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To make a tree, begin with a straight line, vertical. On each side of the straight line add additional straight lines, shorter, at an angle. These are limbs. To the limbs add more straight lines, shorter still. These are branches. Continue in this manner until your tree is finished. It is not difficult to master, this skill. It is, in fact, a near-universal one. Long before a child learns how to put together a particular combination of lines and squiggles to make his or her name, that child knows how to draw a tree. Soft fingers curl around a crayon, a Sharpie, a pencil fat as an over-ripe stalk of asparagus. A head bends low over paper. Any child can draw a tree. I don't ordinarily think a lot about trees when I am within sight of the ocean. Trees belong to the land, my anchor. The ocean, my compass, belongs only to itself. But tonight is different. Tonight I find myself hovering between the two. I am on the north end of Jekyll Island. The moon is an eyelash away from full, though it is a little hard to tell. A veil of gauzy clouds makes it look as though someone has taken an eraser to its edges. The dusk is heavy with dampness from the day's rain, threatening to make it the evening’s. Along the dunes, the seagrass trembles in the slightest of breezes. I am standing under a cluster of live oak trees. Stretching my neck to look up into the canopy they form over the wide green lawn, I notice that the trees – the ones whose very name distinguishes them from the ones I learned how to draw – , every last one of them, have grown not straight and tall toward the sky, but curved in the direction of the ocean. This is not a characteristic of the species. There are thousands of live oaks all over the South growing upright and unbent, like yardsticks and arrows and 2x4s. Planted somewhere else, the acorns that eventually became guardians of this island would have done the same. But they were planted here – by bird or man or God, who knows – where, from the moment the first tiny twig cracked the soil, the wind created by the ocean has pushed and pushed and pushed against the will that would grow them straight. It is still light enough for me to see the way the branches curl around and around, back and forth, stretching up and out toward the ocean like words written in Arabic. I am both anxious and curious in my ignorance of what they say. I've been here before, on this exact spot. I can see and hear and smell and taste all that I saw and heard and smelled and tasted. I can feel what I felt. I stand very still and I am back in that other time. There is another full moon; children are laughing; I am wearing a black and white dress; the breeze is pulling at my hair pinned up off my neck. I take a deep breath and return to the present as the translation of the trees’ message moves through me like an electrical current: For hundreds of years we have felt the wind. For hundreds of years we have borne its force. For hundreds of years we have yielded to its strength, but we have never given in. Across the way the waves slap at the shore and the needle of the compass quivers in delight. Copyright 2017

When Big Phyllis died, Lynn decided that, while flowers were nice and there was certain to be spray after spray from the Republican Women and the Daughters of the Confederacy and any number of other organizations to which Big Phyllis had offered her considerable talents and opinions, what the grave overlooking the bluff in Bonaventure Cemetery really needed was some water from Eagle Creek. I don’t remember that I’ve ever said no to one of Lynn’s ideas, so as soon as the funeral was over, she – Lynn, that is, not Big Phyllis (though if anyone could survive her own funeral that force of nature could) – and I headed to the drainage ditch that had been endowed with magical powers by nothing more than the words of another force of nature. My theory is that one of the reasons Erk and Big Phyllis were such good friends is that neither one of them ever gave much credence to the odds or put much faith in the pundits. They both knew that statistics can’t factor in things like heart. So there we were, in broad daylight, in front of God and four lanes of traffic on Fair Road, two grown women in what passes for funeral clothes these days, scrambling down the bank in our high heels, hers higher than mine. Right at the edge, thinking more of our shoes than our health, we slipped them off and tiptoed into the shallow brown water. I held one of Lynn’s hands and leaned back toward dry ground as she leaned forward holding an empty plastic water bottle. The graveside service was not until the next day and Lynn had to get back to Atlanta, so the actually delivery or, as we preferred to call it, the anointing of Big Phyllis’s grave with Eagle Creek water was left in my solitary hands. As the gnats swarmed and the bagpipe player played, I held the bottle, whose contents looked a lot like a urine sample, unobtrusively down by my side. At the final amen, I circled behind the casket, enlisting along the way, the assistance of Big Phyllis’s son-in-law to serve as shield; not everyone, we understood, would appreciate the appropriateness of the gesture. I opened the bottle, sprinkled some of its contents into the open grave, and emptied the rest on the ground around it. It has been a long time since I have felt such a sense of accomplishment. Lynn’s husband Lamar is not new to this circus and he, without complaint, documented the gathering of the water with a photograph. It is an image of two women smiling, two women looking straight into the sun, two women smiling, two women holding hands. I keep it on my phone. The other night, as we were waiting for Chambless’s pre-school graduation program to begin, Jackson, who is practically a first-grader now and for whom pre-school seems ages and ages ago, took my phone and began scrolling through the photos. Most of them are of him and his sister – ball games and birthday parties, silly faces and serious gazes, holidays and regular days I was just lucky enough to spend with them. He stopped scrolling when he came to the photo of me and Lynn in Eagle Creek. He pointed and looked up at me. “Why are you standing in that water?” I don’t remember exactly what I told him – something about a football coach thinking it was magic – , but the question has stayed with me, has continued to resurface in my thoughts over and over these last few days. Why are you standing in that water? Why are you doing something that no one else would understand? Why are you doing something that appears to have no purpose or no chance of success? And, for heaven’s sake, why are you doing it so publicly? The answer, I think, is the answer to all the great questions that start with why. Why was I standing in that water? Why am I standing in that water today and will I stand in it tomorrow? Because love compels me. I, we will never get beyond the boundaries of what we know and with which we are comfortable unless and until we are moved by love. And that is real magic. Copyright 2017

