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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

The morning after the presidential election breaks still and gentle. The colors of the landscape – pale gray, faded blue, soft green – make me think of cashmere sweaters. There is no breeze worth noting. The flag that proclaims “Welcome Friends” hangs straight and limp from the flagpole and the wind chimes ring out only the infrequent single note. Breathing in the smell of just-cut grass, I realize for the first time time that election day and All Saints’ Sunday are in the same week. I cannot imagine that this is a coincidence, that the founding fathers did not in some way recognize it and find some significance in the juxtaposition of the two events. Perhaps someone among them considered that the great experiment, which would remain a great experiment even 229 years later, could use an assist from the great cloud of witnesses referenced by Saint Paul. On Sunday, as is usual, the pastor reminded us that it is not only those who have died who are considered by the church to be saints, but all of us. All of us saints. And, so, with that thought in mind, I stand on the front porch of Sandhill, gaze out across the cotton fields still to be harvested, and try to think of myself that way, as Saint Kathy. Try to decide how I should walk into the world on a day in which, in the words of one of my young friends, “half of America thinks the apocalypse is coming and the other half thinks the savior has arrived already.” In the distance I hear a diesel engine. Across the way I see a tree has fallen, damaged most likely in the hurricane and, finally, after a month of struggle, overcome by gravity. On my face and my arms I can feel the dampness of not-yet-evaporated dew. I see and hear and feel and it is all beautiful, all overwhelmingly beautiful. I have not forgotten about Omran Daqneesh, the little boy in the Syrian ambulance. I have not forgotten about the tragedies in Charleston and Orlando and Dallas. I have not forgotten the children whose faces I see every day, the ones who live in poverty, the ones who struggle with mental health issues, the ones whose families are fractured. The late Irish poet John O’Donohue said that beauty is “that in the presence of which we feel more alive.” If he is right – and I believe he is – then there is beauty in the tear-streaked face of five-year-old Omran. There is beauty in the passion and dignity of the mourners of tragedies. There is beauty in the suffering of those whose voices have not yet been heard. There is beauty because in their presence I am more alive. And I realize that that is how I walk into this day. That is the Gospel of Saint Kathy, the good news that I am called to share – the good news that beauty still exists and we will find it in each other, not just in our similarities, but in our differences. That beauty still exists and we will find it when we listen to each other’s stories with interest and patience. That beauty still exists and kindness is still possible and disagreement doesn’t have to be polarizing. And that in the embrace of beauty we can change the world. That is how I will walk into this day. And every day. And all the saints said, “Amen.” Copyright 2016

Within the arms of the tree lost to the hurricane I found a nest. Deep and empty like a soup bowl slurped clean, it was cradled between two branches. In wind strong enough to topple the tree, it had somehow remained whole. Both the architecture and the construction were solid and the removal of the avian residence from its perch was difficult. The finesse with which the twigs and leaves and other bits of natural ephemera had been woven together was obvious at first glance and I knew that one ill-advised tug could send the entire structure falling to the ground and disintegrating into a dusty pile of yard waste. Lift. Pull. Twist. Turn. I maneuvered the nest while doing my best to avoid swallowing a dangling chinaberry or putting my eye out with a protruding broken limb. Eventually it came loose and I lowered my arms, now burning from having been held above my head for so long, to see that the nest was much bigger than I’d first thought. All of the nests in my house – and there are more than a couple – are about the size of a large grapefruit, like the ones the relatives from Florida used to bring in the red string bags with the graphic labels. This one, the one that survived the hurricane, is more the size of a head of iceberg lettuce – not the ones in the grocery store now, but the big ones from the 70s when we first started eating salad and iceberg was the only kind of lettuce and French, Thousand Island, and Italian were the only dressings. This nest was built, it appears, by a couple with aspirations. I took it inside and, with so many other post-hurricane chores to address, set the nest down in the bowl in the middle of the dining room table, the pastel-glazed bowl I bought at the university ceramics sale one Christmas. It generally holds fruit – a dozen apples or oranges –, but it was empty and handy and that’s where the nest landed, its outer twigs catching on the rim of the bowl so that it hung like a double