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When I retired from practicing law, I decided two things:  The first was that I would not speed.  No longer subject to the power of a judge who could hold me in contempt for being late, I would drive the speed limit, even on the interstate.  The second decision was that I would not set an alarm.  I would no longer be jarred from sleep, but would, instead, break the surface of the day slowly, languidly, quietly. This morning, though, this late August morning, I did wake to an alarm.  I have an appointment – a designated place to be at a designated time.  A time that, in these days of self-rule, makes me wince, but even as I wince I leave the bed, pull up the covers, and walk stiffly toward the door to step outside. I do this thing – this stepping outside, this breathing of un-conditioned air, this briefly surveying the world – every morning.  It is like the blessing before a meal, an acknowledgment that what is being offered to me is gift not wages.  It is a reminder that, if I open my eyes and my arms, I will see and hear wonders. On most mornings I am met by the clear colors and distinct shadows and certain dimensions.  On most mornings I recognize everything around me, can see the weeds that need to be pulled, the splintered wood on the screened-in porch, the footprints on the unswept steps.  On most mornings I am self-conscious, absurdly aware that my hair is sticking out in all directions, that my bathrobe should probably be thrown into the laundry, that my brain is screaming for caffeine. Not this morning.  This morning there is just enough light to discern the mist that smudges the landscape into indistinct objects in the palest of colors.  The sun is still lolling beneath the horizon and the birds are not yet vocalizing in the branch.  I am wrapped in a sacred stillness that I realize, as I stretch my arms into a high arc, is the world reverently awaiting the birth of the day. In my peripheral vision I detect movement and turn to see a doe and fawn moving away from the sawtooth oak under which they have been breakfasting on acorns half the size of golf balls.  In the low light they could be ghosts of deer, floating over the damp grass.  I watch until they turn the corner where the field road meanders down to the pond. If I had not awakened to an alarm, if I had not resisted the urge to instruct Alexa to snooze ... and snooze again ... I would have missed the deer.   Yes, they are probably there every morning.  The deer prints and discarded acorn caps that they leave behind are prima facie evidence that the Sandhill buffet is something like their Waffle House, but heart-shaped footprints and lacy cupule will never evoke in me the amazement of seeing, even through early morning mist, the mama, the baby, so beautiful, so close. I am always grateful that I get to live so near to what we casually call nature, what we nonchalantly claim to appreciate and want to protect, but every so often that gratitude turns into humility.  And every so often that humility becomes supplication, a simple prayer that I never forget that these acres are shared. Copyright 2025

I got my first pair of glasses when I was in ninth grade after I noticed that I had to squint to make out the numbers Miss Kemp had written on the chalkboard.  I can still feel the coolness of the windowless classroom and the momentary panic that ensued when I considered the possible consequences of getting even a single digit wrong in the equation we had been given to solve. The joy and, more acutely, the relief I experienced a few weeks later after a visit to the ophthalmologist in Savannah and the delivery of my first pair of glasses completely eclipsed any self-consciousness I may have experienced.  Pulling the glasses out of their case at the beginning of each class and replacing them as the bell rang to move to the next period was something like Christmas morning, so happy was I to be able to see.  The fact that the distant world could now be as clear and accessible as the up close one was, as far as I was concerned, a miracle. I thought about that a few days ago after yet another person expressed incredulity at my ability to read and knit and file my nails without the assistance of glasses.  I am, I offered, VERY nearsighted and went on to explain that a couple of decades ago, about the time that most of my contemporaries started needing readers for their aging eyes, my optometrist said to me, “You know, you are probably never going to need reading glasses. You are so nearsighted that you should be able to easily read unassisted your entire life.” Considering how much reading I did and still do, I accepted that prediction as a gift and have held on to it as though it were a promise.   The promise has held and even now, as I approach the end of my seventh decade, I read and use the computer and stare at my phone with no ocular assistance. I admit, though, that reading road signs and recognizing friends at a distance and, if it were necessary, deciphering an algebra equation at the front of a classroom are entirely different matters.  I need assistance to be able to drive the speed limit and know which exit to take, to follow the score on the television screen, and to identify the person in the pulpit on Sunday.  All of which makes me grateful for the tiny piece of plastic I insert into my eye each morning. At any rate, all that contemplation of visual acuity or lack thereof led me to consider whether nearsightedness and farsightedness might be about more than literal seeing.  Could it be that emotional eyesight is equally important?  Might it also be about how one witnesses the world, how one encounters creation, how one interprets what one experiences?  Is it possible that some of us can focus on, be content with what is up close while others of us gain clarity only when sharpening our gaze on that which is far away? The answer is yes. The farsighted among us are, I think, the scientists and the astronauts, the financiers and the politicians.  They are the people who can see the numbers without squinting.  Their consideration is for what lies in the distance, the not-yet, the still to come.  They are not discouraged by the smallness of what they see from here, knowing that it will fill the future.  They plan ahead for the rest of us.  They are the preparers, the anticipators, the foreseers.    The nearsighted are the writers and artists and creators of all kinds.  They are the noticers of the small and inconsequential, the observers of the ordinary and quotidian, the payers of attention to the close-up and nearly invisible.  They bend close to gape and gawk.  They stop to stare. They deliberately absorb the atmosphere through which they walk and then sweat it out in the form of paintings and poems, stories and songs.   We don’t get to choose whether our emotional eyes are made to see up close or far away, but, in a world that is continually going into and out of focus, it would do us well to figure it out. Copyright 2025

