And, in fact, most of them eventually were when she and Grannie made a quilt for me. Having exhausted every other location, I begin rummaging in the box. About halfway down I came across not the object for which I had been searching, but a Ginny doll. The realization of what the discovery meant was, I’m sure, both surprising and shocking, but I remember neither of those feelings, only the thought that I had to continue the search. When I finally located the object, I took it into the living room and presented it proudly to Mama, never saying the word about what else I had found. I was an adult before I told anyone the story of how I came to know the truth about Christmas. There is a song by John Lennon that begins with the lyric, “So, this is Christmas.” It always strikes me as wistful and just short of cynical, but also a little too true and I listen to it every year as a reminder that part of my celebration of this holy season has to include an examination of that truth, that if the season is to mean anything at all we must acknowledge the reality, not just the ideal. Which includes the fact that not every highly coveted gift is actually received, that sometimes we wish and hope and maybe even pray for something we don’t get, we can’t have. Yet, it also means, once we learn that immutable fact, we tend to learn another, complimentary one: that the central idea behind the season is not the gift-receiving, but the gift-giving. Which is why we adults go to such elaborate means (including facilitating letters to Santa and utilizing Amazon Prime) to see children be delighted by what they find under the tree. And which is why – even in places ravaged by hurricanes and floods, in places where landmines are easier to find than Christmas lights, in places where most five-year-olds know nothing of cornucopias and the plenty they represent – mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, doting aunts and uncles still wait with anticipation, with hope, with hunger for the brief respite afforded by the joy reflected on their children's faces Christmas morning. I never told my parents that I no longer believed. I never will. Because I still do. Copyright 2017

Owen, the new dog, and I were out walking. At the crossroads, we saw two cars had pulled over. Two cars containing so many children that I wondered how they had all fit. They had clamored over the deep ditch like clowns spilling out into the big top and were fathering along the edge of the cotton field yet-to-be-picked. A mother, still standing in the road, was aiming a 35mm camera at the clowns/children. “Grandma,” she explained, “would never forgive us if we didn't get a picture in the south Georgia snow.” I've never liked that phrase, south Georgia snow. It's always seems just a little too cute. What Dorothy Brannen would have circled with her red pen and called trite. And it also makes me a little defensive, as though snow is such a wonderful thing that a land without it is backward, overly provincial, pitiful. But this morning – with the fog a thick and even blanket stretching all the way from treetop to heaven, one solid swath of pale gray enveloping and at the same time silhouetting the near leafless trees in the pecan grove – the field at the edge of the road did look as though it were covered in snow. Which made me think about the Christmas Eve it snowed in Adabelle and the time it snowed at Wesleyan. And the weekend we went to Boone, North Carolina, to ski, only Kate had broken her pelvis when she fell off the horse, so while everybody else was flying down the mountain, she spent the weekend tromping through the snow on crutches and I tromped along behind her serving as ballast. I can still see our tracks in the snow – footprints and crutch marks. The memory makes me pause. I really can see the tracks, dark indentations in the crisp, cold white. Four ovals for the boots and two circles for the crutch tips. The ovals, the footprints, they make two lines, side-by-side, but different. I stop the memory reel. I re-wind to make sure. My footprints make two lines. Kate’s footprints make two more lines. Four lines through the snow. Fourth grade. Big piece of dark blue construction paper. Create a snow scene, we were told. What did we know of snow? I brushed thick white paint across the bottom of the paper and, while it dried, I put a few stars in the dark blue sky. I watched my classmates attempt to create realistic human figures on their winter landscapes. I knew my limitations. My scene would be people-less. Quiet, serene. A snowy hill adorned with just trees. I decided to add some footprints. Black paint, small brush. Two rows of tiny black ovals moving up the hill toward the sky. I remember thinking it was mysterious, that no one would ever know who made those footprints, where