Poor Blanche Dubois. Always depending upon the kindness of strangers. It is a dangerous thing, depending upon the unknown. Much better (if one must depend at all, if one cannot be left to one's own devices) to depend upon the kindness of friends. This past week – in a five-day trek that took me to Macon, then to Kennesaw, then to Powder Springs, then to Lake Blackshear and, then, back home – the kindness of friends accompanied me like a shadow. It began with my visit to the English professor father of one of my oldest friends. It is a matter of both satisfaction and trepidation that he reads what I write and a matter of genuine pleasure to spend time with someone who, nearing ninety, still writes himself. Toward the end of our visit, he leaned forward and extended his hands toward me, palms open and facing each other, the gesture of someone intent upon making his point. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “that you should get a dog. A big dog.” I felt a grin spread across my face. The writer had turned paternal on me. All my musings about wandering in the woods and rambling down dirt roads have made him worry for my safety. I assured him that I was careful, that my brother and my parents lived nearby, that I was, in fact, considering getting a dog. He sat back in his chair, content for the moment that I was in no danger and when I left a few minutes later I did so feeling well-tended. Just a couple of miles down the road was Wesleyan and Alumnae Weekend where there would be no end of hugging and smiling and reminiscing. The friend in whose home I was staying had just experienced a significant loss and was in the midst of a major home renovation and, yet, she managed, as always, to be the quintessential hostess. “You know where the Diet Coke is,” she said. “Manage the thermostat to your liking,” she said. “Make yourself at home,” she said with every word and gesture. And I did. On Sunday morning I drove to Kennesaw and had lunch with my niece Kate and her husband Kirck, a lunch that included an up-close look at the two of them teasing and laughing at each other with a sweetness I dared not mention to either, but which made my chest expand with happiness and which concluded with a purposeless and unhurried visit to a nearby Barnes & Noble. I left the store with four books to add to the stack at home and the giggly delight that there is someone, some two, in my family for whom wandering around a bookstore is as much fun as it is for me. In Powder Springs I drove into a cul-de-sac, parked my car on the edge of the yard, and took out my umbrella. It is never easy to extend condolences and the wet gloom felt appropriate. Sandra and I have been friends for 50 years and it was the death of her mother that had brought her from Indianapolis and me from Sandhill. Bad taste or not, we had one of Sandra’s grown-up daughters take a photo of the two of us and looking at that photo later all I could see was the little girls we used to be, the little girls who were so different from each other, but recognized the seeds of loyalty and faithfulness. The final stop was Lake Blackshear where the talk went late into the night, some of it significant and some of it frivolous, where I told the story of how my mother used to save the biscuits from supper and turn them into breakfast by slicing them in half, slathering butter on them, and toasting them under the broiler, only to wake up the next morning and find that my friend had done exactly that on the morning of my departure. Back at home and sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch, I can take a deep breath and absorb the gifts of my trek around the state. The hospitality and the tenderness. The laughter and the tears. The questions and the answers. I can depend upon those things. Those things and the fragile human beings through which they came, not one of whom is a stranger. Copyright 2017

There is one grapefruit left. One. It sits in the wire basket on the counter along with five apples that are, quite frankly, past their prime. It is not-quite yellow, not-quite orange and it is smudged with dark lines, tiny lines that cross and knot like a web, that attest to the fact that it is not a grocery store grapefruit. It is not perfectly round or perfectly hued, but it is a grapefruit. The others have already been scored and peeled, skinned and sectioned, bitten with lips drawn back in anticipation of tartness. This one, though, may well, by now, be too dry to eat. I’ve passed by, looked at it over and over again, and, yet, I’ve chosen not to stop, not to get out the knife, not to take and eat. I’ve just figured out why. Cooper was a much loved 8-year-old who liked to wear hats, especially fedoras. He shared a middle name with his aunt and a home with two sisters and a mother and father who described him as “an old soul.” He endured far too many visits to doctors and hospitals with a huge smile and a sense of humor that most grown-ups would envy. In a world where smiles and humor are not that easy to find, his death made no sense. Cooper’s grandmother has been my friend for nearly thirty years. Thirty years and I realized, staring through the windshield into the haze on the interstate, that I had no idea what I would say to her when I walked into her hug. From the parking lot of the Mulberry Street United Methodist Church where a group of us met to ride to the service together, we could see a passel of children on the playground, their voices rising and falling in some indeterminate key, all of them waiting for a mother or father to arrive, to grip a fat little hand in his or her own and lead the way home. The poignancy of the moment, the unconscious tenderness of the parents with the children, underscored the reason why we had come, why Mary Catherine had driven from Signal Mountain and Anne from Blue Ridge and I from Sandhill, why Susan had raced down the interstate from Hartsfield, why others had forgotten whatever else they might have been doing on a Friday afternoon in March to