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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.

The bride was as lovely as I have ever seen. The groom as serious. The bridesmaids floated down the aisle like mermaids, the groomsmen lumbered like the men they were. Summerall Chapel was majestic, the flags of the fifty states hanging from stone braces along the ceiling in silent reminder of the fact that The Citadel is a military college, a place where boys go to be educated in the ways of war. I could not place the priest’s accent, but his tone was familiar – equal parts congratulation and admonishment, celebration and warning. This is a big and wide and wondrous space into which you are stepping, he seemed to be saying, one about which you know nothing, but for which you are fully equipped by virtue of the simple fact that you are standing here. We witnesses filed down the long aisle back out into the late afternoon sun and waited to watch the bride and groom, the newly married, parade under raised swords and happy cheers into the future. The next morning I decided to take the backroads, to wend my way home down gravelly highways with lots of stop signs, past all the churches with Bethlehem and Antioch and Macedonia in their names, through hamlets whose only identifying features were boarded up gas stations and single blinking caution lights. I was well into the journey when I saw the road sign proclaiming that I was but a few miles from Ridgeland. I’d never been to Ridgeland. Never had a reason to go. But Ridgeland is a place I have always known. It is the first town you come to when you leave Georgia on US Highway 301 North and it is the place where my parents, 19 and barely 18, having decided that they would forego the church wedding for which my mother’s sister had painstakingly made the satin dress with umpteen tiny covered buttons up the back, drove to find a Justice of the Peace and get married. I slowed down slower than necessary as I got into town. There was no traffic. I suspect that most everybody was in church. The downtown buildings were flat-faced and close to the sidewalk, many of them empty. A railroad track cut across 301 at a perfect 90-degree angle, but I suspected that it rattles infrequently these days. I saw a lot of abandoned motels and truck stops, broken windows and rusted canopies. There really was very little worth noting about Ridgeland beyond a satellite campus of the University of South Carolina that boasts a few new buildings and the confiscation and renovation of a handful of old. Very little to recommend this town, like so many that had been left behind by the people racing up and down the interstate highways, except for that one small thing. I tried to imagine them on that Friday afternoon – her tiny waist, his black hair. I wondered what they talked about as they drove. I wondered which building had held the JP’s office and if it was still there. When people ask me where I’m from, I always know what to tell them. I was born here. I have lived here always. But that Sunday morning on the way home from a wedding that could not have been any more different from the one in which my parents took their own steps into that big and wide and wondrous space, I realized that while here is where I am from, it is not where my story began. Not in the beginning. Not once upon a time. My story started when two teenagers stood in front of a common civil servant and, in response to his particular version of will you, said they would. And they did. They still do. Copyright 2016

Late in the day, when the light has bloomed lavender and the audible heartbeat of the earth has faded to a quiet drone, when the heat of the day is old and settled, I walk outside to meet the dragonflies. They are everywhere. Flashing and dipping over the Russian sage, whirling through the lantana, gliding through the balusters and around the posts of the deck. As I walk around the yard they follow me, barnstorming from above and below, twisting and diving like tiny biplanes, intent on eliciting oohs and aahs from their one-person audience. Their colors change as they angle up and down and over. Black, then blue, then purple. Iridescent flashes that remind me of peacocks and cloisonne’ and the kind of eye shadow that only models wear. I don’t know much about dragonflies beyond what we learned in the third grade unit on insects – head, thorax, abdomen – , but I do know that I remain as fascinated by them as I was before I knew the names of their body parts. There is a memory, faded like an old Polaroid, of standing in Grannie’s yard, holding out my arm as a landing strip, waiting for the sticky, prickly dragonfly legs to light on my sticky, sweaty skin. That arm is soft and round and does not narrow much at the wrist where it spreads out into a child’s hand and five pudgy fingers. The