she was going, what she was doing out there in the snow, alone. At about that moment, my teacher appeared, looking over my shoulder. “That’s not how footprints look,” she said condescendingly. “Footprints make a straight line.” She walked away. She was wrong. I knew it then in the way that a nine-year-old knows things she can’t put into words. I knew it thirty years later when Kate and I trudged slowly over the mountain. And I know it now, with another twenty years’ distance, sitting in my car gazing out over a field of south Georgia snow. Footprints don’t make a straight line. They weave and wobble. They turn in, then out. They crush things inadvertently and move on. They leave a record, but don’t always answer questions. Footprints, in the snow or otherwise, don’t make a straight line. Copyright 2017

Confession: I set the table primarily for myself. The good dishes and the brass candlesticks and the tall tapers. The cloth napkins rolled and threaded into napkin holders. The broom sedge or cotton stalks or whatever I’ve foraged from the fields around the house staked into vases and pitchers and crocks. I do it because I like the way the sunlight reflects off the creamy white china and the way the candle wax puddles and quivers for a split second before plunging over the edge in a long, slow stream. I do it because I like the heft of the glasses, the forks, the knives in my hands as I circle the chairs to drop them into place. I like the way the wrinkles on the tablecloth stretch and smooth underneath the weight of all the plates and platters. This predilection does not reflect the Thanksgiving tables of my childhood, cleared of everything – even the white crocheted doily and bud vase of plastic flowers – , but the roasting pans and Corningware dishes and thick crockery bowls that held the day’s feast. The tables at which the men gathered first to eat quickly and ravenously of the turkey and dressing, creamed corn, sweet potato souffle, and chicken and dumplings. The tables around which, after the men had gone outside to play pitch penny in the autumn sunshine, the women circled to eat slowly and deliberately, taking deep breaths for the first time since rising that morning. The tables under which I sat quietly among the crossed ankles of my mother and grandmother and aunts and listened to them talk. Their voices, all of them thick with the country Southern accent I did not yet know was an accent, lifted and fell in waves of soft laughter, half-hearted complaint, honest inquiry, and communal instruction. Their conversation was punctuated with names of people, some of them familiar, others not, that I knew intuitively were my people – Minnie Lee. Annie Belle. Lessie Mae. In the dimness, unable to sit up straight without hitting my head and rattling the dishes, I learned that a lady didn’t say the word pregnant in public and, instead, referred to someone expecting a child as being “p.g.” I learned that in-laws, at least in our family, stood on equal footing with everyone else. I learned that, in that time and place, being a woman meant eating last and enjoying the meal more. And I learned how to tell stories. I learned which details to include and which ones won’t be missed. I learned how to mimic the voices of the characters and where to throw in a “bless her heart” or “Lord, have mercy.” I learned the value of an appreciative audience and the necessity of a powerful ending. Underneath those tables, the ones without a single cloth napkin or lit candle, I felt the first stirring of an identity, the first inkling that words are powerful, that story is what connects us, that sharing can make us whole. That is why I set the table. I make the sharpness of the knife blade and the curving lip of the bowl an offering. The lit candles become a prayer. I say to those who gather around it, “This is a place deserving of attention, deserving of time. The table is not just for holding food, but for holding us.” Copyright 2017

The sun has not yet cracked the tree line. Its blush is just beginning to show when I step out onto the front porch to gauge the day. The air is close and the bird song is clear. Whatever I hear, see, feel today, I will hear, see, feel sharply. This much I know. I must leave home early this morning for court in Jenkins County. I will cross the Ogeechee River to get there and it occurs to me, as it has countless times over these many years, that whenever I leave Bulloch County to go to Effingham or Jenkins or Screven, whenever I “ride the circuit,” as we used to say, I always have to cross the river. That thought is especially poignant today, All Saints’ Day. The day on which the Christian church remembers all those who have died in the faith. The day on which “Shall We Gather At The River” is the hymn of choice and no one seems to