make their way to Riverside Cemetery. At some point, as we stood suspended in the surreality and the sunshine, Mary Catherine said, “I have grapefruit.” It turns out that her cousins who live in Florida had brought her grapefruit, lots of grapefruit, and she wanted to share. So each of us took a few. And I heard myself saying, “You know my motto: There is nothing in life so bad that it can’t be made at least a little better by a party favor.” I immediately felt awful. It was a stupid thing to say. Totally inappropriate. Except that now I know it wasn’t. It was truth. There are moments in life – moments of significant pain, deep uncertainty, or just the occasional awkward silence – when words are not adequate. When whatever power words might otherwise have to soothe anxiety, incite a political movement, or create the universe has been sapped. In those moments all we can do is share. Whatever we have. I didn’t say anything when I walked into my grandmother-friend’s hug. I felt her head against my shoulder. I heard her catch her breath in a sob. I hugged her back. I cried, too. Hugs. Tears. Grapefruit. Here is a grapefruit. Here is my heart. Here are the memories we share and the grief that is now added to those memories. Thank you. Thank you for the grapefruit. Thank you for this grace. There is one grapefruit left. One. It needs no words. Copyright 2017

Across the way, two turkeys, dark and awkward, amble across the field. The larger leads, the smaller follows. Two mockingbirds dive-bomb the holly tree at the corner of the house as though the single berries upon which they are intent are the last two berries on the face of the earth. Their wings flutter like the pages of a old book thumbed hurriedly. Somewhere in the near-distance, a flock of geese squawk squawk squawk. From the vantage of the back door it is hard to tell, but I think the two tiny birds teetering on the edge of the bird feeder and nibbling like polite ladies at an afternoon tea at Carolina wrens. Behind them, somewhere beyond the canopy of kudzu vines, small maples, and scraggly oaks that fall away to the pond, a duck calls out a single guttural note. I am surrounded by birds this morning. I want to stand in the yard in the perfect spring air and still myself into a St. Francis pose in hopes that one or more of them will land on my shoulder, my head, my outstretched hand. My friend Anne is a devoted birdwatcher and I have to admit to a bit of envy when, over the years, she has recounted to our group of friends sightings of scarlet tanagers and goldfinches and indigo buntings, all colorful chaps that, as far as I can tell, have never been drawn to Sandhill. A couple of years ago Annie became a Georgia Master Naturalist through the University of Georgia and they proclaimed her certified to share her knowledge of “the habitats, natural resources and the natural environments of our state” with the rest of us, making it even more evident to me that whatever I might think I know about woods and fields and critters, I am not, as Daddy would say, Ned in the first reader compared to her. Which brings me back to the birds. As a consequence of her newly-obtained knowledge and official recognition thereof, I fully expected Annie to show off. In fact, I wanted her to do just that. I anticipated that the next time we were all sitting around on the wide porch of the big house on Signal Mountain where we do our best to flock once a year, we’d play something like a lightning round of Georgia Nature Bowl, during which each of us would throw out a question and Annie would immediately bark back an answer. “How long does a brown thrasher incubate her eggs?” “Anywhere from eleven to fourteen days. Next?” “How fast does kudzu grow?” “Up to one foot a day. Next?” “How many kinds of frogs are there in Georgia?” “There are 33 species of frogs and toads in Georgia. In addition, Georgia is home to more species of salamanders than any other place in the world, including the largest salamander in America.” It didn’t exactly go like that. We were spread out in the rocking chairs, settled into the stillness of the mountain air, and looking out across the brow where the mist had just about obscured the view of Chattanooga, when somebody heard a bird somewhere off in the bushes. Annie immediately identified the bird and then jumped up and hurried into the house, returning with her iPad. “Let’s get him to come closer.” In a few seconds she had swiped her way to a screen offering a picture of the bird she had identified. “Watch this,” she said and touched the microphone icon. The bird’s song came streaming out of the iPad’s speaker. In a moment the bird, the real bird, called out again, this time closer. Three or four times the sequence was repeated, the iPad, like the Greek Sirens, calling again and again and the real bird answering, nearer and nearer. I don’t remember who lost interest first, the bird or the women, but the call and response was the highlight of the afternoon. Call and response. In music, it is two distinct phrases, one following the other and played by different musicians, in which the second is heard as a commentary on the main theme. In preaching, it is participation of the congregation, verbal encouragement, punctuation of the preacher’s words. “That’s right.” “Amen.” “Praise the Lord!” Call and response. I understand why I want to remain with the mockingbirds and the geese and their brethren. I know why their voices draw me in. They are calling. Calling me. They are playing the theme, preaching the sermon, inviting me to participate in the morning, this singular morning that regardless of its familiarity will never be again. And my job, my one and only job, is to respond. Copyright 2017