other hand makes a fist and then pulls out the index finger to make a perch, easing it slowly toward the dragonfly who is tentatively rubbing his two front feet together, carefully nudging him onto the finger. He clings now, all eight legs wrapped around the finger, and I walk around the yard watching the light glisten off his wings, fluttering so rapidly they hardly seem to be moving at all. I am P.T. Barnum. I am Dr. Dolittle. I am the man on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. I have tamed something wild. The dragonfly does not stay. Wild things never do. Not for long. He lifts, hovers, and flits off into the deep summer evening. My finger tickles just a little on the spot where he sat. It is odd, I think as the memory falls back into memory and the present reasserts itself, that I have never seen my younger self, my child self as an explorer. If anyone asked, I would probably have said that, with the exception of Girl Scouting adventures and one week each summer at camp, I spent most of my childhood with my nose in a book, curled up in a corner of my bedroom discovering the world through words rather than experience. But the memory of the dragonfly is making me rethink that self-portrait. Other images are appearing, breaking the surface like tired swimmers. Here! they call out. Look! they say. See this! they demand. And I do. I see myself and Keith and the cousins tromping through the woods, sticks in our hands. I see us digging tunnels and splashing in rain-filled ditches. I see us chasing butterflies across the front yard and searching for grasshoppers among the tall grass at the edge of the pond. I see that I have sold myself short. I have failed, not for the first time, to claim what I am, what I have always been. I am a dragonfly tamer, a memory chaser, a story finder. I am an explorer. Copyright 2016

It is so hot. So hot that, by 7:30 in morning, the basil on the deck droops like little green flags on a windless day. So hot that, at 7:30 in the evening, it takes less than ten minutes to be damp with sweat and sticky with salt and for gnats to be going after my eyes like children on parade candy. But this evening brings a break in the stifle. This evening I am standing on the edge of my earth, the place where sea oats and sand separate everything that men and women have made from the thing they have never been able, will never be able to reproduce. I am standing on the beach, the shore, and over my head is a moon so round and full that it could have been die-cut, except it wasn’t. Its light is refracted by flat waves into a troupe of fairies that shimmy and shake across the water into Busby Berkeley choreography. I lift and lower my eyes from one to the other – moon to reflection, reflection to moon – and wonder how I came to be so lucky to be standing right here, right now. I remember how lucky I have been to be here on other nights – watching fireworks up and down the beach on the Fourth of July, dodging driftwood on a long walk in December. The wind picks up. The waves rise. The fairies kick a little higher, twirl a little faster. The voices down the way drift off as a breeze skips across the sand and tickles my cheeks, picks at the curls around my face like fingers on a harp. The memories transfigure. I am no longer a grown woman. I am a little girl. I am lying on my stomach, face inches away from a yellow box fan. I close my eyes and fall into the hummmm of the blades slicing the air and shooting the heat away. We are taking turns – Keith, the cousins, and I – sending our voices into the box and hearing them vibrate back out at us, sonorous and deep. The image blurs and changes. I am in my childhood bedroom. The box fan has been lifted into an open window, turned so that the spinning blades force air out into the darkness and create a current around the house like the one in the river where we learned to swim. It goes round and round and round the house all night long, tumbling through the window, fluttering the curtains that Mama made, kissing my eyelids and lulling me to sleep. I open my eyes. I am back on the beach. It is natural, I suppose, to wonder what makes certain images rise to the surface of consciousness. Maybe it is mere proximity or some sort of sensory re-engagement, the smell of salt air or the feel of sand caught between my toes, that makes me remember. That would account for my visions of Roman candles and weathered wood, but what of the whirr of the box fan and the smell of my summer pajamas, all Gain and Clorox? What about this moment, fifty years and a hundred and fifty miles away, would stir them up? My memory, I have decided, is a cauldron, deep and wide and mysterious; its contents are odd and unpredictable, like eye of newt and salamander tail, driftwood and box fans. Summer is the wizard who heats up the cauldron, sets it to simmering and bubbling, stirs the contents bottom to top. Boiling over, spilling out to disrupt my present are images – still shots and movies, black and white and Kodachrome – transfigured magically into creatures that engage me in conversation, take me hostage, and demand the only ransom I could ever pay – my total attention. Only when they are sure that I have not forgotten do they leave me alone. Copyright 2016

