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I hated to do it. It hurt my heart. I stood there and stared for the longest time, hand saw held in one gloved grip and hedge trimmer in the other. Rosemary is my favorite. Rosemary is for remembrance. And once my friend James told me that rosemary grows where strong women live I was hell-bent to make it grow at Sandhill, but it grew too much, too tall, too wide and now it had just about taken over the entire corner of what I pretentiously call the herb garden. It was the size of one of those neon pink azaleas that line the course at Augusta National or one of those topiaries at Disney World (if somebody had forgotten to trim it up to look like Mickey or Dumbo or Ariel). It had grown around the corner of the house into the holly hedge and over the concrete edging into what passes for grass at my place. Shoot, it had even overrun the mint, leaving just a few scraggly sprigs fighting for enough sunshine to stay alive. So, there I was, backlit by the morning sunshine like Scarlett on the hills of Tara, muttering something like, “As God is my witness, I’ll never let the rosemary grow this wild again.” I advanced into the thicket, discovering immediately that the clippers were useless. Either they were too dull or the life force in the rosemary was too strong. I turned to the hand saw, grabbed a handful of branches, and started hacking. The scent – that sweet yet pungent, sharp yet smooth, musky and at the same time bracing scent – surrounded me and for a moment I stopped. Could I do this? Could I cut away still-live branches, toss them into a big pile where they would dry out and die? The sun grew brighter. I could feel the hair on my neck grow damp. I muttered as mutantly long branches sprang loose from my grip and slapped me in the face. It is hard work, pruning. I looked down to see blood running from a cut on my arm. One of the newly trimmed branches had gouged me in retaliation. I kept going. Soon I could reach the hose pipe coiled like a cobra beneath the winter’s deposit of dead leaves. I could see a whole patch of new mint that had sprouted defiantly in the rosemary’s deep shade. And I could see the entire bottom third of the massive rosemary bush was nothing more than dead branches, leafless stems, slender twigs that snapped like pretzels. It took me a minute to absorb the significance. A minute to recognize the contradiction dwelling within my handiwork. It’s pretty obvious, in life as in gardening, that eliminating the dead limbs may also require the sacrifice of some of the living. What is not so obvious, but what I couldn’t deny standing there in the spring sunshine with sweat and blood running in separate rivulets down my body and toward the ground, is that the dead limbs were so hard to get to, so hard to see because the live ones were providing cover, that the live ones were – by continuing to grow, continuing to produce, continuing to spread their fragrance profligately across the landscape – protecting the dead ones. Down on my knees, I snapped the limbs off one by one. Felt the roughness of the scaly bark, felt the resistance as my hand pushed down, felt the release as separation came. Over and over. The pile of dead limbs grew. It is not easy to rid anything – a rosemary bush or oneself – of dead undergrowth. It is not easy to wield or yield to a sharp instrument. First, you have to be willing to lose some of what looks good, seems healthy. Then, you have to be willing to feel the roughness and the resistance, sometimes over and over. If you can, if you do, and only if you can and do, you will experience the release. Release from the necessity of giving cover to something that would never be able to give anything in return. Copyright 2016

I was awakened by the lightning. Not the thunder, not the windchimes whirling dervishly, not the rain slapping against the side of the house. Not the sound of the storm, but the light. Through the thin slits between the slats of the window blinds, into the flat blackness of my bedroom came slashes of white that prized their way through the blue-veined flaps of my eyelids and jerked me away from whatever dream world I had been visiting. One does not think in those moments; one senses. And the first sensation was that the flashes of lightning looked amazingly like cartoon bolts, jagged and irregular, as though Mighty Mouse could be riding one of them. Or like Harry Potter’s scar. Or like the crack in the Liberty Bell. The second sensation, coming not so much on the heels of the first, but concurrently with, was that there would be a migraine. I was in law school when I had the first one. I didn’t know what to call it. A mind-bending drum beat in my temple that left me huddled in a dark corner of my apartment wondering not whether a person’s head could literally explode, but only at what moment it was going to occur. That doesn't happen much anymore, that kind of guerilla attack. I am older and wiser, armed with powerful pharmaceuticals and no longer too stubborn or proud to admit that I