As an origin story, it is nothing particularly noteworthy.  In fact, the circumstances were ordinary, mundane, unremarkable.  It was a scene repeated hundreds of times over every day across the country.  But, like Robert Frost’s road in a yellow wood, it has made all the difference. It was lunchtime.  Fifteen or twenty of us were gathered in the back room of what was then RJ’s Restaurant – heavy china plates, green napkins, plastic glasses sweating in summer humidity that not even the best air-conditioning could vanquish.  The business meeting for Leadership Bulloch Alumni had not yet begun; polite chatter and subtle gossip circled the tables placed end-to-end.  I was counting the minutes until I could leave and get back to the stack of manila folders on my desk. My friend Phyllis sat across the table from me and beside her sat then-editor of The Herald, Larry Anderson.  With the charm and genuine interest that would one day make her president of the Chamber of Commerce, she turned from side to side, leaned across the table, pulling everyone into the current of conversation.   “Oh, Kathy,” she offered when the flow of words stalled, “you have to tell Larry that story.”   I knew which one she meant, the one  about how, in reviewing the work of that year’s General Assembly, I had discovered that it was now illegal in Georgia to feed wild alligators (an act it had never occurred to me as something in which to engage).  Intrigued, I delved further and learned that our esteemed legislators had also used part of its short 40-day session to pass legislation making the peanut the official Georgia state crop, the peach the official Georgia state fruit, and the State of Georgia the Poultry Capital of the World.   They were just following precedent as previous General Assemblies had declared the shark tooth the official Georgia state fossil and the honeybee the official Georgia state insect (Didn't anyone think to nominate the gnat?).  In 1981 the legislators really got into the spirit and named 8 "officials," including an official reptile (the gopher tortoise); an official vegetable (the Vidalia Sweet Onion); and an official 'possum (Pogo, as created by cartoonist Walt Kelly). I generally do what Phyllis tells me, so I recounted my legal research and Larry found the story sufficiently entertaining to ask me to write it down so that he could publish it. I did and he did and a few days after the column came out, Larry called me and asked, “What would it take to get you to do this on a regular basis?” I almost said, “Not much.”  What I did say was, “Let me think about it.” I thought about it and decided that I could probably think of a few more things to say.  This month that was 30 years and around 700 columns ago. Seven hundred times I have begun by staring at a blank computer screen.  Seven hundred times I have panicked just a little.  At least half of those times I have had no idea what I was going to say until my fingers started moving over the keys. And every single time  I have been struck by what a privilege I have been given to share my words. It seems an appropriate moment in which to offer two more: Thank you. Copyright 2025

I have not always loved trees. I was not the child who read books in the shade of limbs extended like arms and I certainly did not climb trees – my mother’s fearfulness made that particular childhood pleasure unavailable to us. I have not always loved trees and that is probably why my fascination with and adoration of them is so deep now. It is as though I need to make it up to them, live out an apology for my prior ignorance and indifference. My affection for trees in winter is not insubstantial. Their shameless undressing and deliberate nakedness arouses in me an admiration that never wanes. It is their nature to reveal, in the hardest, darkest moments, exactly who they are – knotty trunks and crooked branches, imperfect and scarred. They leave me envious of their honesty. I cannot, though, deny an infatuation with trees in summer. Fully dressed, they entice the breeze and pretend it is their own song. Even as their limbs waltz and foxtrot and cha-cha, the dancing shade offers respite from the sun and the scent that must be chlorophyll perfumes the air as though spritzed through a giant atomizer. Behold a tree in summer and be alive. This summer, in particular, the trees around Sandhill, buffeted regularly by afternoon and evening thunderstorms, have demanded my attention. Rarely has there been a morning when the backyard was not littered with arboreal detritus. Limbs as big around as my wrist, branches the diameter of a broom handle, twigs long and skinny like spaghetti noodles. Most I have been able to gather in my arms like an over-sized bouquet; some have had to be dragged. All of them have been deposited at the edge of the pond where they will eventually turn themselves into soil. On Sunday morning I walked out to my car to go to church to discover that a large sycamore limb, one whose leaves were brown, evidence that it had been barely hanging on to the trunk that was its lifeline, had been wrenched off and thrown under the carport into the driver’s side door of the car. The physical damage, only three tiny scratches, was significantly