notice that using a river as the metaphor for the afterlife sounds more than vaguely like Styx and Greek mythology. In this thoughtful and near-melancholy state – a mile and a half from home, but still on the dirt road – I am jolted by a flicker of movement off to the right. I slow an already slow car to allow the deer I can not see yet to cross my path. He bounds from the field edge, over the ditch, hitting the road once with his hard hooves and bounding into the woods on the other side. Before I can accelerate, a squirrel who could have easily been crushed by one of those hooves, darts across the road in the opposite direction. I pause for a moment, my foot on the brake, to consider what I’ve just observed. One large animal, one small, spurred to movement simultaneously. Both panicked into moving directly into the path of danger. Neither would have been at any risk from me or the thirty-five hundred pounds of metal and plastic I was navigating had he simply remained where he was – deer in the open field, squirrel in the underbrush. Neither would have found his heart thumping wildly, his extremities quivering had he kept still and allowed the traffic, albeit a single car, to simply flow on by. I wonder how many times I have been the deer, the squirrel. How many times I’ve heard an unfamiliar noise and responded to it with fear just because it was unfamiliar, not because I had any reason to believe I was in peril. I drive on. I cross the river. I go to court. I cross it again on my way back. I don’t notice it, not even the sign. My thoughts are preoccupied with the deer and the squirrel and the paradox upon which I’ve stumbled as I consider that they ran from opposite directions. The side of the road from which the deer escaped was the side to which the squirrel ran for cover. The side from which the squirrel was flushed in fear was the side on which the deer found camouflage. Can both sides be simultaneously safe and dangerous? I drive on and the paradox morphs into the tender idea that leaving doesn’t always have to be about avoiding danger and arriving doesn’t always have to be about seeking safety. Sometimes it’s not even about leaving and arriving. Sometimes it is simply about the crossing itself. About the spot exactly halfway across the bridge where the view is better there than anywhere else. About the moment when all four of the deer’s hooves are in the air and he is, without a feather to his name, flying. So, yes, we will gather at the river. And with any luck, we will cross it by leaping straight into the sky. Copyright 2017

The late afternoon sun made my shadow long and narrow. It stretched out in front of me like a plumb line. I had brought with me no book, no iPod, nothing to mute the sound of my shoes crunching like cereal on the dirt that just the day before had been mud. A few yards ahead, startled by my approach, a covey of quail flushed from its hiding place in the broom sedge. The flutter of twenty wings sounded like pages of a book – thick and well-worn – falling from beneath a thumb’s stroke. They rose and scattered, some of them barely clearing the vegetation. One of them flew head-height across the road in front of me, its soft brown body a smudge against the sky. They are such vulnerable creatures. Shy and elusive, they generally depend upon their camouflage to protect them, crouching and freezing when threatened, and they fly only when danger is close. And, yet, they like to live on the edges of things. Edges of fields, edges of forests. Edges are perilous places. There is a photo in the windowsill of my office. A sunrise over Goulds Inlet, one of my favorite spots on my favorite island. My boss took the photo and gave it to me, aware of my affinity for sunsets and St. Simons. This morning he came to the door to ask a question, make a comment, alert me to something, I don’t remember what exactly. “Nice photo,” he quipped, pointing to the one in the windowsill. And from there our conversation slipped and slid from one place to another until we were talking about erosion and accretion, the falling away and the building back. “Edges are fragile places,” I said. I visited some friends this weekend, friends who enfold me, warm me, feed me. Friends who care not one whit what irritations I bring with me, what impatience I pack in my suitcase, what impertinence and frustration and general human-being-ness I drag through the front door. They care only that I am there and I care only that they have welcomed me. We have loved and laughed and lived not just from the sweet center of existence, the place where the heart beats strong and steady and the sun shines long and hard and the future can not possibly be anything but wondrous, but also from the edges. The perilous edges. The fragile edges. Places where hearts and bodies