One bird feeder hangs from the still empty branch of a sycamore tree. One hangs from the already-budding branch of a saw-tooth oak. Both feeders are full. The birds that frequent these adjacent all-you-can-eat buffets have become braver in recent days. They no longer scatter like dandelion seeds when the back door opens. Instead they flit, without startle, to a perch close enough to their plates that they can watch my movements, know exactly when I’ve left the vicinity, and resume their meals. We are not friends, the birds and I. We are neighbors. The kind who say hello at the mailbox, who are willing to pick up the newspaper when you’re out of town, who remark on the new car in the driveway or compliment the new flowerbed, but who would never even think about being invited in for supper. Good neighbors. One morning last week, just before the cold snap, I walked outside to see both bird feeders being patronized. A male cardinal, all slick and shiny red, stood proudly on the ledge of the feeder dangling from the sycamore tree. He gave me a quick glance and resumed his pecking, a man on a mission and one not about to be deterred by something he’d long ago determined was not a danger. A female cardinal, a color so close to the fresh new leaves of the oak tree that I did not see her at first, bounced quickly away from the feeder at which she’d been nibbling and landed on a nearby branch, her beak clamped onto a single sunflower seed. Her mate’s bravado was matched by her caution. Breeding season for cardinals starts in March and, since there was probably a nest somewhere nearby, the mother’s glare was steady. Even as she raised and lowered her head in an effort to crack open the seed, I remained in the cross hairs of her tiny black eyes. Being the one responsible for filling the feeder did not, apparently, make me any less suspicious. It was amusing to see such stereotypical gender roles being played out among my non-human neighbors. I kept thinking about my avian neighbors long after I left them to their labors and drove off to my own and my curiosity, or, perhaps, just my desire to be a good neighbor, sent me to Google and Wikipedia and all those intangible capitalized places (which have all but taken the place of the tangible lower case places like library and dictionary and encyclopedia) to find out more. I found out that though the bird is most often called the northern cardinal, it is really a southern bird and the first pair did not nest in New England until 1958. I learned that cardinals are counted among the species of birds that “mate for life,” but I also learned that the cardinal’s average life span is one year. Comparing them to other birds known for lifetime monogamy (bald eagle, mute swan, whooping crane) and whose life spans average about 20 years, I found a difference significant enough to make me pull back a little in my admiration of red bird fidelity. I discovered that cardinals do not migrate, that they are fairly social and join in flocks that may even include birds of other species, and that the brightness of the male’s feathers is determined by the carotenoids in his diet. What was most fascinating to me, though, especially in light of my observation of protective mama cardinal and macho daddy cardinal, was the fact that both sexes of the cardinal, not just the male, sing. And their songs sound virtually the same. In most other bird species, the male chooses an exposed perch, a stage, if you will, and offers up his version of a sentimental ballad, a stirring anthem, or a soothing hymn to claim his territory, while the female remains close by, but silent. Not so the cardinals. The cardinals’ two voices multiply the melody and intensify the volume, announce in unison that they, the both of them, are in charge of their chosen province. Which means that my cardinals, the cardinals who had seemed so conventional, so traditional, so “Leave It To Beaver,” were, in fact, the very model of modernity. We are just neighbors, the birds and I. But in taking the time to get to know them, to eliminate the assumption that they are just like all the other birds, and to appreciate what makes them a little more like me, I can be a better neighbor. And that is always one step closer to being friends. Copyright 2017

The first time I can remember standing in line was at the milk dispenser in the lunchroom at Mattie Lively Elementary School. I didn’t like milk. I was not made to drink it at home. But in the lunchroom at Mattie Lively there was no other option. So I stood there and waited my turn, took the metal cup holder from the rack, turned it upside down and pushed it hard on the stack of white paper cones. The cup holder was always cold and it got colder as I lifted the handle on the milk dispenser and watched the stream of white liquid fall in. Standing in line was a big part of what we did in first grade at Mattie Lively. We all got to be very good at it. I guess that’s the whole point. I left Mattie Lively fifty years ago and I’m still standing in lines. To place an order, to mail a letter, to buy a ticket. To make a purchase, to board an airplane, to receive a diploma. The line is often long and the movement slow. My companions are frequently people I don’t know. But the end result is that, generally, at the end of the line I’ve obtained or achieved something I desire. Rarely do I find myself in something like the Mattie Lively milk line, for a reason I don’t like, but for which there is no other option. Rarely, but not never. Saturday afternoon was beautiful. The sky was the blue of faded chambray and there was the slightest breeze. It didn’t feel like February. I walked across the parking lot, hearing every step my dress shoes made on the gravel, bracing myself for what was ahead. I entered the building and took my place at the end of the line. Over the next half hour or so I moved, along with my fellow line-dwellers, slowly, slowly, slowly forward, inching my way toward the moment when I would step in front of the husband and the three sons, each of them standing so ramrod straight that a stranger couldn’t have guessed which one graduated from West Point. When my turn came, I would hug them and murmur something about how sorry I was for their loss, how much we all loved her, how much she loved them. I hated being in that line. I hated the reason I was there. There was nothing good at the end of it and, yet, there was no other option. On Sunday morning, still hung over with sadness, I went to church. I sat through Sunday School and the sermon and then, without much conscious thought, there I was standing in yet another line. This time, though, I would be required to say nothing. This time, at the end of this line, all I had to do was receive. “The body of Christ, broken for you.” He broke off a piece of bread and dropped it into my outstretched hands. “The blood of Christ, shed for you.” She held out the cup and I touched the surface of the dark liquid with the bread. It was a small morsel, but I could taste the salt in the bread and the bitter in the grape juice. It is a little like tasting tears, this receiving of communion. And that is when I realized that there had, in fact, been much good at the end of the line the day before. In the sadness and the disbelief, the uncertainty and the fear, there was also communion – the bearing witness to an unfathomable loss, the attesting to memories that will forever defy that loss, and the affirming with every single tear that, in the end, it is what we share and how we share it that define what it means to be loved. What it means to be human. What it means to be alive. Copyright 2017