less than my amazement that no glass had been broken, no metal dented. I pulled the limb far enough away that I had clear entrance to the car, mentally adding yard work to the afternoon to-do list in my head. Thoughts of the limb – what it must have sounded like, looked like as it was sent flying through the air – accompanied me all the way into town to my pew in the back of the church, where the sermon (coincidentally? serendipitously? providentially?) was about Zaccheus, the wee little man who, in an effort to get a better look at Jesus, climbed a sycamore tree. I congratulated myself for not laughing out loud. And, then, I considered whether the universe or the tree or God might be trying to tell me something. It was hot when I got home, changed clothes, and went outside to pull the big limb into the branch, into the growing heap of tree parts. Heading back to the cool inside, I stopped under the tree from which the latest addition had been amputated, looking as far as I could into the canopy. I wanted to know from where it had fallen, but all I saw was palm-sized leaves, fluttering in filtered light, a broad swath of green shimmering like summer sunshine on the surface of water. It was as though the tree had developed regenerative powers like hydra or starfish, filling in the gap left by what was taken away, healing the wounds that damaged but did not destroy. I love trees. I love everything about them. Mostly, though, I love their audacity – persisting in purpose, insisting on getting on with living in spite of loss, and determined to teach me things I should already know. Copyright 2025

It is hard to know what to call this time of day.  The sun is still above the horizon and the time is almost 8:30 p.m..   I cannot possibly refer to it as afternoon, but it will not be night, real night, for another couple of hours.  Despite imagining that my neighbors would say I am putting on airs, I settle on “evening,” from the Old English æfen for “end of the day.” Whatever I call these moments of whisper breeze and stillness, I speak it with deep affection.  I love that I can watch the shadows of the pine trees spread like spilled milk, that I can hear the call of the bobwhite unmuffled by the midday heat, that I am surrounded by the softness of a day winding down, yawning and stretching and preparing for rest. This particular evening – Sunday, the day after the summer solstice – the temperature has fallen from 93° to a balmy 86 and I am grateful for bare arms and legs.  Ordinarily I would walk toward the sunset, stare into the neon oranges and pinks as they drip into the horizon, but something is drawing me in the other direction, into the shadows, to my parents’ house. I walk slowly.  My feet move in less of a stride, more of scuffling.  The dry dirt makes small puffs as the toes of my shoes kick it into the air.  Owen, confused by my measured steps, darts back and forth across the road, spinning and bouncing like the puppy who showed up at Sandhill eight years ago, not the gray-muzzled old man he has become.   The house looks the same, I guess.  There is a dead branch – brown leaves covering its brittle bark – dangling from the oak tree in the front yard.  I pull on the branch and quickly realize that the grip the tree has on it is still strong, will not yield to my strength alone, will let go only when confronted with the blade of a hacksaw.  I understand that kind of stubbornness. I stroll through the yard, stare at the gnarly grapevines that line the edge of the backyard, the wizened pecan trees under which we used to crawl and fill buckets.  I can almost see them – my mother reaching into the deep green leaves and pulling out fat gold orbs of scuppernong sweetness, my father scaling and gutting fish that he has just caught from one of the ponds. There are a flood of memories. There is a reason that flood is the perfect metaphor. Like uncontrolled water, memories can overwhelm everything in their path. They can knock down the thickest walls, upend the deepest roots, drown the strongest swimmers.   But not today.  Today I am not crying, my eyes are not flooding.  I have not been tossed back into the torrent of grief, the inundation of emotion that can come with the recollection of great loss because, while it is true that flooding destroys, what is also true is this: Rising water lifts.   The memories of my parents and this home lift me into gratitude and wonder at what was – and still is – so undeservedly mine.  The rush of emotions that pulse inside me as I remember the sweetness and tenderness of those people and things now gone are not like the deluges that wash out roads and drown livestock.  They are like a rice paddy or a cranberry bog, whose harvest brings to the surface a bountiful crop and a celebration of all that has been.   Near the back corner of the yard is my mother’s long-lived gardenia bush.  The flush of blooms is long gone; there are only a few limp brown blossoms clinging to the limbs.  Out of the corner of my eyes, though, I glimpse – near the bottom, almost completely hidden by dark green leaves – a single white flower.  I pinch it off and bring it to my nose. All the way home I hold it gently in the palm of my hand, its scent and the memories it invokes lifting me up and up and up. Copyright 2025