I have tried for years to feed birds. Hung all manner of feeders from stout branches and metal shepherd’s crooks, tried seed mixture blended specially – or so the bag said – for the birds I’ve seen hanging out at Sandhill, crumbled up stale bread and sprinkled it on the grass in an effort to Hansel-and-Gretel-like show them the way. And, with the exception of hummingbirds, I have failed miserably. Friends who have been successful in this endeavor have suggested that perhaps the birds around my place don’t need supplemental feeding, that they are able to get all they need from the fields and forests. This has never seemed a reasonable explanation to me. Why would the mockingbirds, wrens, sparrows, crows, doves, cardinals, and blue jays that I see and hear with regularity turn down free and easy food? One person, who knows how much I love wind chimes, told me that the birds might be scared away by the sound. Another supposition I find it hard to fathom as the chimes have never kept the hummingbirds from drinking their fill at the red plastic tubes dangling from the corners of the deck nor have they deterred the armadillos, raccoons, rabbits, or deer from coming right up to the house to nibble hostas, lilies, mint, or anything else green and tasty. The long running frustration does not, however, keep me from trying again every so often. I empty out the seeds from the last attempt, now moldy and stuck together in strange Lego-like shapes, and refill the feeder with fresh crisp seeds. I am such an optimist. So that’s what I was doing last Saturday when I realized that balanced in the crook of two slender branches just above the branch from which I was attempting to remove the bird feeder was a nest. Smaller than a cereal bowl, slightly larger than a coffee mug, the twigs that formed its armature were about as big around as a wooden match. It looked like a new nest, one that would still be holding eggs or maybe even babies. Even on my tip-toes it was too high to see over the edge. I took my cell phone out of the pocket of my shorts and held it up and over the nest. Click, click, click. Three photos of something. I lowered my arm, careful not to jostle the nest, and looked to see whether I’d captured anything. There they were – three gape-mouthed fledglings. Their bright yellow beaks pointed toward the sky like traffic cones, their bodies one round heap of downy softness somewhere between brown and gray. Could I be faulted if I allowed myself the fleeting thought that their mother might be pleased to find a full feeder right outside her door? A couple of days later I was back outside – watering the hydrangeas, pulling weeds, giving in to my baser self and actually spraying Round-Up in a couple of places where the black mesh stuff just wasn’t cutting it. I decided to check on the baby birds. I eased my phone back up over the next. Click, click, click. Three photos of something. I lowered my arm and looked at the screen. An empty nest. No sign of birds. And no sign that any food had been taken from the feeder. I don’t know which disappointed me more. Well, actually I do. Baby birds leave nests. Either they get big enough to fly or they fall victim to a predator. I can’t do anything to assist in the former or prevent the latter. But the feeder, the still full feeder, left me feeling let down because it was all about me and my good intentions, about me and my efforts to help. The feeder was all about me and whether I would be successful at feeding the birds. Except that – and I realized this when I stopped to really think about it – I was successful the minute I filled the feeder and hung it from the branch. My part in the enterprise was simply the offering. The birds’ part was the eating. I had done my part whether they ever took a single seed. Copyright 2016