and wills were pushed to their limits. Places where camouflage was not enough to forestall danger, where erosion ate away at foundations. Places where the dirt crunching beneath our feet was broken dreams. And this is what I have learned: I would rather live on the edge – the perilous, fragile edge. Because it is how we live, what we do on the edge that determines whether we are men and women of courage or cowardice, faith or fear. It is how we face the attacks – with shattered shields or no shields at all – that measures the depths of our dreams. And it is with whom we face them – those who know the edge rather than those who huddle in the center – that make the battle, regardless of its outcome, worthwhile. Copyright 2017

It was a gift from Daddy’s friend Frank Simmons when we first moved out to Adabelle in 1974. It was supposed to be – “supposed to be” taking on the colloquial Southern meaning of “presented with the understanding and belief that it was” – a silver-leaf maple. It didn’t take long for everybody concerned to figure out that it wasn’t, like a lot of things, what it was made out to be. It didn’t take long because a sycamore tree, which is what it was, will grow like a weed under the right conditions and, apparently, the backyard offered excellent conditions. Over the years we decided that it was all just as well. That sycamore became an excellent climbing tree for Adam and Kate and the flower bed Mama made around its trunk burst forth in the spring with a wild mess of daffodils and red lilies that could have made a beautiful cover for Southern Living. We were never much for raking leaves at our house, so when the leaves, big as a grown man’s hand, starting falling and floating through the autumn sky we ignored the mess and just enjoyed the rustle and crunch as we walked through them. I was always particularly enamored with the bark, the way it peeled off in long sheets and left the tree smooth and cool. It made me think of the Native American canoes in my elementary school social studies books and I imagined how it could have been used like papyrus to send messages or record stories. I didn’t know then that the peeling accompanied growth. Years later, after I’d built my own house, I came home one afternoon to find Mama and Daddy in my backyard, huddled around a fingerling of a tree with a couple of bright green leaves sprouted at the top. “We brought you a sycamore,” Daddy pronounced as he stomped around the freshly-turned dirt with his work boot. “This all right?” he asked pointing at the tree and referring to the location. It was, of course. That tree is somewhere around 15 years old now. Maybe a little older. I don’t know for sure. What I do know for sure is that it is old enough to have become an elegant and more than adequate shade tree for Sandhill and young enough to still look small compared to Mama and Daddy’s. I walk under its branches every afternoon as I make my way around the yard and, at a certain point, looking from a certain angle, and when the field in between is growing peanuts not corn, I can see the other sycamore tree at the same time. The older house with the bigger tree and the newer house with the smaller tree. It reminds me of the elementary school primers with which we learned to read the words big and little, tall and short, old and new. Opposites, our teachers told us. These things are opposites. But our teachers were wrong. I am standing under my sycamore and one of its limbs has gotten tangled in my hair. I reach up to pull it loose, to brush away the fading leaves that fall across my cheek, and I realize that, in the context of living things, there are no opposites. Only movement. Little turns into big, short grows into tall, new will eventually be old. Whatever it appears to be today, it may well be something else tomorrow. Or next year. The joy may turn into pain, the loss into gain. The silver-leaf maple may become a sycamore. It is incumbent upon us only to watch and listen, to pay close attention to the metamorphosis that is happening in every moment. Watch and listen and write it all down on the peeling bark. Copyright 2017