am no match for whatever it is that causes my brain to turn on me with the ferocity of the Furies. The relationship between flashing light and migraines isn’t exactly clear. Most scientists agree that migraine sufferers are more sensitive to light in general, so it would make sense that bright light, flashing light, light in a form or intensity outside the norm could be problematic. I know this, but this is not what I was thinking as I lay there, fully awake, feeling the beginning of a trembling in my head, like picking up the distant rumble of a train through your feet. What I was thinking was: This is interesting. And: What exactly just happened, neurologically speaking? And: When will I need to get up to take something? And, probably most importantly for a person whose preferred currency is words: How can I describe this? The lightning continued. I got up and took something and eventually went back to sleep, having made what I hoped was a successful pre-emptive strike. When I woke up again it was morning. All day long tiny spikes and shards of light, like leftover pieces of the lightning, hovered in my peripheral vision. All day long everything I saw trembled just the tiniest bit. All day long I kept thinking, how can I describe this? It wasn’t that day or the next day, but a few days later, still trying to answer the question, that I found myself remembering the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”: “Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.” I thought of the lightning again, how it had looked like the crack in the Liberty Bell. And I realized that it wasn’t the lightning I’d been trying to describe, it wasn’t even the migraine. It was the crack. I hate migraines. I never want to have another one. But migraines are the everpresent reminder of the cracks. The limitations and imperfections. The failures and regrets. The missed opportunities and the bad choices. The things that, one by one, let in the light. I’ll take that. I’ll take the pounding drum beat and the huddling in the corner if it brings illumination. I’ll take the attack of the Furies if it gets me the truth. I’ll take the struggle if it gets me the light. Copyright 2016

It is just after sundown. The yellow moon hovers in the navy blue sky and beneath it, far beneath it, where the sky meets the earth at a seam, a line of bright orange flames simmers. I stand on the front porch and watch a frothy lather of smoke floating off to the north. I rush inside for the camera, snap a shot, and post it on Facebook. Someone replies with a question as to why the woods are intentionally set on fire. I answer, “It's called a prescribed burn and is done regularly to rid the forest of dead undergrowth. It improves the soil quality and also reduces the chance of wildfire.” I am a bit smug in my knowledge. Later, at nearly midnight, I sit on the steps and listen to the faint whisper of dry dead undergrowth snapping and dissolving in the distance. I hear a tree fall, a gentle collapsing of trunk and bark, the sound like a weak wave sloshing against the shore. A few seconds later, a second one falls, this one with a thud, a heavy slap against the ground, muffled only slightly by the accumulated debris. The darkness has given itself arms and wrapped them around my shoulders. I watch the glow on the horizon and am warmed against the chill. That is the first night. The moon, still fat and full, appears again. My friends – the ones whose great-grandfather named this place, built a railroad through its heart, and brought the Indians who harvested its treasures and consecrated it with their lives – watch from the edge of the ditch as the new round of fire begins its flank and advance on vines and fallen branches. “Don’t want it to jump the road,” one of them says to me when I stop, roll down the window, and taste two days’ smoke. Ownership requires diligence and attention. Later, I go out to the porch again. The orange on this end of the woods has died and left a carpet of soft soot unrolled across the acres of pine trees. There is no falling, no crashing. Only the moon offers light this evening. It dangles in the sky like a drop of mercury caught in its fall from a broken thermometer. There are no arms to surround me this time and all that remains for my viewing is a leftover haze, thick and gray, obscuring the treetops. That is the second night. I am late coming home. Ahead on the road I can see multiple sets of headlights, small and low to the ground, ATVs and four-wheelers moving slowly toward me over dry red clay. The light is diffused through thick smoke, also low to the ground, and I realize that something has gone wrong. There is fire where there shouldn’t be. I stop to ask what has happened and in the dimness a bright white bandage on my friend’s arm tells me. On the third night, the fire has jumped the road. It has ignored the things that were supposed to contain it and spread wildly into a place no one expected it to go. By the time I get there the blaze is contained, the equipment saved, the injured arm salved