At about nine o’clock Monday night I stood in the middle of the front yard and took in the magic. Over my right shoulder the sun was smearing her last flush of pink and orange across the horizon, a long narrow stretch of luminous light kissing the tops of the pine trees. Over my left shoulder the moon, round and gold as a double eagle, was already floating in dark blue sky. It is an odd sensation, experiencing sunset and moonrise simultaneously. Turn to the right and it is still day; to the left and it is already night. Look straight ahead, across the field where the first green of cotton is struggling to find its way to the surface, and it is neither and both. Right here, in this spot, one is certain to be unsure about things. Three nights ago a storm came through, brought down a tree that felled a power line. Sandhill lost electricity for about six hours. It was still daylight when the power went out so there was no disorienting dive into darkness. No sudden loss of depth perception. No need for candles or flashlights. But it was hot. The high had been 97 degrees. It would not take long for the house to heat up, so I opened the front and back doors and a wave of cool air rushed in, a train barreling its way through a tunnel. I went to the front door, sat down on the threshold, pulled my knees up to my chest, and listened to the sounds of the storm – tree limbs rattling, leaves shuffling, windchimes shaking like a jig doll. I read a couple of magazines, ate the salad I had somehow presciently picked up on my way home, and waited. Waited for the darkness to fall. Waited for the lights to come back on. Waited to be released from my post there on the threshold. It is an odd word, threshold. Its etymology is questionable, its use infrequent. A noun rarely spoken except in conjunction with the verb to cross. A threshold lies between, neither here nor there, fish nor fowl. A place where the decision is yet to be made, the step yet to be taken, consequences yet to be engaged. The threshold is also not a comfortable to place to remain for long. My legs were cramped. My back was stiff. I stood up slowly and stretched. It was time to light the candles. That is what I am remembering on the full moon summer solstice. Comparing the colors of the day star to those of the evening light I realize that I am standing on yet another threshold, another in-between place. Is it day or night? Am I coming in or going out? Am I holding on or letting go? I have no idea. That is what the voice in my head says in response to the questions: I have no idea. And as I hear that voice, the breath I’ve been holding flies off across the yard like a fairy. As I hear that voice – my voice – I suddenly understand that I am brave enough, strong enough, wise enough to stand in the threshold, to stay in the uncomfortable, uncertain place for as long as it takes. For as long as it takes for the day to become night and the night to become day again, for the leaving to become arriving, for the holding on and letting go to become one wide embrace of all that is. Copyright 2016

The French Broad River is the second oldest river in the world. Only the Nile is older. I am not certain who decided this and upon what basis, but when I stopped in Asheville to see my friend Lee Lee on my way home from a book festival in Virginia, she happened to mention it and she said it with such authority that I assumed she must be right. I further assumed she was right about it being a good idea for the two of us to go hiking in the North Carolina Arboretum, which isn’t far from the river. We started at Bent Creek Park, a stone’s throw from the Blue Ridge Parkway, and made our way up and down trails lined with rhododendron and white oak and the occasional sign warning of bear sightings. We forgot about the threat of rain as the gray sky got lost behind the canopy of trees under which we climbed and talked. When we reached the exhibit center I was delighted to discover that the pedometer on my phone had recorded over 6,000 steps. Inside the center was an exhibition of watercolors by a regional artist, landscapes and still lifes that captured in stunning realism the rhythm of life in both the small towns and cities of Appalachia. On the front lawn was a bronze statue of Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of landscape architecture, whose last great project had been the nearby Biltmore Estate and whose design for an arboretum at the estate had been an inspiration for the one through which I’d just hiked. And then there was the bonsai garden. Begun more than a thousand years ago in China and developed as a part of the Buddhist tradition, bonsai involves keeping plants and trees in a miniaturized state and shaping them into artistic forms. Lee Lee and I walked around staring at the tiny versions of the trees under whose vast shade we’d just been walking a few minutes before, feeling like Gulliver in Lilliput. I half expected to see small people – most likely in Victorian dress and carrying parasols – strolling beneath the limbs that were no thicker than a No. 2 pencil. In the center of the garden was what Olmsted would probably call a water feature, a stream bed of rocks down which the soft trickle of flowing water would create the perfect ambiance for a meditative stroll through the diminutive forest. Except that there was no water. I noticed it right away. And before I could formulate the thought that there must be a drought, I saw the sign: “This stream bed is intended