When the click and flicker that signaled the loss of power sent the house into dimness and silence I thought about going through the rooms and turning everything off. Then I realized I wasn’t sure exactly what had been on, which lamps, which ceiling fans, which ceiling lights. All that light – all that automatic, instantly available, taken-for-granted light – and in less than ten seconds I’d forgotten which of the many switches produced it. The power came back on some 25 hours later, just after noon. I went through the house and, turning them off as I went, counted the lamps and overhead lights that were suddenly blazing again. One, two, three, ... eleven, twelve. Had it really been that gloomy and gray as Irma’s wide arms flailed wildly outside my windows? So gloomy and gray as to require that much light to beat back the darkness? I didn’t spend much time on the contemplation. The sun was forcing its way through the clouds, so as soon as I could get the towels that caught the leak from the ceiling up off the floor, I was outside to greet her. It didn’t matter that the rocking chairs were clogging up the guest room and the deck furniture was jammed in the shed and all those towels needed washing. All that could wait. The first thing I noticed was that the air was thick with the smell of peanuts, a mixture of nitrogen and dirt, that strange perfume that signals the beginning of fall. I heard, in the distance, the call of geese. And, there, high in the sky, exactly where she is supposed to be was the sun. Light. Bigger than Irma. Brighter than LED. Sandhill is nearly 26 years old. Studying the blueprints with the builder I pointed at every window, “Bigger.” “Longer.” “More.” He accommodated me. For at least 15 years they were completely unadorned. No curtains. No blinds. I wanted to be able to sit anywhere, stand in any spot and see the slant of light falling in straight lines across the floor, in even curves across the back of the couch. I monitored the seasons by the angle at which the moonlight came through the window of my bedroom. I didn’t care that it faded fabrics and wood. I didn’t care that it increased my power bill. And, honestly, I didn’t care that people thought it was odd. Grannie came to Sandhill one day and noted, “Darling, you don’t have anything up to your windows.” “I know, Grannie. I like it that way.” “But, what if somebody was looking in?” Her tone of voice held both genuine curiosity and abject fear. “Well, Grannie,” I offered in a moment of cheekiness never to be repeated, “if they come this far they deserve to see something.” I don’t think she ever got over it. But I hope she understood that my need for light is greater than any apprehension I might have of being observed. Though I’d never thought of it in metaphorical terms before the visitation of Irma and the waiting for EMC and the remembrance of that visit from Grannie, I’ve decided that one of the truly grand things about growing up and growing older is learning that how one may appear to others is never worth apprehension. It is no reason to hide behind curtains, no reason to wear a mask, no reason to pretend to be anyone other than who you are. No reason to stand anywhere but in the light. Copyright 2017

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 and heavy with branches that dangle 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 of being IN the world. I have conjured this memory – and I do mean conjured as in pulling it up with a kind of spell, an incantation of wondering and a potion of solitude and quietness – as I work on remarks I am scheduled to give to an environmental group. My topic is “How To Make An Enviromentalist.” I have no idea why I suggested that topic. Do I even know what an environmentalist is? A word loaded with meaning, it used by people of widely varying stripes with alternately positive and negative connotations. It is a word like “artist,” “Southerner,” “liberal,” “athlete,” or “Christian,” heavy with history, both personal and societal. Is the “artist” a photographer or a classical pianist? Is the “Southerner” a descendant of the First Families of Virginia or a wiregrass farmer? Is the “athlete” a member of the PGA tour or someone who goes the gym every day after work? I decide that an environmentalist is a person who has a significant emotional or historical attachment to a particular place, an attachment which motivates him or her to work to preserve that place. I also decide that I am one. An environmentalist, at least this one, takes a while to make, but in that first, oldest memory I can see the recipe and the ingredients. First, I notice how young I was. Four or five. My attention had not yet been captured by the socialization of school. My entire world was my family. Where they went, I went. What they liked, I liked. What they honored, protected, appreciated, I would learn to honor, protect, and appreciate. Second, I notice how I felt. Held securely in the arms of someone I trusted implicitly, without even knowing what trust was, I knew no fear. And knowing no fear, I could absorb the sensory elements of that experience, absorb and retain them for the rest of my life. Third, I notice where I was. The Ogeechee River is right down the road. It is the spot to which the people I know are referring when they say “the river.” No one needs to ask which one. It is just a river, but it is ours and therein lies its great value. Early exposure through a trusted adult in a comfortable and familiar place. The rain and sunshine and fertilizer that turned my innate connection to the earth, a connection every human has, into a great love. That made me an environmentalist. This is what I will tell them, the people who have asked me to share my thoughts. This is what I will tell them and suggest that they go provide the rain and sunshine and fertilizer for a child they know. This is what I will tell them with the prayer that we all become, all remain environmentalists. Copyright 2017