Almost every time I have stepped outside this spring, I have been greeted by a lizard – clinging to the doorbell on the concrete stoop at the back door, leaping American Ninja-style from chair to chair on the sun-drenched deck, darting back and forth beneath moving rockers on the shaded front porch.  I have hardly been able enter or leave without encountering the neon green, hyperactive reptile and I have had to maintain constant surveillance lest one land on the book in my lap. I will note that I am aware that “lizard” is a generic term for a large and diverse group of reptiles, including snakes, belonging to the order Squamata, and not the proper name for the creature whose acrobatic feats could easily earn him a spot with USA Gymnastics.  If I had been taught to call him a green anole (his correct name) when I was four and chasing him across my grannie’s front porch, then I would call him a green anole.  (I was not and, so, he is a lizard, just like the plastic tube through which water is conducted in the yard is a hosepipe and not a garden hose.) The Audubon guide describes him as slender with a long, wedge-shaped snout.  It is noted that his toes are padded, his tail long and thin.  The pink pouch that hangs down between the male’s head and chest is called a throat fan and is engaged for the purpose of marking his territory.  He is the only anole species native to the United States.  Finally, it is important to note that the little fellow is not a chameleon, even though his color changes in response to light, temperature, and emotions.  (Who knew that a lizard has emotions?) With that information in hand, I figured that I knew about as much about the lizard as I needed to know. About a week ago, though, I was sitting in my reading chair – large and overstuffed, tucked into the corner between one of the bedroom windows and the French doors that lead to the deck – when I changed my mind.  My journal was open and I had been musing for some reason about a stopwatch.  “Stopwatch,” I had written.  “Stop watching.  Stop looking, observing, concentrating on, focusing on what a watch represents.”  A gentle reminder, I supposed, to slow down. With the pen still in my hand, I heard a loud splat and looked up to see that a lizard had thrown himself against the glass in the door.  Splayed out like a crime scene silhouette, he could have been a lizard-shaped suction cup.   I ignored my own words and watched.  Sat very still and held my breath.  He stayed for no more than a few seconds, but long enough for me to be astonished that his head was a disproportionately large percentage of his seven-inch self, to be amazed that his belly was the color of a gardenia petal, to be surprised that there was no sign of his throat fan. Then, just as quickly as he had plopped onto the glass, he flung himself backwards  like a scene out of “The Matrix,” padded toes cushioning his landing before he disappeared.  I may have gasped.  I know I sighed. I don’t generally revisit what I write in my journal.  The words are not meant for posterity or recollection.  They are meant only as a conduit, a means to turn wordless things into words, into spendable currency.  This time, though, I looked down at the black lines curling and crossing each other to see that they had twisted themselves into something different.   Instead of “stop watching,” the vision of the stopwatch was telling me – as an order, not a suggestion –  to “stop AND watch, stop TO watch.”  Consistent with every mysterious encounter I have ever had with Nature, this one was gently reminding me that all I will ever need to know (about the lizard or anything else) can be learned, will be learned by watching, by focusing on that which is right in front of me.  Even when it means I have to look away from something else. Copyright 2025

I learned to love sports on Sunday afternoons, sitting on the floor of the living room at the feet of my father watching black-and-white images of men named Unitas and Matte and Mackey move back and forth across the television screen. I learned that there is no drama like physical drama, that power belongs to the people who interpret the rules, and that it is permissible to yell in the house if the yelling is along of the lines of, “Kill him!” or “You missed the call, ref!” Most importantly I learned that sports, in its best possible incarnation, is the telling of a story. In 2019, Cory Carignan was a wide receiver on the Minot State (North Dakota) University football team. The first game of the season was on September 5, for which the Beavers traveled 745 miles to play the University of Minnesota at Duluth. The Beavers’ sole score came on a kick-off return made by Carignan after he fumbled on the three-yard line. The ball rolled into the end zone and Carignan, chasing the ball, was swarmed by UMD players for what initially appeared to be a certain safety. Somehow, the teenager playing in his first college game managed to break free and run 104 yards for a touchdown. The video of that play shows up every so often in my social media feed based on an algorithm I do not understand (in a mathematical sense), but absolutely adore (in a magical sense). I could not say how many times I have watched it, how many times I have held my breath watching Cory Carignan outrun his opponents, tiptoe down the sideline, and make it safely into the endzone, but I can say that every time I have done so with goosebumps rising on my arms. Such is the power of sports. A couple of weeks ago, the video appeared again and, again, I watched it with the same rising emotion, as though the outcome was uncertain, as though I did not know that the tacklers would fall away one by one, as though I did not know that Cory Carignan would cross the goal line and spread his arms in an embrace of the moment that would be relived, at last count, over 71,000 times. As the video begins, Carignan is the only one in the frame. The fumble, the muff is all that exists for a second or two. The mistake, the error is all we see. We anticipate the catastrophic end as though we are all Beaver fans and we can protect ourselves from disappointment by not believing in miracles. We dare not think of second chances and redemption. Somehow, Carignan manages to scoop up the wildly bouncing ball and dance around the horde of defenders advancing toward him. As he does, the camera pans out, the screen widens, and we can see that he is not alone. At least five of Carignan’s teammates have made it down the field and are running alongside him, deflecting defenders and creating the alley through which he runs. By the time he reaches the 50-yard line, most of the others – teammates and defenders – have fallen away, but there are two, two teammates whose names we do not know, who continue to run alongside. Two teammates who escort him all the way home. What is the story? Initially I would have asserted that Cory Carignan is a reminder that it ain’t over ‘til it’s over or ‘til the final whistle blows or ‘til the fat lady sings. But after further review, as the referees say, I think it is something different. After watching the video four or five or ten times more, after finding out the touchdown by Cory Carignan (whose name was mispronounced over and over by the broadcaster for the opposing team) was the Beavers’ only score and that the Beavers lost that game 52-7 and that they would go 3 - 8 on the season, I think the story is this: No matter how badly you mess up, how big is your failure, how improbable your redemption, if you will just pick up the ball and keep running, there are people who will run with you and a precious few who will follow you all the way home. Copyright 2025