to be dry, the only time it carries water is when it rains. With a dry stream the water is suggested. The water must be supplied by your imagination.” I stopped. Stared. Read it again. “The water must be supplied by your imagination.” The words burrowed into my subconscious as Lee Lee and I hiked back down to the creek and said our goodbyes. I left the mountains and headed back to the flatness of the coastal plains. I left the bonsai garden and went back to the farm. Days later I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the dry stream bed and the far-fetched, yet familiar idea that my imagination could supply the needed water. How many times, I found myself thinking, have I landed in a place so dry, so drought-stricken that it should have been impossible for anything to grow, anything to flourish, anything good to rise from the dusty soil and, yet, somehow it did. And how many times had I managed to envision water falling, puddling, soaking into the dirt and coaxing a green blade to the surface. And how many times had I seen that blade pushing and writhing and willing itself to the surface. A single blade that was enough to make me know that more were coming. I thought of other words. Old, familiar words. “The evidence of things not seen,” which is, of course, the description of faith as offered by the writer of Hebrews. And I realized that, for all we say of faith, religious or otherwise, it cannot exist without imagination because they are both built upon the always difficult, sometimes scary willingness to see what isn’t there. I don’t know when I’ve been more astonished. Astonished and affirmed and just a little giddy. Imagination it now seemed, that place where I have lived so much of my life, is orthodoxy. Orthodoxy revealed in a Buddhist garden. Copyright 2016

On the slope of the hill, just where the field ends and the woods begin, where the ditch on either side of the road deepens, I stopped to listen. I’d been walking into the warm silence of mid-morning, absorbing the stillness and the pulse of soil awaiting seed, when a sudden rush of shrieking and squawking burst from among the pine trees and scrub oaks to my right. I stopped short, just in time to see the mockingbird swoop down toward the ground about six feet ahead of me, followed closely by a pileated woodpecker. The two birds flew madly back and forth, mockingbird screeching, woodpecker close on his tail, from one side of the road to the other. I didn’t dare move. I didn’t dare miss a single moment of whatever this encounter signaled. Eventually the mockingbird found cover in the foliage and the woodpecker peeled off like a fighter jet, successful in some aerial maneuver at whose purpose I could only guess. It is rare to get that close to a pileated woodpecker. Rare to be able to see so clearly the white markings that twine around the neck and down the shoulder like a strand of opera-length pearls. Rare to get such a prolonged look at that glorious red crest. I am accustomed to the sound of woodpeckers drumming on the trees in the branch behind Sandhill. It is the bass note to the songbirds’ springtime chorus. It is the percussion that keeps the beat in early morning and late afternoon. And I am used to straining my neck to get a glimpse of the jaunty red cap in the tops of lightning-shaved trees. This encounter, though, left me a little breathless and I spent the rest of my walk wondering about the feuding neighbors. About a week later, I was there again, same spot. This time my reverie was broken by a sudden swarm of black and white wings exploding from the woods like fireworks. Four, five, six baby woodpeckers were suddenly swooping and gliding, one following the other, making identical loops and circles in the sky like the ones I used to draw holding a handful of crayons. Across the road, then over my head and back into the woods, then back over my head again to light in a tree for mere seconds before restarting the acrobatic show. Over and over they slid down through the space thick with sunshine and my awe to climb effortlessly, in unison, from one branch to another. These were, obviously, the babies of the woodpecker I’d seen before, the objects of the instinct that had turned a nurturing mama into a hell-bent kamikaze. Somewhere in the canopy of blue and green that had stretched over my head a week earlier, a nest full of chicks had slept, fiercely defended and oblivious to it all. Poor mockingbird. He probably had no idea. You don’t have to be a mama to know that feeling. You don’t even have to be a woman. You just have to recognize inequity and unfairness and then be willing to stand in the gap between the weak and defenseless and the arrogant and powerful. You just have to be willing to say, “That is wrong. I will not ignore it. I will not pretend it isn’t happening. I will bring whatever I have