Mama didn't buy Jell-O. Not even to adorn with a can of fruit cocktail and call it salad. The only time Keith and I got Jell-O was at school, cut into a square and plopped into a perfectly sized compartment on one of those indestructible oblong trays. I was probably 11 or 12 when I saw the first commercial about Jell-O 1-2-3. I was absolutely mesmerized by the assertion that one could mix the contents of the handy packet with water, put it in the refrigerator in a tall glass (preferably, it would appear, one with a long stem), and come back later to a lovely and delicious parfait, a three-layered delicacy that included “creamy topping, fluffy chiffon, and cool, clear gelatin.” I somehow convinced my frugal mother to buy this amazing product and proceeded to create what I was sure would be a food so sophisticated that it would somehow enable me to overcome all the impediments (too tall, too smart, too religious) that stood between me and popularity. The end result was not as amazing as the marketing. The top layer, which I expected to be a lighter version of the meringue Mama whipped up from egg whites for Sunday’s lemon pie, tasted like much of nothing. It collapsed in my mouth leaving behind the faintest hint of artificial strawberry flavor. The second layer, “fluffy chiffon” for which I had such high hopes, was okay. It reminded me a lot of pudding except without the richness of pudding and the thick feel of milk and eggs heated and stirred so slowly that the result was neither solid nor liquid, but simply a heavy presence of deliciousness dissolving in your mouth. And the bottom layer, well, it was just Jell-O. This is what I am thinking of when I walk out onto the porch in the early morning, look across the field, and see the first indication that summer is packing its bags in anticipation of its departure. The sky is layered. Like a Jello-O 1-2-3 parfait. The clouds are white like cotton batting, like cotton candy, like cotton balls glued to construction paper to look like clouds. They start at the top of the pine trees at the property line, stretching straight up to wherever the top of the sky might be. Underneath the clouds is a layer of fog, dull silver like a tray in need of polishing. It hovers between the treetops and head-height of a good-sized man. And under that is the mist, the damp translucent mist that makes the domed rows of peanut vines glisten in the morning light. It is hard not to laugh at myself, laugh out loud. Where do these thoughts come from? It is 7:30 in the morning. I am standing on the porch catching my breath before leaving for work. I am looking at a peanut field shrouded by clouds. An image from nearly 50 years ago jumps to the front of my mind, an image I did not know existed. What does it mean? I don’t know. Yet. There is no offering of regrets to memory’s RSVP. It will, without permission or the necessity of a token, transport you faster than any time machine to a moment, a breath, a blink that changed everything. Or didn’t. It can tickle or scald, bless or scold. It is simultaneously seductive and frightening, luring and repelling, even as you realize that it can be none of those things without your acquiescence. It is, after all, yours. The Jell-O parfait, sophisticated though it may have been, did not make me popular. Nor particularly sated. What it did do was give me a template to lay over a morning sky some 50 years later, a way to see differently something I see every day, and a realization that what the quantum physicists say is true: past, present, and future are all right here, right now. We haven’t lost a thing. Copyright 2017