if still stinging. I remind my friends to be careful and drive on, forgetting to look for the moon. That is the third night. Later, it occurs to me that it is also Maundy Thursday. The next day is Good Friday and Sunday is Easter, the third day. The day on which Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, who ignored the things – death, the grave – that were supposed to contain him and whose message spread wildly into places no one would have expected it to go. I catch my breath. I smile. The best thing about living in such close proximity to soil and trees and water and sky is the constant tutorial. Every day the voice of the earth calls out, “Attention, please. There is something going on here.” When I am at my best I actually listen. But sometimes it takes me a while to get it all, to discern the nuance. Mother Nature can be subtle. A week goes by. The woods are still and the trees that fell across the road in obeisance to the flames have been moved to the side. The smoke has dissipated and the sky over Adabelle is the blue of baby blankets and chambray shirts. The moon, when it rises tonight, will be half of what it was when it watched the fire scuttle beneath it like an army of crabs. I am thinking of the hostas that any day now will knife their way up through the crust of dirt at the back door. That’s when the last bit of mental smoke clears and I suddenly realize that the forest isn’t the only thing that needs the occasional prescribed burn. Bad memories and outgrown dreams can turn into tinder. Unrealistic expectations can become kindling. The only way to eliminate them is to set them on fire. Once I do, they will be gone forever. Deep breath. Am I ready to let them go? Am I ready to see them curling black and brittle and drifting away on currents of heat? I feel a surge of something that could be pyromania. Somebody hand me a match. Copyright 2016

One year it was biscuits. One year it was list-making. The objects of my Lenten fasts have ranged from the concrete and indulgent to the intangible and neurotic. On Ash Wednesday, just hours before my forehead accepted a sooty cross, I decided that this year I would give up expectations. Confession: the decision was made with more than a little jaw clinching, maybe just a bit of cynicism, and, most certainly, with the sense of resignation that always accompanies what we now call compassion fatigue. Further confession: the decision may not have been so much made as thrust upon me. Often in the weeks and months leading up to that brisk February evening I’d felt the sting of disappointment and I no longer had the desire or the strength to carry the weight of frustration. I walked away from the altar, the sound of my heels echoing off the walls like a chisel on stone, knowing well what I had invited into my life – the opportunity to deliberately confront the way I think things ought to be, illuminated and then crushed by the way they really are. I walked away, the sound of the minister’s voice already fading, thinking that it would not be all that hard. Not nearly as difficult as, say, giving up biscuits. Denying myself a hot handful of buttery bread every single morning had to be tougher than acknowledging the unavoidable truth that people will fail you. I was right. I refrained from rolling my eyes when the car in front of me turned without signaling. I held my tongue when my restaurant order was wrong. I decided that I didn’t absolutely have to have a receipt from the car wash. Piece of cake. Until last Saturday. Last Saturday I had this party to celebrate the publication of my second book. I planned carefully. I cleaned and decorated and borrowed tables and chairs. Aunt Linda and my new Uncle James filled the tables with more food than could be eaten. There was a table of twelve different cakes. The sky was high and blue, the breeze was light and sweet. The yard at Sandhill was full of people I love. It was perfect. Except for one thing. I had thought I would have time to visit with all of those people I love, have real conversations and tell them why it was important to me that they were there and a part of the celebration. I had assumed that all my orchestrations would result in flawless execution and those conversations would be organic and unhurried. I had taken for granted that everything would go according to plan. I had expectations. And some of those expectations were not met. I didn’t get to hold my newest little cousin Abby. I didn’t get a photo of me and my friends Melissa and Anton who came from Columbus. I didn’t get to taste all the cakes. When everybody had gone home and I was swaddling the leftovers in Saran Wrap, acutely aware of Sandhill’s ordinary silence in the aftermath of so much laughter and storytelling, I couldn’t help wondering if there was another side to my Lenten fast. I’d been so intent on letting go of what I expected of other people that I’d missed out on my need to let go of what I expected of myself. If I could ignore the man who didn’t signal, if I could scrape the guacamole off my sandwich, if I could scribble down the car wash cost on a napkin, couldn’t I just look forward to holding Abby at Easter, smile at the photo someone took of Melissa and Anton with Daddy, eat cake now? Couldn’t I be delighted at the things that I didn’t plan, couldn’t have planned, that just happened? Sarah and Aaron, two mid-western transplants, finding they have mutual friends in Cincinnati, of all places. Little Ella and her parents walking down the dirt road as the sun set. And me standing at the kitchen window looking out over the now empty yard with a heart that is anything but. It is still a week until Easter. Still time for more expectations to be released. Still time for the fasting that always ends in a feast. Copyright 2016