and whatever I am to this battle and I will fight.” There was another, not so obvious, point to the morality play I watched being performed on the stage of springtime sky. A point that did not come to me until later. Those babies, those ballerinas in black and red, did not know that they had been in danger. They did not know that the freedom with which they performed their arabesques and grande jetés was expensive. They twirled and spun completely ignorant of everything save the joy of being alive. I was reminded of a story a friend told me once, a story about a conversation she’d had with her mother as an adult. Her mother was concerned that one of my friend’s siblings was about to embark on a relationship with someone who already had children. “It’s hard,” my friend’s mother said. “It was hard for me and your father to raise all of you. We did it and you all turned out okay, but it was hard.” My friend is a wise woman. Both grateful and graceful, she looked at her mother and said, “Thank you for keeping that from us.” And that, because all good sermons have three points, was the third lesson from my encounter with the mama woodpecker and her babies: The fight can never be about being thanked or appreciated or pointed out as being a good fighter. The standing in the gap can never be about being noticed or rewarded. It can only be about showing up, showing up with absolutely everything you have and absolutely nothing less than all that you are. Copyright 2016

So, I won this raffle. Not the big prize, which was a pick-up truck of some uncertain vintage, but one of the smaller prizes, a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses. The $20 that I invested in my great- nephew’s elementary school fundraiser was $20 that I considered a donation, $20 that I never expected to see reappear in my life in any form other than the great satisfaction of knowing that I had supported Jackson's school and increased his chances of participating in the pizza party. I don't remember ever having won a raffle before this one. Contests, door prizes, competitions, and awards, yes, but never a raffle. I was, then, a little bit tickled to get a video text message from Jackson announcing my great good fortune. Just as I had never won a raffle, I had never owned a pair of Ray-Bans. I had never owned a pair of really fine sunglasses of any brand. Because I tend to do things like leave mine at other people's houses or have them slide down my sweaty nose out in the woods somewhere, I generally don't spend a whole lot of money on them. The $10 rack at Walmart is usually good enough for me. I wasn't prepared, then, for the difference that my fun new shades would make in my vision. It was cloudy and overcast at the t-ball game where Jackson made delivery, but even then I could see that through my neon aqua aviator Ray-Bans the glare was significantly less and the world was significantly clearer. I also noticed that the work required by my eye muscles to keep my eyes open had been significantly reduced. That is, I wasn't squinting. Not at all. It was the next morning, though, in the brilliance of an amazing sunrise, that I was able to detect the true value of my newly acquired eyewear as my unavoidable tendency to draw parallels between the tangible and the intangible took over. I am all for looking at things straight on. Telling the truth. Eliminating filters. Abolishing subterfuge. Being honest with ourselves and others. What I realized, though, driving toward town in the early morning brightness, was that, in my sincere and vigorous attempts to find the truth in everything, I had too often done it staring straight into the sunlight. Staring straight into the sunlight and being blinded as a result. I’d never considered that before, that truth can be blinding. That truth – offered or received, delivered without tenderness or at the wrong time, accepted without question – can leave both the messenger and the recipient in the dark, bumping into walls, tripping over furniture, bruising shins and hearts. That in the moments in which we are forced to tell or hear that which can not be denied, it may well be essential that we first don some quality sunglasses. Not the cheap kind that blur the edges of trees and fencerows and flowers. Not the flimsy kind that sit cattywampus on your nose. Good ones that eliminate the glare, reduce the shadows, ease the squinting. Patience and tolerance and curiosity. Humility and hope and compassion. Those are the lenses through which I need to be looking when I tell the truth, when I hear the truth, when the truth steps into my path and blocks my way. They are not cheap, but neither are they flimsy. Like Ray-Bans and Oakleys and Maui Jims, they are well worth the price. So, I won this raffle. Not the big prize, but the best prize. Excuse me while I go look at the sun. Copyright 2016