The first day it rained. The second day it rained. The third day the sun came out, slowly and sheepishly, as though embarrassed by her failure to perform earlier in the week. The beach swelled with people, families mostly, and the toys of various sizes and costs without which the vacationers would have had to notice the ocean or, worse, engage in conversation. My friends and I planted our chairs a few feet above the water line, cognizant of the rising tide and the probable necessity of moving them up the sand at some point in the not distant future. The waves rushed and fell back, shouted and then lapsed into a whisper. Over and over. Back and forth. I could feel myself slowing, like a yo-yo hurled from a curled fist and left to unwind, its movements growing shorter and less violent with each up and down. Breaths growing deeper, muscles relaxing, thoughts quieting. It lasted about ten minutes. “I need to walk,” I told my friends as I laced up my tennis shoes. I headed south. It was late afternoon and I’d spent most of the week listening to lectures on topics like “Cyber-Bullying” and “Trying the High-Profile Murder Case.” I’d seen images and heard words that I wanted to bleach from my memory. I’d been reminded over and over that evil exists and that the defense against its advancing tide is only as strong as the hearts of the men and women holding the line. I think I can be forgiven for feeling less than joyous. I passed two elaborate sand fortresses under construction, a sailboat faded by salt and sun, a stick-drawn beach volleyball court, and tent after tent shading people of every size and shape and color, immobile and, for the most part, silent. It was as though, exhausted by the process of getting themselves and their children and the coolers and towels and tents to the beach, they had collapsed just a few yards short of the object of their desires. Farther down the beach, in front of the grand old hotel, the row of blue canvas chairs shielded by blue canvas umbrellas, military in the precision of its line, held more still and silent people. Their faces were hidden by sunglasses as they stared straight ahead, not moving, barely breathing. Even they, with the ease of wealth and the service of other people, exuded the air of, if not despair, at least lethargy. As though nothing, not even this brilliant summer day at the edge of the ocean, was enough. I had just turned around to head back to my friends when a little boy, no older than three or four, darted from the shadows of one of the tents directly in front of me. I had to stop to avoid hitting him. He was at top speed and never saw me. There was a huge smile on his face and I watched him run as hard as he could toward the water, oblivious to anything else. He knew what he wanted, he knew where he was going, and he was delighted by it all. Within the span of those few seconds, I felt my spirits lift. I am long past three and I’ve lived far too long to be oblivious, but he reminded me that there is absolutely nothing to prevent me from knowing what I want, knowing where I’m going, and being delighted by it all. I can be the little boy, arms flailing and legs pumping, sprinting toward the wild and endless ocean. There will still be evil and darkness and injustice, but from my place in the line the world will see a reflection of the sun. Copyright 2017

Second grade was the year I asked for and got a stuffed French poodle for Christmas. I named her Fifi. She had thick wire in her legs and could stand on my dresser by herself. It was the year that Mama made me a pink pin-wale corduroy dress for the Valentine's Day party at school. It had a Peter Pan collar and a high yoke with tiny pearl buttons down the front. It was the year that I added to my vocabulary the words college, scholarship, and author and decided that those words were mine. It was in first grade that I took my first tentative steps out into the world, but second grade was the moment when I realized my autonomy, my separateness, my ability to experience things and feelings distinct and apart from my family. One November afternoon, sunny but with the dullness of fall, the brown wooden box on the wall at the upper left-hand corner of the chalkboard crackled to life. “Attention please,” said Mr. Adams, our principal. “Teachers, attention please. President Kennedy has been shot.” And he placed the big silver microphone near a radio from which a scratchy voice offered up the first reports of what had just happened in Dallas. I remember Peggy Franklin bursting into tears. I remember Mama holding the screen door open as I stepped off the bus, her face drawn and tears sliding down her cheeks. I remember sitting in a big leather chair at my grandfather’s furniture store on West Main Street watching the flickering gray television images of horses and the soldiers moving slowly down the street in what I recognized as Washington, D.C. . I remember John John in his little double-breasted coat saluting his father's casket. I remember the rapid expansion of my vocabulary to include assassination, motorcade, and cortege. A couple of weeks ago I happened to be in Dallas for a few hours with a friend and her two grown daughters. Our hotel was just a few blocks away from the site of the assassination and we decided to pay a visit. The concierge at the hotel handed us a map and pointed out the spot. Dealey Plaza. In five minutes the four of us were standing on the sidewalk where, over 50 years ago, crowds had stood