“Be still and look straight down at your feet,” she said. “Look for black and shiny,” he said. They are teaching me how to find shark teeth along this quiet stretch of beach on a cool clear day. I am having a hard time. There are, I soon realize, a couple of reasons for my difficulties. First, it is my tendency to keep my eyes on the ocean, not the beach. I am inclined to walk with my chin tilted up toward the sky at an angle, much like that of the waves. I am generally more interested in what is happening out there, between me and the horizon. The second difficulty is that when I do lower my head to scan the ground what I see are sand dollars and moon shells. Or, more accurately, pieces of sand dollars and parts of moon shells. The less-than-perfect, not quite whole, fractured pieces of beauty that litter the sand. They jump out at me like the one unripened tomato in the basket or the face of someone I love in a crowd. Nevertheless, I am a willing student. I want to find shark teeth. And so I walk on like an old woman – shuffling, barely lifting my feet, head rolled forward from my shoulders, staring down while all around me seagulls call and waves roll. The few other people on the beach are far behind us now. We have wandered a long way. It is time to turn around and head back. Inside my plastic bag is one perfect olive shell, the broken knobby end of a whelk, a couple of scallops, and two tiny shells I will later identify as Florida augers. There is even a small starfish, so newly washed up on the beach, so recently dead that it is still red, red like brick, red like blood, red like alligator tears. There are even three or four tiny shark teeth sympathetically donated to my cache by the children, but none of my own finding. I don't count the one I nearly stepped on, the one I picked up only after having been prompted, “Look down at your feet.” I am not disappointed. It has been a lovely day. Sand under my feet, wind in my hair, sun on my face. People I love sharing it all. Failure at becoming a shark tooth finder, failure at becoming something I clearly am not, no longer bothers me. Though I have no talent for it, golf fascinates me. Unlike any other sport, the singularity of the athlete is on constant display. There is never anyone to blame for mistakes but oneself, no teammate who failed to carry her load, no referee who can be blamed for his bad call. It has two elements, the long game and the short game. In the long game, power and distance are rewarded; in the short game, finesse and accuracy make all the difference. A good golfer can excel at one and be just okay at the other. A great golfer has to master both. I am thinking about that later, when the children have gone to bed and the grown-ups sit in the dim glow of lamplight engaging in what Ursula LeGuin called “the beauty and terror of conversation.” We are remembering the past, questioning the future. We are talking of ourselves and how we confront the challenges of life. I hear myself saying, “I play the long game.” And I realize then why it is so hard for me to find shark teeth, to look down, to direct my attention to the single spot where I stand. It is easy, when you stare long enough at one spot, think long enough about one option, hold long enough to one opinion, to believe that that is all there is. It is easy to get stuck, be disappointed, lose heart when what you see never changes. It is easy to think you are a great golfer when Putt-Putt is all you’ve ever played. I am okay with never being good at finding shark teeth. I am good at watching the horizon. I am the girl who can see far down the beach. I am the girl who is patient. My game is the long game. Copyright 2016