boiler. That was nearly three weeks ago. I’ve walked past that nest in that bowl on that table at least three hundred times. Headed out to work in the morning, coming in at night. From the couch watching the baseball playoffs to the refrigerator for something to drink and back again. To the laundry room to load the washer, to empty the washer, to load the dryer, to empty the dryer. Back and forth and back and forth. And this is the thing: I’ve seen the nest – had the image register on my retina and travel to my brain for identification – every single time. But not once have I stopped and looked. Not once have I slowed down to touch the tiny leaf stems and curly root hairs that were woven together to make the lining soft enough to incubate eggs. Not once have I paused to note how many different shades of brown and gray it would take to reproduce that nest on canvas. Not once have I broken stride and acknowledged the magic and the mystery surrounding the fact that a bird with only a beak and two clawed feet as tools and debris as materials, a bird weighing less than two ounces managed to engineer and construct something that withstood a hurricane. This is a sin. To him, or her, who knows to do good – who knows to pay attention and be amazed, who knows to be grateful for the miraculous, who knows to take the time to watch the world unfold – and does not do it, to him, to her, to all of them everywhere, this is sin. On the front porch, in morning light turned golden by the October sun, I pause to listen to leaves on the holly trees rattle like a dancing skeleton and dew heavy as rain drip from the roof onto the brick steps with flat splats. I look across the road to see the white polka dots of cotton bolls and the narrow green stripes of pine trees rolled out like the fabric of an Easter dress. I feel the breeze and taste the air. This is my repentance. After the earthquake Elijah heard a still small voice. After the hurricane I saw a nest.

The water is hot. It is rushing through the faucet, collecting in the sink. Bubbles that smell of green things, living things rise like yeast. I hold my hands under the water for a moment, watch my knuckles turn red. It is dark outside the kitchen window, but inside, inside my house, it is light, miraculously light. I am cleaning the candleholders. The bronze ones that were a housewarming gift for my very first grown-up place. The clear acrylic cubes I bought in Chattanooga as a memento of a girls’ weekend. The lead crystal ones that belong to Mama who loaned them to me and who never asked for them back. I am cleaning them of the wax that dripped and hardened and caked over the four nights during which they got to be more than just bit players in an attractive table display. Four nights during which they were the only thing that stood between me and the abyss, darkness that fell with the thud of a guillotine at 10:23 p.m. on Friday. The hurricane was relatively kind to Adabelle. Other than the string of pine trees that fell like dominoes over the power lines, stranding all of us without lights and cable and internet and well water, there was little real damage. The ancient oak tree in my parents’ front yard, already crippled by two previous storms, lost yet another chunk of itself, taking out a part of their fence, but graciously falling in the road rather than into their bedroom. The chinaberry tree in my backyard that had of late become the feeding station for so many birds was halfway uprooted and left dangling. A few more pine trees in the woods behind my brother’s and my neighbors’ houses snapped in two – that’s all. I did not have any trees fall through my roof or crush my car. I did not have water rise up into my house like the tide. I did not – I can hardly form the words. – have someone I love stolen from me by the violent, indiscriminate wind and rain. Yes, it was for 93 hours. Yes, it meant that I had to drive 20 miles to get something cold to drink. Yes, I had to put on makeup in the bathroom at the office. But that? That’s inconvenience. That’s all. Which is why it’s a little embarrassing to admit that by Day Five, when I’d grown tired of drive-by showers and my favorite take-out, when I had to stop to remember what day it was, when I was about ready to just let the cell phone die rather than sit in my car for one more minute waiting for it to charge, I got a little pouty, a little impatient, a little impertinent. I was, like everyone else, longing for normal. I wanted to be able to do something, anything, without thinking and planning and strategizing. I wanted to be able to look at a clock and check the time, to find the dog snacks in the pantry without knocking something else off the shelf, to put in my contacts. I wanted to be able to flush the toilet, for heaven’s sake! Did I really need to feel guilty about that? Is it wrong to desire comfort? Can’t we prefer light over dark without being made to feel as though we have failed the test of human toughness? No. No. And yes. Hardship is not a contest. Pain is not an endurance test. Nobody leaves here unscarred. Nobody gets a perfect score. Hurricane Matthew – just like every hurricane, tornado, drought, war, terroristic attack, and automobile accident that came before or will come after – was just one more challenge, one more chance to do the best we can. Copyright 2016