The call of a killdeer is less a song than a squeal. It reminds me of the sound of a straight pin being drawn across metal. Or a branch being blown across a window screen. Or a fingernail on a chalkboard. High-pitched and shrieky. In the open field just outside my bedroom windows, I often see them making bounced landings, their voices mimicking the squeaking of brakes as they quickly become invisible, light brown feathers and black neck rings blending into the foliage. I was startled, then, just the other day when, backing out of the carport, I heard a killdeer precipitously close. I stopped the car and got out to look for what I assumed was an injured bird and it took only a moment to locate him, a warm brown blot on the bright green grass. I approached slowly and, rather than flying away, he began limping toward the edge of the yard, one wing dangling at his side. Every couple of steps he awkwardly attempted to lift the wing and each time I got a glimpse of the multiple shades of tan and rust and white that feathered his belly. I did not immediately realize that I was talking to him, cooing sympathetically as though my reassurances would assuage what had to be primal fear. I could almost hear his tiny heart pulsing hard and fast in time with his shrieks. He struggled all the way across the yard, across the driveway, and into the field, forcing me to accept the fact that there was nothing I could do to help and taking some slight solace in seeing another killdeer close by, a friend – I convinced myself – who would, surely, not leave the injured bird alone. I have not been able to get the bird out of my mind. I have scanned the yard and the nearby brush for feathers. I have listened intently for killdeer calls closer by than usual. I have reminded myself over and over that it is the way of the natural world for birds to be injured, for birds to die. I decided that the least I could do was to write about the killdeer, to offer up a remembrance, a memorial. I could, with words if not avian medicine, give honor to my feathered neighbor. I began by researching the killdeer, including its Latin name (Charadrius vociferus), its species name (plover), and its habitat (which happens to be quite broad both geographically and seasonally). After mentioning that killdeer often nest near “human development,” the text goes, quite nonchalantly if you ask me, to mention that “Adults perform broken-wing displays to distract predators from their nests and young.” I think I read the sentence five times in succession before I started laughing. I had, obviously, been had. It is not the first time I have been fooled, duped, or deceived (though it is more common for my gullibility to be revealed by humans than by birds), but it is the first time I have articulated the common thread among the fooling, duping, and deceiving. Having been tutored by the killdeer, I can now say with clarity and, I hope, generosity that birds – and people – lie when they are afraid, when something important is at risk, when everything within sight, within earshot feels like a threat. And considering the general state of things that is pretty much every day. Somewhere in my yard, probably deep within the branches of the 40-year-old Ligustrum, there is a killdeer nest and over the next couple of weeks there will be baby killdeer, a gift that is worth the lie. Copyright 2025

There is a memory from my childhood that reappears every so often: I am seven or eight years old, sitting between my parents on the pew that may as well have our names on it, the pew on which we sit every Sunday morning.  Without fail.  We are those people, those “every time the church doors open” people.  The choir, unrobed and untrained, is singing “When The Roll Is Called Upon Yonder” and I am gazing at the beam of spring light that lasers through the long window just off my father’s shoulder.  There are a million tiny dust motes floating in the light, hovering like fairies. This was the moment, I am quite sure, that I fell in love with churches.  All of them. The square white wooden chapel on a dirt road keeping watch over worn gravestones. The cathedral nestled among skyscrapers, its stone walls thick enough to keep out the noise of millions of lives. The arenas, surrounded by acres and acres of asphalt, that used to be shopping malls.   I love being surrounded by the echoes of oft-repeated words.  I love the soft rustle of pages – Bibles and hymnals and bulletins – being turned.  I love the consistent, if uniquely expressed, symbolism and ritual, the invitation to participate, and the feeling that descends on me every time I walk in, the sensation that can only be described as sacred. Today, though, it is different. On this particular Friday in April, drenched in springtime sunlight, I am not immediately engulfed in the reverence I have come to expect when entering a church.  Today, as I take a seat in the balcony and look down at a full sanctuary, the long cylinders hanging against the chancel wall – the metal tubes through which the organist will send blasts of air to produce majestic music that is both doleful and triumphant – make me think of the raucous belching of a gutted muffler. Today, as I look around at the congregation, so many of whom are  young adults, the white glass circle surrounding the face of Jesus in the stained glass window looks less like a halo and more like a veterinary cone, a tool of captivity and humiliation. What is wrong with me? I wonder.  