It looks like the opening credits of a science fiction movie. Or a Saturday morning television show from Japan or Scandinavia. Or a more sophisticated version of the time-lapse photography reel-to-reel movies Mrs. Trapnell showed us in fifth grade. It is a large green sphere that could be covered in Astroturf, from which dangles a chenille thread the color of a ripe peach. The thread ends in two frayed knobs that, like little feet, move steadily along a rope the color of young asparagus. That is what it looks like. But that is not what it is. What it is, says the caption on the video posted to my friend’s Facebook page, is “a myosin protein dragging an endorphin along a filament to the inner part of the brain's parietal cortex which creates happiness.” She goes on, to make sure apparently that the less-scientifically minded among us understand the import: “Happiness. You're looking at happiness." I am – as I should be, as the person who posted the video intended me to be, as anyone with half a lick of sense would be – amazed. Slack-jawed, pop-eyed, caught-breath amazed. Someone has made an animated image out of information collected from inside a living brain. And before that there was someone who invented the machine that collected that information. And before that there was someone who figured out where the parietal cortex was and what a myosin protein is and what an endorphin does. Someone with equal amounts of abstract intelligence and gee-whiz curiosity was drinking coffee or reading the newspaper or just staring off into space one day and thought, “How would one go about finding happiness?” So he or she or they set about answering that question with the tools of science and some time later he/she/they produced the moving picture I can’t stop watching, explaining in visual terms that happiness happens when chemicals get moved from one place to another in my brain. It is as though the sum total of all my emotions is nothing more than an elaborate logistical system located between my ears and behind my eyes and underneath all this curly hair, a fleet of neurological big rigs that pick up and drop off and keep on truckin’. And, despite my initial and ongoing amazement, I am unsure as to whether I am prepared to accept that. I get the caption-writer’s point. I admire her use of the short declarative sentence – “You are looking at happiness.” – that startles in its directness and simplicity. But that admiration is accompanied by an instinctual resistance to the idea that anything so fragile and ephemeral, so welcome and longed-for as happiness could be reduced to a formula, an equation, or a recipe. I have looked at happiness before today. Many times over. I have looked at happiness on the faces of strangers and familiars and in the mirror. I have heard it in the breathless laughter of children playing tag with ocean waves and in the slow easy breathing of a sleeping loved one. I have known it in the oven warmth of summer sun and in the heavy darkness of winter midnight. It is always new, always different, ever frightening in the way that taxiing down a runway is frightening, the way starting a new job is frightening, the way choosing to trust another human being is frightening. And this is what I know: Happiness is not formulaic. It is not simply a matter of gathering all the correct ingredients and combining them in the specified order. If I thought for one minute that contentment and satisfaction could be beckoned, forced, or conjured and that I had the power to do the beckoning, the forcing, the conjuring, I wouldn’t. I’ve been gifted with enough happiness and I’ve watched enough of it slip through my clenched fist, my cupped hand, my open palm to know that forced happiness is never real and real happiness can’t be held for ransom. Myosin proteins and endorphins didn’t teach me that. Living did Copyright 2016

Sometimes, when the moon is full, I leave the blinds open and I fall asleep with a laser beam of light falling through the window and puddling on the floor, blue-silver and shimmering like watered silk. When I wake up, the moon and its brilliance will have floated to the other side of the sky, the other side of the house and, in the winter at least, my bedroom is dark as a tomb. So it is that I can’t help being startled when my eyes slide open at the sound of the alarm to find not darkness, but a not-quite-moonbeam of light angling in the window. It takes only a moment to remember what I’ve read the day before about the alignment of five planets being visible just before dawn. One of them is trying to get my attention. I jump out of bed, throw on my robe, and run to the front porch. The computer generated graphic that I saw indicating where in the sky I should look and where each planet would be in relation to the others included a line of bucolic silhouettes along the horizon – a barn, a horse, a shed, a house, a gazebo, and, in the distance, a sailboat on a body of water of indeterminate size. It bears no resemblance to the horizon toward which I am looking, a straight line of pine trees, their pointy tops blurred in the darkness. It doesn’t matter. It takes only a few second to find what I’m seeking. Through my bare feet I feel the bricks that make the steps and the hard straight valleys of mortar that run between them and hold them together. I hear the night-buzz that still hovers in the branch. And, by tilting my chin ever so slightly toward the sky, I see five planets – count them: one, two, three, four, five – five planets arced across the sky like a well-groomed eyebrow. Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter. Pulsing like stars, but closer, brighter. If I count the planet upon which I am standing, I am in visual contact with six of the eight currently identified planets in the solar system. Eighty percent of all planetary structures in my celestial zip code are, at this very moment, within the range of my myopic sight. I draw in my breath. Hold it. Let it out slowly. I expected – as I read about the alignment, as I thought about getting up to see it, as I hurried outside – that I would, in the presence of such vastness, feel small and insignificant. That I would, in considering that Saturn is 746 million miles away, recognize the irrelevance of my quotidian complaints. Instead, I stand in the presence of the ineffable and feel myself being enveloped by it. Like the solar system and the Milky Way beyond that, I am large and expansive. I am the constellation whose name I do not know floating between Venus and Saturn and I am the full moon that hovers off Jupiter’s shoulder. I am the Indian tree frog everyone thought was extinct until I sang loudly enough to be heard. I am the missing booksellers in Hong Kong, the ones who sell banned books. I am crying, tears of something deeper than emotion, and I am whispering, something like a prayer. “What do I do with this?” I ask in amazement. “What do I do with this?” I ask in gratitude. “What do I do with this?” I ask in acknowledgment, creature inquiring of creation. There is the faintest blush of pink on the horizon. In mere moments the spell will be broken. Only it is no spell. It is not magic or sleight of hand, this cleaving of my heart. This spilling and refilling. It is what one buys when one pays attention. A bargain at any price. Copyright 2016

The wind is traveling across the field in gusts, picking up fallen leaves and tossing them around noisily. They rustle behind me like a covey of quail flushed from their hiding place in the broom sedge. Farther down the road, where the pine trees converge like soldiers in formation, the wind gets caught in the highest branches and the rustle is replaced with a rattle. I am always amazed at how full of sound the silence can be. Nearly to the four-way stop, the crossroads which I’ve decided is far enough to wander on this cold day, the wind’s rustling and rattling is overcome by the sound of machinery, big machinery, the kind with diesel motors. Harvest is long past; the fields are empty. And to ears that know the sound of a John Deere engine, this roar and rumble is clearly not that of a tractor. I top the hill and see the yellow of a backhoe and what appears to be a bulldozer for beginners. They are in the field behind the abandoned farmhouse where the boys in my high school class used to camp out and they are clearing the edges of that field right up to the road, right up to the edge where it drops off into the ditch. They are eliminating the honeysuckle and jasmine vines that twisted themselves into knots and made tunnels for the rabbits that occasionally cross the road in front of me. They are knocking down the chinaberry trees, including the one that I use to mark exactly one mile from Sandhill, and they are destroying the blackberry bushes into which I have fearlessly thrust my hands for over forty summers. I am not pleased. But neither am I angry. It is not my land. I am not its steward. I don’t get to decide what stays and goes. I turn and start for home, the sound of the marauding monsters fading a little with each step. I try to imagine that swathe of landscape without its selvage. I give myself the freedom to envisage the wideness of the vista and I think of how many fewer dead branches thrown into the road during rainstorms I will have to get out of my car and pull to the side. I consider how much easier it will be to see deer darting out in front of me if they are not screened by foliage. I decide that it is possible to see the pillaging as something else, as – almost, but not quite – beneficial. It is probably about this moment that I make the connection between the field and myself, between its edges and my own. Regardless of how well-tended and productive are my fields, how fine and praiseworthy are my crops, I cannot deny that the edges have gotten scraggly, grown over with vines and volunteer corn, turned into dens for snakes and foxes. Left to themselves the edges will inch inward and claim the ground meant for sowing and reaping. Left to themselves the edges will no longer be edges and the field no longer a field. The rumbling and coughing of the backhoe has faded away and I have returned to the noisy silence of the wind in the trees. I can hear the voice in my head now, the one whispering, “Vines and viciousness. Jasmine and jealousy. Honeysuckle and helplessness. Edges. All edges.” I shiver a little underneath my layers. It might not be from the cold. I am always amazed at how full of sound the silence can be. Copyright 2016