I have taken up the habit of walking a prescribed path along the edges of the yard. This walking is different from the other kinds of walking I do – the brisk striding to the highway and back that increases my heart rate and makes me feel I'm doing at least a little something toward maintaining my good health; the slow and purposeless ambling through the woods looking for nothing in particular, but hoping to stumble upon something astonishing. This walking, this perimeter walking, is not slow or fast. It is both purposeful and purposeless. It is a moment in the day in which reestablish my equilibrium, recalibrate my settings, refocus my attention on the distinction between the urgent and the important. I am accompanied on these walks by a rosary, a gift from my friend Becky, a souvenir from her trip to Israel. I am not Catholic and my knowledge of how a rosary is generally used is limited to what I have gleaned from novels by people like Flannery O'Connor and conversations with Catholic friends. Armed with that admittedly limited knowledge, I have developed my own way of using the rosary to draw myself toward all that is sacred. Sometimes, as I walk and the beads slide through my fingers like silk, each one represents a moment of gratitude from the day I'm just lived. Other times, when the soft flesh of my thumb and forefinger are dented by my tight grip on each one, the beads represent the hurts and sorrows and unfulfilled dreams of people I know and love, the bruises and lacerations of my own heart. Of late I have been accompanied on these meditative strolls by Dave, the new dog. He is still a puppy and is fascinated by anything that flutters, rattles, or dangles. Thus, I should not have been surprised the other afternoon when he scampered up behind me, tongue lolling out of one side of his mouth, and suddenly sprang toward the hand clutching the rosary. He managed to get his teeth around the chain, breaking one of the tiny metal links that thread the beads into one long strand of supplications. It was his first mistake. And because he is not my first dog, I am comfortable in acknowledging that it won’t be his last. So I picked up the half-rosary that lay in the edge of the field road and we kept walking. I have neither the tools nor the eyesight to properly repair something that small. I, therefore, resorted to fishing line – threaded the 40-pound test through two neighboring links and tied it off with knots like the ones Mama taught me to use when hemming a dress. Put it back together with the best of what I had. Before Dave broke my rosary, I was a little careless with it. I held it nonchalantly, loosely, in one hand. I let it swing back and forth, losing track sometimes of where I was in my journey through the beaded labyrinth, depending upon the fact that the trek is always a loop and either way will take me back to the beginning. Now, I no longer let it dangle carelessly in rhythm with my stride. I exercise greater care. I hold it with two hands, its beads and links sifting back and forth between them like an elegant Slinky. And when my fingers reach the spot where two beads are held together by a piece of knotted fishing line, I am prompted to regard fragility and adaptability and forgiveness as the graces they are, to remember that all things are sacred, to rely upon the truth that all paths eventually lead home. Copyright 2016

It's not that I don't pay attention to the weather. I do. I pay very close attention to the weather. At least my body does. When the barometric pressure drops, the headaches come. When the humidity rises, the hair expands. As soon as the flowers and trees and grasses begin to bud and shoot their pollen out into the air like invisible fireworks, the breath becomes labored. And in the right combination of cold and wet, the right knee reminds me of green grass and white lines and speeding soccer balls and the feeling of invincibility. No, it's not that I don't pay attention to the weather. It's just that I don't pay attention to the weather forecast, an aversion that I suspect comes from all those years living in a house with a farmer. A house where conversation about the weather wasn’t something in which you engaged to pass the time and fill the spaces, but something that surrounded you, lingered on your skin, left you more often than not anxious and tender. A house where unseasonable freeze and wind chill factor, serious drought and record high were not vocabulary words, but dangerous interlopers, evil marauders, malevolent trespassers. Weather forecasts, it didn’t take me long to learn, could narrow my father’s eyes, furrow his brow, hunch his shoulders. Weather forecasts could make him quieter than usual, send him out into the middle of the field, alone, to walk and think and pray. Weather forecasts offered information which might or might not be correct and about which I could do absolutely nothing. So I stopped paying attention. And the storm that blew up Sunday night, the storm that Grannie would call a badstorm, a one word moniker carrying the connotation