Where are the feelings of comfort and assurance that I expected, wanted, needed to envelope me as I stepped into this meager repository of what we know of God?  Why, on this day, can I not see the sacred?  My senses are skewed by anger and that anger has made me sarcastic.  It has also made me sad, so sad. Ellie was 24 years old. Just a few days shy of 25. When cancer invaded her body and stole her future, she had not lived even a quarter of a century.  The words used to describe her – “a ray of sunshine,” “a shining light,” “a genuine joy” – are not the exaggerations of people struggling to assuage the grief of those who loved her best.  They are the God-honest truth, truth that makes all this even more painful.  And they make me sure that I will have absolutely nothing to say to her mother when given the opportunity to pull her wounded self into my arms for a brief moment. I am stiff and straight-backed as the service begins, but somewhere between the first powerful notes of the organ swelling and spreading in an invisible wave to land on my shoulders and the tender prayer of the minister who baptized Ellie as an infant, I feel the anger, the sarcasm, even the sadness give way to something else, a revelation of sorts. I realize, as the tears finally come, that it is not, of course, the churches and chapels and cathedrals themselves that create the sacred.  It is not the stained glass windows or the altars, the prayers or the hymns.  It is not even the scriptures or the sermons.  It is the desire of the human heart to recognize, to acknowledge, to know that what we experience of life is but a threshold, a doorway, a waiting room.   And as the benediction rises and falls upon our grieving heads, I yield to the mystery, to the ineffable presence of all that is beyond understanding, to the unfathomable power of love.  Copyright 2025

I planted the crepe myrtle last spring. Actually, I did not plant it. I had it planted by someone who knew what he was doing. It was his suggestion that the tree be planted outside one of the windows where it would eventually provide some relief from the western sun that, in July and August, turns the living room into a reasonable facsimile of a sauna. My professional picked a spot between the chimney and the bay window in the kitchen – a little nook, a niche, a sheltered corner. He dug the hole according to the guidelines known by every subscriber to Southern Living (“three times wider than the root ball, but no deeper than the root ball itself”), loosened the roots slightly, and dropped the tree into the hole. He then patted the soil gently and gave the tree its first bath. I have failed at a number of horticultural efforts over the years – the camellia, the dogwood, and multiple hydrangeas – but something about the crepe myrtle made me optimistic. Despite its scrawny limbs, I got the impression that this one, this Lagerstroemia indica, was scrappy. And the chances that I would forget to water something that I saw every time I passed the window were pretty low. The crepe myrtle survived the summer heat and almost total neglect as I directed all my attention to the sudden illness that would take my father 37 days after diagnosis. Withstanding a near-drowning from Tropical Storm Debbie and Hurricane Helene, it limped its way into fall, dropping with a languid sigh the one leaf it had managed to produce. It trembled in the cold stiff winds of winter and bore up under four inches of unexpected snow. When green finally began its creep across the landscape, I kept waiting for the little crepe myrtle to, if not burst into bud, at least gasp its way into producing some evidence of life. Day after day I stared through the window at a bare tree. I was disappointed, but not surprised. Had I really expected this latest attempt at gardening to result in spectacular success? I rolled my eyes and muttered under my breath something about wasted money and “never again” and I let it go. Then just before Easter, I noticed the way the late afternoon light was falling in soft puddles on the wood floor and stopped to watch it shimmer like the surface of a pond beneath a gentle wind. I took a deep breath and turned to look at what I knew would be a subtle, but still stunning sunset. And that is when I saw it – the crepe myrtle covered in fat buds and bright green leaves bouncing in the breeze. The tree I had left for dead, the tree I had forsaken was alive. I stood there with my hands on my hips frustrated with, aggravated at, and provoked with my own self. This was not the first time I had, in an effort to avoid disappointment, given up on something beautiful. Not the first time I had feigned disinterest or claimed detachment when I stood on the edge of letdown. In fact, I had lived enough moments just like that one to know that if I chose to stand there long enough, take another couple of deep breaths, stare into shimmering light at the horizon for a few more seconds, I would experience the magic that is believing, that is hope, that is resurrection. And I did. Thus is the power of spring. Copyright 2025

The mantel at Sandhill is one solid piece of heart pine, the soul of a tree that, were it still standing, would be well over 100 years old.  It is solid and square.  Its rings are the color and thickness of the layers of a love-baked caramel cake. Last week it was also full and flush, strung with pine and ivy and bay leaves, twinkle lights moving in and out of the branches like a creek through woods or a snake through high cotton.  Last week, nestled among the greenery, were the shiny glass ornaments that were too big for the tree, the string of paper doll teddy bears that Adam and Kate made the Christmas they were six and four, and a set of three ceramic angels, a gift from the mother of a college student who used to work for me. This week, though, it looks lonely (I have a tendency to anthropomorphize.).  There is an empty vase on one end and three brass candlesticks, their tapers leaning precariously, on the other.  