The fields surrounding Sandhill are naked. Along the edges of the yard, where a fence would be if I were a fence sort of person, the tractor tires have made loops like rainbows or rick-rack and I have to be careful as I make my nightly rounds not to stumble. It is that time again. Time to start over. It has been such a mild winter that I might have expected myself to be less moved by the sight of the fields stripped and plowed and cut and left waiting, less moved by this herald of spring. But I am not less moved. I may be, in fact, even more than usual. In the wake of so few bitterly cold days, the turning under of naked cotton stalks seems less rebellious and more determined. Starting over, it reminds me, does not always have to be in the wake of destruction or disappointment. Sometimes it is simply the natural order of things. And, as I was reminded watching the television broadcast of the Grammy Awards, starting over can also be simply a matter of the desire to do one’s best. I don't watch awards shows much anymore. It may be because I have little time for the popular culture it celebrates or it may be because the celebrations have too often turned into something completely other, platforms for the political opinions of those celebrated. Or maybe I just forget. Whatever the reason I generally don’t watch, the reason I did watch this time is because I am a great admirer of Adele. I explained my appreciation of the hugely popular singer to a friend of mine by saying that I especially like the fact that she just stands there and sings, that I can understand her lyrics without having to look them up, and that she makes me feel better about my body type. On Sunday night she added to that list of reasons for me to appreciate her artistry. Chosen to perform a tribute to the late entertainer George Michael, Adele got off to a very rocky start. I am not enough of a musician to say exactly what was happening, but it was clear that discordant is the best way to describe it. On live television she stopped, apologized to the producer, used a swear word (for which she later apologized profusely) and said, “Can we please start it again? I can’t mess this up.” Later, accepting one of the three major awards she won that night she said, “I had to get it right.” The Staples Center, where the ceremony was held, holds 21,000 people. Another twenty-six million people watched the broadcast. That is a lot of people in front of whom you admit you messed up, in front of whom you declare that this thing is important enough to start over. Picking my way over the tractor tracks last night, kept company by yet another startlingly beautiful sky full of stars, I thought about starting over. I’ve done it plenty of times in the natural order of things – new school years, holiday celebrations, planting gardens. And I’ve done it while experiencing excruciating pain in the wake of the deepest disappointment. But I couldn’t remember the last time I had started over, from scratch, on something important, something public, something that mattered for no other reason than to get it right. I decided I might need to do that occasionally. I might need to take a breath, look at what I’m doing – writing a column or planning a future – and give myself permission to start over for no other reason than my heart tells me that what I’ve done so far is out of tune. For no other reason than I want to do it right. Adele started over and got a huge round of applause. One of those applauding was me. Copyright 2017

Like a blackboard on the first day of school, the night sky is flat and clean and dark. So very dark. The stars are strung from one horizon to the other in irregular clusters that, even to my own untrained eyes, look like pictures. Not archers and scales, but front-end loaders and salad tongs. Not lions and fish, but rakes and Christmas cacti. About halfway up the sky to the west, the moon, a die-cut sliver of silver, hovers unusually close to two pulsing points of light that I have been told are Venus and Mars. The three of them light up that little section of sky like a neon sign. “Come hither,” they beckon. “Join us. And if you can’t join us, sit back and be amazed.” And I am. Back and forth from one edge of sky to the other, I turn my head and my eyes. I don’t know that I have ever seen so many stars so clearly. The thought crosses my mind that this night, this sky, this lavish display of celestial bodies is quite possibly the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Which is why I am completely taken off guard by the next thought, series of thoughts, actually, that come tumbling, stumbling, crashing, careening into my mind from somewhere. The thought that this same breathtakingly beautiful sky is the same sky dangling over the 70-mile swath of towns and cities and fields and houses and highways less than 200 miles away that were left in ruins by a tornado bearing winds of somewhere between 136 and 165 miles per hour. The thought that this dazzling, bewitching, radiant sky is probably going completely unnoticed by the children who are sleeping on cots in a church fellowship hall and the mother whose two-year-old is still missing. The thought that the people who are wielding chain saws and axes and shovels during every daylight hour and falling asleep exhausted couldn’t tell you and don’t really care that Venus and Mars are so clearly visible. And one more thought. A selfish thought. The thought that within that 70-mile swath there is a particular spot, a specific address, a place where I have been and belonged, a place that did not escape the destruction. And that thought dulls the brightness of the stars a little. The people connected to that spot are long gone, relocated to other addresses, all happy and safe, but that does not pre-empt my sadness over knowing that the roof and walls that sheltered me have fallen. It does not prevent the editing of my memories. The feel of bare feet on tile floors is now accompanied by the imagined sight of those tiles broken and sticky with pine tar. The sight of a front door flung open in welcome is now paired with a ceiling caved in submission. The sound of laughter and music is joined by the plaintive silence of a house left without people. I realize in that moment that what I am feeling is loss – certainly – and grief – yes – , but it is something more. It is empathy. And connection. As I turn to go back inside, inside a house that is dry and secure and safe and mine, I feel a little guilty. A little shameful that I am so carefree as to be able to stand in my front yard and swoon over the night sky when so many people – the vast majority of the human beings on this planet – cannot. Because of poverty or displacement or illness or a hundred other burdens, millions of my brothers and sisters the world over do not have that luxury. And as long as they don’t, I can never be complacent in the fact that I do. It is one sky that shelters us all. Copyright 2017