and waved and cheered the handsome young president and his beautiful wife in her pink Chanel suit. We could see the building that used to be the Texas School Book Depository. We actually stood on the grassy knoll. Sandra and I shared with her girls what we remembered. One of them remarked that they’d not covered the Kennedy assassination in school. Probably, I told her, the same reason that we never got to the Korean War. We ran out of time. I’ve thought of that conversation a lot since I got home, thought of it in connection with the admonition that Moses offered the children of Israel as they set out to take the Promised Land. It’s important to remember, he told them. It’s important to tell your children what happened before. Rehearse it in their ears. Over and over. Tell them the stories. The good ones and the bad ones. The victories and the defeats. The moments when the human spirit triumphed over despair and the moments when despair seemed – for the moment, but only for the moment – to win. We have to tell them. We can’t leave it to their friends or the schools or the churches. We can’t leave it to the news media or social media or any other media. It is up to us, the adults who love them. We have to tell them the most important story of all – that hope never runs out of time. Copyright 2017

The first funeral home fan that I remember (probably from the funeral of a great-aunt or uncle, my attendance at which, as a child of four or five, would never in that time have been considered inappropriate) had a stock painting of Jesus as the Good Shepherd on the front. On the back would have been the name and address of the funeral home and a tasteful slogan along the lines of “Here when you need us” or “Treating your family like family for over 50 years.” In the years since, I’ve wondered about things like whether there were dyes in the first century to make robes such a deep shade of blue and such a rich shade of red, but back then my wondering was limited to how long I was going to have to wear the crinoline. These days funeral home fans don't always invoke the divine. Instead of Jesus standing at the door and knocking, some of my more recent acquisitions have featured bucolic scenes of a meadow, impossibly green, impossibly verdant, and necessarily generic. The unnamed locale could be an Appalachian valley, a New England orchard, or the Mississippi Delta in spring, just after a soaking rain. Where it most definitely is not is where I am today – a sun-scorched cemetery in south Georgia where wiregrass and cockleburs fight for space with the gravel rocks that tumble against each other under the tires of the hearse. Where I stand just outside the perimeter of the green tent under which the family is seated in metal folding chairs that still look exactly like metal folding chairs despite the fabric covers. Where I fan with the finesse of one bred to the task – elbow tucked against my ribs, wrist bent at a 45-degree angle and twisted slightly so that my palm is facing my chest, fingers curled loosely around the handle. Down and up, down and up. A regular beat. Like the one I’ve been taught is proper when administering CPR. The beat to “Stayin’ Alive.” The fanning does little more than stir the hot air. My arms grow damp and a cling like Saran Wrap forms between my skin and my clothes. There is a kind gentleman standing next to me who pops open a black umbrella and moves a step closer. “This will help a little,” he says, and it does. The shadow from the umbrella is dark and round. The preacher reads a psalm, sings a hymn, shares a few remembrances of the departed. I can’t make out every word from my vantage point where I’m trying very hard not to step on someone else’s grave. He says something, I think, about comfort for the grieving and that word – comfort – catches my attention. A comfort. That is what the fan is. Not in a physical way, but in the way of being a solace in an uncertain world. It is a promise that, in a world in which so much has changed, is changing, will continue to change, some things haven’t, don’t, and won’t. “Here,” says the kind face in a dark suit. “Take this thin yet sturdy piece of cardboard with a balsa wood handle and be reminded that some things last. It won’t keep you cool, but it will keep you sure.” The preacher says amen and I walk toward the car where a quick blast from the air conditioner vaporizes the sweat and replaces it with chill bumps. I slip the funeral home fan up over the visor where over the next few days it will slip and slide back and forth until, eventually, it will fall gently to the seat beside me. I reach over and pick it up, think back to the funeral, the heat, the gentleman with the umbrella. And I feel it again, the comfort. I turn off the air conditioner and fan, fan, fan. Copyright 2017