of imminent destruction and danger, caught me completely off-guard. Rain earlier in the day had come and gone, leaving the road still walkable. Dave, the new dog, and I had left footprints in the damp dirt and breathed cooler air. We’d noticed that the cotton seemed to be standing a little straighter and the grass seemed to be a little greener. We’d hardly broken a sweat. There was nothing to indicate that the evening would be anything other than quiet and calm. Nothing except, apparently, a severe weather warning or some such thing that had been issued by the National Weather Service or some such agency. I sat on the couch and listened to the wind grow louder and wilder. It rattled the window screens and keened through the chimney like a banshee. The rain flew across the yard in near-horizontal sheets, hard wet arrows puncturing the ground and chopping at the roots of anything growing. There hadn’t been time to turn down the rocking chairs and I listened for the sound of one or more being thrown into the shrubs. And then the power went out. Three hours in the dark can leave a person with plenty of time to consider things. Like whether it makes any difference if you know that a storm is headed your way. In this case it probably wouldn’t have. Other than securing the rocking chairs, there’s not much I would have done if I’d been watching television and recognized in that ubiquitous floating line of information at the bottom of the screen the announcement that included words that had something to do with me. On the other hand, there are different kinds of storms and different kinds of warnings, different ways of forecasting torrential emotional rains or issuing psychological travel advisories. In those situations, it is easy to surmise – lying in the dark, listening to the wind screeching around the corners of the house and giving it a scary face –, that advance notice would be a good thing. That staying inside, staying at home, staying safe is the better choice. What I know, though, from all the times I’ve been caught without an umbrella is that the storm always passes, I won’t get blown away, and the rain on my face reminds me I am alive. I don’t need a forecast to tell me that. Copyright 2016

Birds, it would appear, read the newspaper. Or perhaps it is just the birds who live at Sandhill. Only days after the public revelation of my failure to attract anything other than aflatoxin, the birdfeeder dangling from the chinaberry tree was empty. Amazed and hesitantly excited, I refilled it and a couple of days later it was empty again. I bought a second birdfeeder, hung it on a higher limb on the other side of the tree, and filled it. The next time I checked they were both empty. I bought a bigger bag of songbird mix. But I didn’t see any birds. Nobody balancing prissily on the edge of the feeder, nobody gliding through the branches for a nibble or a nosh. Nobody pausing at the end of the meal for a brief nod of acknowledgment to the provisioner. Then one day as I struggled to simultaneously still the springy branch, keep the leaves out of my eyes, slide the top of the feeder up the string, and avoid spilling the birdseed, I saw out of the corner of my eye a bird. Less than an arm’s length away, perched on a branch no bigger around than a wooden spoon, staring straight at me. The same pale chartreuse color as the berries on the tree. A head topped with a downy tuft of feathers like a mohawk. Just a few leaves separated us. I wanted to reach out, to touch the feathers that looked like velveteen, to stroke the tiny head that tilted up so regally. But at the same time I did not want to break the moment. We stood there, the two of us. Staring. And breathing. It was I who eventually broke the spell by remembering something or other that remained undone on the list of chores. I finished filling the feeder and left the bird to its supper. Back inside the house I went straight to the Audubon book and gasped out loud when I recognized my friend in the glossy photograph. Female cardinal. Of course. She looked exactly like the flashy red male cardinal, right down to the tuft on her head, but I’d failed to recognize her because, well, she wasn’t flashy and red. She was subtle and green, the color of her surroundings. She didn’t draw attention to herself. I’d seen her only because I’d gotten so close and she’d been so still. It’s been a long time since I was a girl. A long time since it mattered what Glamour and Seventeen said about how I should look. A long time since I slept in pink rollers the size of orange juice cans trying to straighten my hair. A long time since I refused to smile in pictures because I was self-conscious of the space between my two front teeth. A long time since I thought I needed to be flashy and red. Flashy and red is beautiful. Flashy and red is reassuring when it shows up on a gray afternoon in winter. It’s inspiring when it streaks across a pale blue sky on an early spring morning. But flashy and red has never let me get close enough to stare into its eyes. Close enough to share a breath. And that’s what I want. In birds and in people. So I’ll keep filling the feeder and watching for the ones that are watching for me.