It has been a week of fog. The first morning it made me think of the tendrils of smoke wafting from a cartoon Santa’s pipe, pushed slowly over the fields by a gentle breath. The second it was flat, had the dull finish of an old car, and stretched from earth to sky in a single swath of mourning dove gray. The third morning the kind lady on NPR warned of limited visibility and suggested caution on the roadways and, stepping out onto the front porch, I could see why. The previous days’ fog had been almost intangible, practically two-dimensional, invisible except from afar. But this, this was thick and heavy and wet. It changed the shape of things and distorted distances. It fell on my arms and face and hair like a wave of depression. It was so bad that, despite the instinctual alertness that comes from over 40 years of dodging bucks and does and fawns, I did not see the dead deer lying smack dab in the middle of the dirt road until I was, quite literally, on top of it. Just as its soft tan coat, the exact color of the road, went under the front bumper, I simultaneously realized what it was, gasped out loud, and felt the car rise as though encountering a higher than usual speed bump. The car was fine. I was fine. I have no idea about the vehicle that originally encountered the poor animal nor the driver thereof. I assume that he/she/it proceeded on through the vicious fog just as I did – slowly and respectfully. It seemed at this point that I’d seen all the faces of fog. I was ready for a morning in which I did not debate myself all the way to work on the question of whether high beams or low beams were appropriate, in which Carl Sandburg and his little cat feet did not insert themselves into my thoughts every five minutes, in which – like the true flatlander I am – I could see the horizon and locate my place in the world. And, yet, I woke up again to a landscape that couldn’t be brought into focus simply by inserting my contact lenses. I could sense the imminent arrival of frustration. I have to say that I am getting better at handling it, probably a direct result from frequent and intense contact with what I’ve come to recognize as a feeling of annoyance at my inability to change something that I think needs to be changed. It turns out that the most effective way of dealing with it is to be a good hostess. Open the door, ask it in, offer it a piece of pound cake and some sweet tea. Do that and frustration, like every guest who’s ever been made safe and comfortable, will open up and tell you something you didn’t know before. So I walked out onto the front porch and left the front door open, a sure sign of welcome. I took a deep breath and raised my arms, like you would if you were getting ready to offer your best friend a big hug. It was quiet and still, as though the fog had insulated the whole world. No birds chirping, no breeze tickling the windchime. I brought my hands together under my chin, took another deep breath, and closed my eyes. When I opened them, I could see the sun. Not a blazing orange smear, not a pink and lavender smudge, not a shimmering gold spread. What I saw was a white circle, a perfectly round sun, edges as sharp as a lens, smooth as a sphere. Like a biscuit-cutter biscuit. And I realized immediately that, but for the fog, but for the filter of all those billions and billions and billions of water droplets suspended in the sky, I wouldn’t get to see that. I love blazing orange smears and pink and lavender smudges take my breath away. A shimmering gold spreads make me run for my camera. But there is more to acknowledge than the spectacular. There is more to notice than the flashy. There is more to see than what we can see. I’m working hard to remember that. To remember it so well that I just know it. To remember it so well that I don’t have to think about it. To remember it so well that the sight of fog will make me hungry for pound cake. Copyright 2017

After the last decoration has been taken down, after the Fitz & Floyd platters have been carefully shoved into the way-back of the china cabinet, after the programs and pageants and parties have been reduced to cleverly captioned images on Instagram, what is left are the sounds. The real sounds. Not the over-produced orchestrations of carols that soundtracked every moment of December, the ones with which the crowds in the mall could only hum along because no one learns the words anymore because school children get only thirty minutes a week, if that, of music and when they perform it’s a holiday concert not a Christmas program. Not the ubiquitous jingling of sleigh bells underscoring every commercial on every televised sporting event, of which there were a multitude. Not the mind-numbing beep beep beep of the barcode reader at Walmart, scanning each of the individual items in each of the five overloaded buggies that make up the shortest line available. No, not those sounds. The real sounds. I was outside after dark, whispering with every step my gratitude for the balmy weather, smiling to myself over the good fortune of being able to walk around outside in January in shorts and a t-shirt. It was cloudy. No moon, no stars. I walked at the edge of the light, the edge of the darkness, the place where the artificial glow coming from the house faded and my feet were just oblong shadows. I’d made a couple of loops around the perimeter when I heard a cry, as plaintive a wailing as ever there has been. No banshee keening from the mounds of County Meath could have been more bone-chilling. A single painful note unrolling over the field like a fogbank and it stopped me in my tracks. There was distance between us and I assumed it was some kind of bird, a night bird, a swamp dweller I had never heard before. I called myself brave and kept walking. The cry got closer. I stopped again. This time it was obvious that the creature making the mournful sound was no bird. It