For the life of me I can not remember what was there before. I walk around the house thinking that something will jog my memory (Was it that antique copy of The Plays of William Shakespeare ? The pine needle basket I bought at a craft fair decades ago? A photo on an easel?), but nothing does, a consequence of what I can not be sure and I refuse to debate myself over old age or inattention as the culprit. Instead, I forage the bookshelves and choose three hand-thrown pottery bowls holding nature’s debris.  The smallest bowl, fired a shiny cream with its rim outlined in teal, guards a handful of seashells, a sand dollar, and a single sycamore pod.  The second bowl, heaped high with more shells, is the color green of 1960s bathroom tile.  The largest bowl, big enough to have held the black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day, contains a nest blown from its perch by Hurricane Helene, its outer rim a Jenga-like construction of twigs and small branches, the inner lining made of small roots and specks of dried leaves. I examine the tableau from various angles.  The negative space between the bowls feels almost prophetic, as though the room between them, the noticeable emptiness, is intentional, purposeful, meant to leave room for what is to come in the new year, already a quarter of the way through the century. I light the fire.  I light the candles.  The bowls make shadows on the wall. Outside the wind is picking up.  It makes howling noises as it careens around the corners of the house. It is, I think, safe to assume that real winter is upon us. Today, I remember, is Epiphany. The twelfth day of Christmas.  The day on which Christian church commemorates the arrival of men from the East to worship the Infant Jesus.  “Epiphaneia” is an ancient Greek word which meant an appearance or manifestation, specifically of a diety to worshippers. When I woke up this morning there was no indication that, on this very ordinary day, a handful of astronomers would be showing up with gifts. And, yet, the three bowls are just that – the gift of forgetting the past; the gift of provision for the present moment; the gift of sight into what can be. I kneel before the fire, reach my hands toward the flames, and whisper a prayer of thanks for my sweet sanctuary and a prayer supplication for all those, man and beast, who have none. Copyright 2025

The light of the early spring sunset is soft, its colors muted. It comes through the wide window at a slant and the shadow that is thrown by the vase of tulips in the middle of the kitchen table is the palest gray, like someone has tried to erase it. The tulips are over a week old now. Their straw-like stems are beginning to curve down toward the tabletop, yielding to the inevitable pull of gravity. A handful of petals lie scattered at the base of the vase that belonged to my friends’ grandmother, each of them making me think of a silent movie heroine on a fainting couch, the back of her hand against her forehead in resignation. Fields of Grace is a you-pick farm outside Columbus that exists to support a ministry “to women who have endured any type of trauma and to provide caregivers with a restful retreat.” My friend Melissa, a retired midwife who is herself a restful retreat, took me to the farm after I commented over and over about the bouquets of tulips on the tables and countertops of her farmhouse, tulips that I had to be convinced were real. Cold and wind greeted us at the farm, but it did not matter. I had never seen tulips in such abundance, never seen tulips in so many shapes, never seen tulips in such luscious colors. I walked up and down the rows, clippers in one hand and a bucket in the other, equally thrilled at my good fortune and dismayed that I could not take them all. I was particularly fascinated by the tulips that did not look like tulips, at least not like the tulips I learned to draw in elementary school – three triangles at the top of a rounded bucket. Some of them were full and blousy like the chiffon skirt of a ballgown; some were velvety and stiff; some were nonchalant and droopy, wrinkled like worn linen. But it was the colors that had me entranced. I stared and stared, searching my memories and all the words I knew, trying to imprint on my hippocampus the exact shade of each one. The purple tulip, the one that resembled a peony in its lushness, was the color of grape cough syrup. The iridescent orange variation, with its fleck of hot pink, exactly matched mercurochrome, the now-banned disinfectant that bathed the cuts and scrapes of my childhood. The pink tulip, whose delicate petals resembled suede, was the color of amoxicillin, the liquid antibiotic that is every new parent learns to request at the first sign of illness in her newborn. Later, I scribbled down the descriptions on a scrap of paper and it was only then that I realized that for each of the floral hues – purple and orange and pink – my brain had chosen something curative, something medicinal to represent the particular wavelengths cast upon the cones at the back of my eyes. My memory, my perception had interpreted my experience among the flowers as therapeutic and restorative. Staring at the tulips now – the ones I brought home and at which I have gaped in awe as their initial beauty faded into soft decay – I congratulate myself on understanding. Not just the healing properties of flowers, though the tulips have healed my spirits with each concentrated gaze and sideways glance, but also the idea that medicine, in most cases, has to be administered. We can not, as it turns out, heal ourselves. Despite the human bent toward independence, we are made for connection, most especially when we are hurt or lonely or grieving. We are meant to live not only our own lives, but to be a part of the lives of others, to bandage the wounds of a suffering world with whatever tools we have at hand. Including, sometimes, something as beautiful and ephemeral as a field of tulips. Copyright 2025