sounded more than anything like a baby calf. But it couldn’t be because, of course, we have no cows. I suspected it might be a fawn, a baby deer separated somehow from its mother. When I described it later to Keith, he agreed with my suspicion. “Sometimes,” he said, “you can hear the mama answer back. Real soft like.” I didn’t hear the mama. I can only assume that the baby eventually found her, made its way to her warm and heaving side, and followed her across the field making heart-shaped footprints all the way to the edge of the woods where they would find a soft spot to nestle down and sleep. I love Christmas. I love the gladness of gathering and the warmth of celebration. I love the rituals of the church and of my family. I love the way the oldest of things – ornaments and relationships and stories – are brought out into the open and caressed with the gentlest of hands. But I also love the days after. The days when the rhythm of the ordinary returns. The days when the most beautiful trees are the ones lit not by twinkle lights, but by the flame of a winter sunset. The days when the only carol breaking the silence is the song of an invisible fawn. Copyright 2017

Up ahead, where the hard flatness of the highway drops off to a ragged edge, a large bird sits with his back to the white line. I am immediately cautious. Once, years ago, when I was driving through Fort Stewart on my way to court, a huge black turkey buzzard, similarly situated just off the asphalt, abruptly rose into the air and, then, equally abruptly, dove into my windshield. The windshield did not shatter, but the rear-view mirror broke off completely. I sat on the apron of the road long enough to calm my shaking hands and to offer assurances to the nice man who had seen the whole thing and stopped to check on me that I was, in fact, okay. And then I drove on. Since then, ever mindful of road kill and its connoisseurs, I have been particularly alert to such things – things that move suddenly, that change course without warning, that defy expectation. So no one can blame me when I take my foot off the accelerator, curl my fingers a little tighter around the steering wheel, glance quickly to make sure that the other lane is clear. No one can blame me for anticipating the worst and making preparation to avoid it. If, when the buzzard decides to forsake its noshing, I will be ready to slow, to swerve, to avert. When I am about 30 yards away, the bird spreads its wings and begins to rise. At 20 yards away I can see it is not a turkey buzzard. At 10 I recognize the deep brick color of the red-tailed hawk. I catch my breath as I watch him lift slowly above the wet grass, tail feathers flared and fluttering like a fan in the hand of a belle. Wings the breadth of a good-sized kitchen table fold and unfold, pushing the air down and away. In seconds he is gone. I love red-tailed hawks. Love the way they ride thermals across warm spring afternoons and swoop effortlessly through pale autumn mornings. Love the way they embrace the solitude of sky dancing, twirling and spinning for their pleasure alone. Love the way they hold their heads so high and straight when they perch on power lines. I don’t know that I have ever been this close to one outside a zoo or wildlife refuge and, despite the fact that our encounter was of the briefest kind, I find myself smiling broadly as I accelerate. On a cold and rainy, gloomy and messy morning, I’ve just been handed a lovely gift. A lovely gift made lovelier because it contradicted my expectation. Expectation is a big, important word at Christmas. Children expect Santa to grant their wishes. Mothers expect children to come home for a visit. Shoppers expect stores to be filled with bargains and merchants expect shoppers to be filled with enthusiasm. All of us, whether we willingly admit it or not, expect the lights and bows and tinsel and garland to somehow – Please, God, somehow! – make the hard things easier and the heavier things lighter. We expect the music and the cards and the Hallmark movies to ease the aches of our broken hearts and sand the edges of our difficult relationships. That expectation, the one that exists despite all evidence to the contrary, the one that appears unbidden every single year right on cue, the one we can’t avoid even when we know better, has a name. It is hope. What did Emily Dickinson say? “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul.” Hope is the red-tailed hawk that isn’t a turkey buzzard. It is a reminder on the side on the highway that what has always been true before does not have to be true this time. It is the tap on the shoulder that says, “Don’t believe that the way it’s always been is the way it always has to be.” I loosen my grip on the steering wheel and turn my gaze to the road ahead while, somewhere behind me, hope goes soaring through the December sky on brick-colored wings. Copyright 2016

There are fewer and fewer leaves on the sycamore tree each day. More and more sky showing through the satin-smooth branches. Its neighbors in the backyard, two sawtooth oaks, are disrobing at a slightly slower rate, but they, too, are approaching nakedness. When the wind picks up, the trees sway and rattle, wiggle and rustle, like a little girl in a crinoline. An irritated liveliness. A frustrated animation. Out of the corner of my eye I can see the shed, inside of which is an artificial Christmas tree which I intend, at some point, to drag into the house, stand in the corner, and decorate with baubles collected over the last 40 years. Some of them are beginning to fade and fold. Some of them have a provenance I can no longer remember. Some of them I have kept only because they are big enough to fill the gaping holes in the plastic branches that, despite the manufacturer’s assurances, are not the least bit life-like. I am struck suddenly by the incongruity. At just the time of year when trees, real trees, shed their leaves and step forth naked, we take pretend trees inside our homes, our stores, our churches and we dress them. At just the moment when the sycamores and oaks and maples unconsciously demonstrate the loveliness of simplicity, we frantically rush to display ornamentation. I look back at the tree, its remaining leaves waving frantically to get my attention. Forget what you think you know, it seems to be telling me. Forget the legend that says evergreen boughs on the hearth are reminders of the spring to come. Ask yourself why you attempt to contradict nature. Do you think that because your lamps repel the darkness and