I wake to heavy blue-gray light sifting through the blinds.  The rain is hard and hits the metal roof in rhythmic waves.  The bed is warm and I do not want to leave it just yet.   But I will.  I will ease from under the covers and feel the cool wood of the floor on the bottoms of my feet.  I will stretch and remember again, as I do every morning, that my body is not as limber as it used to be.  I will open the blinds and see a small marble of hot pink breaking through the clouds at the horizon. And, then, the executive function of my brain will remind me of all I have to do.  It is a long list. Fifty years ago I was a college student in the second semester of my freshman year. Among other courses, including the second half of both American History and American Literature, I was enrolled in Psychology 101. I registered for the class with enthusiasm.  Psychology was a real “college” class.  I had never taken it before and in the 1970s, on the heels of the revolutionary 1960s, psychology still felt a little risky.  My enthusiasm, however, waned rather quickly. My recollection is that it was a Wednesday night, the night before our second exam of the semester.  It was late and the hallways of the dorm were quiet.  Yellow light seeped from under a few doors, but almost everyone was in bed when the fire alarm went off. We moved in small pods toward the various exits and then stood in our pajamas and bare feet in the cold and dark for what seemed an interminable length of time while the Macon Fire Department confirmed that there was no fire, no danger at all and allowed us to return to our beds. The next morning, someone came up with the idea of asking Professor Lewis if she would consider rescheduling the exam in light of the previous night’s events.  Her response, delivered in a haughty drawl, was “I would really like to see how you perform under these circumstances.” I was 18.  I was unaccustomed to adults being anything but helpful and sympathetic.  I took the exam, of course, and finished the semester doing everything necessary to make an A, but my interest in psychology disappeared. It was later in the semester that I arrived in class to find a quote written on the chalkboard at the front of the room, a leftover from an earlier class.  In the few seconds it took to read it and the few more it took to write it down in what would become the first of many quote books I have kept over the years, I gave myself a mantra to which I would return often and which would provide the motivation necessary to create a productive and useful life. "Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.”  – T.H. Huxley I have quoted it to myself and to others hundreds of times in the last 50 years.  It reminds me that an education imposes a responsibility.  It reminds me that self-discipline is not a matter of desire.  And on this stormy morning, the words of a man who was never able to find an academic position and, thus, was never called Professor, turn me from the window to the things that ought to be done. Copyright 2025

It is Saturday night. The stiff wind of the afternoon has ushered in a chill that shakes my shoulders as I get out of the car. It is the first day of March and, so, I should have expected the wind, but I will never not shiver in its presence. I am here to sit around the table with people I love, with people whose genetic material and history and at least some sensibilities I share.  “It's nothing fancy,” my aunt proclaims as we take our seats. There is a platter of hot bread, a bowl of rice, and a pot of steaming gumbo, piquant with chunky tomatoes and bell peppers, but no okra because my cousin doesn’t like its sliminess. We pass around paper plates, paper bowls, and plastic spoons, making it easier for the cook who will, as she always does, refuse help in clearing the table and washing the pots. When the bowls are empty and our bellies are full, we stay, leaning in as though the table were a fire and we our ancestors.  Our shoulders curve into one big circle – a cave, a womb, a place of safety – as we talk. I have done this hundreds of times; it is as natural as breathing. We pass around a book that my cousin has put together, a photographic collection of recipes of the woman who was my grandmother. The recipes, written in a hand that is anything but florid, take us back to the kitchens we remember, the kitchens where she tied on her apron in one quick twist and set to rolling out dough for biscuits and dumplings or flouring chicken.  They are written on envelopes, the back of deposit slips, scraps of paper torn from wire-bound notebooks, and include notes on their provenance – “from Minnie Lee,” “out of Linda’s book.” The images spark a conversation about her difficult childhood and we shake our heads in amazement that her heart and her arms remained open.  We tell stories that make us laugh and cry; we ask questions to which there are no answers; we share memories and correct each other on minor details.   The hours slip by.  Somebody yawns.  Somebody stands up to stretch.  It is time to go.  I take with me a Rubbermaid container of leftovers.  It warms my hands as I step outside into the damp coldness.  “Be careful,” my cousin calls from the porch. I have told the story before, the story of the Thanksgiving long long ago, the Thanksgiving when I was still small enough to sit under the dinner table while Grannie and Mama and the aunts talked.  The men and children were long fed and the women could take their time nibbling on bits of ham, slicing off the crispy edges of the pound cake, sipping coffee. I have no idea if they knew I was there.  I sat quietly, so still that my feet went to sleep.  I stared at their legs, watched them cross and re-cross their ankles and tuck them beneath their chairs.  I always say that it was sitting under the table – along with afternoons shelling peas and mornings shucking corn – that I learned to tell stories. Tonight, though, I learned something else: It is at the table that we, like the medieval knights who had to remove their weapons in order to sit, are invited to lay down our swords, encouraged to reveal ourselves, welcomed into a vulnerability that is both frightening and enlivening.  It may well be the only time when our masks slip enough that we are truly seen. The world needs more tables. Copyright 2025