your thermostat rebuffs the cold that you are no longer at her mercy? Do you think you know so much that you can laugh at the cycle that demands a season of quiet, of dormancy, of death? I do not like this line of questioning. I especially do not like the idea that a sycamore tree is the questioner, though I must admit that I am amused by the idea that it was, apparently, from his perch within such a tree that Zaccheus was able to see what he could not have seen otherwise. Could it be the same with me? It is Sunday. I have gotten up earlier than usual to get to church earlier than usual. Along with the young daughter of the associate pastor, I will perform the liturgy for the lighting of the Advent candle. This week it is the candle of peace. The unresolved conflict between naked trees and dressed trees has left me less than peaceful. Now it is Monday and I pause before leaving for work to make an assessment of the sycamore’s progress toward total defoliation. The empty branches are extended like scaffolding against the silver-gray sky, stretching like long arthritic fingers toward something I cannot see. There is a beauty in such bareness, a severe dignity in the act of uncovering the armature of a tree. Or a person. And, suddenly, with that thought, I am Zaccheus – seeing what I would have missed without the sycamore tree, understanding why we wrestle with the tree stand and tussle with the strings of tangled lights, knowing exactly where all the questions were meant to lead me, which is to the realization that it’s not about the tree. It’s about us. We are the ones who are naked and we can no longer deny it. We are the ones who have lost our innocence. We are the ones who have been given the knowledge of good and evil and misused that knowledge to the detriment of our planet, ourselves, and our dreams. We are naked and we are anything but unashamed. So we hide, not behind the animal skins of Adam and Eve, but behind strings of twinkling lights and Christopher Radko ornaments, collectible nutcrackers and construction paper chains, sad representations of real stars and real angels. We fill the holes, gaping and otherwise, with shiny balls that are hollow and easily broken. We turn our bald spots to the wall and anchor ourselves with fishing line. And then we stand back and sigh unconvincingly, “So beautiful!” Staring at my sycamore tree I realize I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to mask my empty places or prop myself up so that I look steadier than I am. I don’t want to divert attention from my odd angles with spot lighting. I want to let go of the dead leaves so that, in the spring, there is room for new buds. I want to be a tree that lives in season, whatever the season may be. Copyright 2016

The skin of the onion, the color of varnished oak, rustles softly beneath my fingers, cracks and falls away from the shiny white layers that hold each other tightly. I chop it into tiny squares of moist piquancy and then make room on the cutting board for the celery, a green that is its own color. I turn the long stalks into a stack of half-moons, satellites for a hundred miniature planets. The seeds of the bell pepper stick to the knife, my fingers, whatever they touch. Their strange adhesive and the pepper’s uneven contours make it difficult to produce a uniform shape. The heap of hunter, kelly, emerald green grows slowly. For a long time, longer than any self-respecting Southern woman should have, I got by without cooking. Lean Cuisine and anyplace with a drive-through window were my primary sources of nutrition. I was known to say that a good day was one in which three different fast food bags made their way into the foot of my car. When friends or colleagues asked, “What are you taking to Thanksgiving?”, I replied, “The centerpiece and my sparkling personality.” Grannie was still alive then and she, Mama, and my flock of aunts did all the heavy lifting required to produce the holiday meal that always brought to mind the old English description of the dining table as a groaning board, heavy with more than enough food for the extended family that gathered at the little house on South College Street and, later when the number had grown to fifty or more, at the pond house at the farm. That large and loud and, at times, overwhelming gathering eventually dispelled, leaving the children of my grandparents and their offspring to forge their own holiday observances. It is no longer enough for me to show up with a vase of wildflowers and a few funny stories. I have, in fact, assumed responsibility for Thanksgiving for my branch of the family tree and it is as a result of that assumption that I find myself in the kitchen on this night creating mounds of diced vegetables. I am alone, but the sounds and smells, the sensations of warmth and intimacy from those other Thanksgivings surround me as I begin the preparations to feed those who will sit around the table at Sandhill this holiday. It is quiet and still except for the rhythmic shush of the knife coming down on vegetable flesh, but I can hear the aluminum foil peeling back from Aunt Doris’s congealed salad and the clang of the pot lid as Debbie peeks in at Mama’s creamed corn. I can see the row of desserts lined up across the top of the washer and dryer in the corner – sour cream pound cake with cream cheese icing, pecan pie, sweet potato pie, coconut cake. It is all as real as the reflection of my face in my kitchen window, the face of the woman who was the girl who tasted the saltiness of the ham she pinched from the edge of the platter before the blessing was said. The girl who felt the sun in her eyes as she stood in the backyard watching her father and his brothers play pitch penny. The girl who smelled vanilla extract in the heat from the open oven door. Beneath my hands the chopping is finished. Still left is the thawing and draining and boiling and baking. The melting and mixing and roasting and slicing. Still left is the setting of the table and the filling of the glasses. There is still so much left to do. I stop. I look at myself, both the woman in the window and the girl in the backyard. I look at her, at us, and I realize something important. The girl who was moving through the rooms and among the aunts and uncles and cousins absorbing their voices, the girl who wasn’t learning to cook, was learning something else. That girl was learning to celebrate. That girl was learning to remember. That girl was learning to hold on and let go simultaneously. That girl was learning to be thankful. Copyright 2016