Like some kind of wizard, I spent the month of December utilizing potion (Jergens Natural Glow self tanner) and incantation (“I would like a table outside, please.”) to excellent effect in holding cold weather at bay. But the cold did eventually come, just in time for New Year’s and all its frenetic, slightly underwhelming, overly affected examination of human behavior. I begrudgingly pull on my overcoat and gloves, wrap a scarf around my neck, and, saying a silent prayer of gratitude that at least there isn’t any frost on the windshield, I head toward town on the first work day of the new year to begin again. I’ve no interest in listening to the news or raucous morning music hosts, so in the quiet of the car I am left to watch the scenery. My thoughts wander. I don’t believe in coincidence, so I find myself wondering if the arrival of cold weather right at the moment that 2015 magically became 2016 is a sign of something, a portent or harbinger of some kind. Only a few days in, the year is already marked by sadness of one sort or another. A friend from long ago has died after four separate cancer diagnoses over a period of twenty years. Catastrophic flooding has erased lives and livelihoods from a swathe through the middle of America. A hero has come home to his town, which is also my town, for the last time under a tunnel of American flags and I have burst into tears every time someone has posted a new photograph of his smiling face on social media. Is this what is ahead? Is this what there is to anticipate for the next twelve months? Heartache and disappointment and loss? One after another? Something makes me remember that 2016 is a leap year, an Olympic year, and an election year. Each of them contains a hard “l” sound, what linguists call the alveolar lateral approximant, a complicated phrase that simply describes from where in the mouth the sound comes and how much air is used to make it. It is the sound that gives us the words love and life and lily. Light and lush and laughter. Lovely words. Words that skip and twirl and dance their way out into the world. But it is also the sound that gives us lost and lack and liar. Lame and lust and lazy. Words that shuffle and stumble and trip over cracks in the sidewalk. A single sound can be both lovely and vile. A single sound can be graceful and clumsy. A single sound can be the source of life and death. Surely, then, a year, even one that begins with heartache and disappointment and loss has room for more than just that. Surely it can hold a place for dancing, an occasion for laughter, a reason to keep loving. Surely an entire year, made of so many sounds – the sounds of babies sighing in deep sleep, of geese rising in a wild rush of wings, of waves flailing against the shore at high tide – must hold a place for celebration, too. If I can make myself believe that, if I can make myself listen for the sounds, for the words that make it so, I can pull on my overcoat and gloves, wrap a scarf around my neck, and step bravely and happily out into the cold. Copyright 2016

Many have been the autumn Saturdays that the pop pop pop of shotguns and the yells of “There! There!” and “Over you!” have awakened me from a sound sleep. The field to the east of Sandhill, flat and broad, is the perfect place for a dove shoot and generations of the men in my family have gathered there with their friends for what is to them the quintessential social occasion. Rain made the harvest late and hurried this year and, as a result, it looked like dove season was going to pass without a single gathering of hunters just outside my back door. This past Saturday was the last possible opportunity. And that last possible opportunity turned out to be the best possible opportunity for Jackson to experience his first shoot. His daddy took a spot just behind the house at the edge of the branch, close enough to that back door that when it got too cold or noisy or boring, Jackson could simply come inside. And that's what he did after a while – marched himself in, proclaimed that he was cold and thirsty, and announced that he wanted popcorn and SpongeBob SquarePants. I popped the corn, found the Nickelodeon channel, and sat down on the couch to continue a conversation with my cousin who was home for the holidays from South Carolina. “You’re talking too loud,” Jackson offered. We lowered our voices, but apparently not enough for him to hear Spongebob and Patrick because, within seconds, he turned and looked at me with the stern expression I suspect he has learned from his father and said, "I'm putting you on the naughty list." JJ and I lowered our voices even further and both activities continued to the satisfaction of all participants. And before you could say Krabby Patty, Jackson had warmed up enough that he was ready to rejoin the menfolk, who eventually, one by one, camouflage-clad and rosey-cheeked, made their way to the house to offer their identical, mono-syllabic responses to my question of how the shoot had gone. “Good,” each of them said. I suspect that Jackson will have little memory of his first dove shoot. I suspect that he, like his great-grandfather and grandfather and father, will spend so many hours, mornings, afternoons, wandering these fields and fencerows that the individual moments will eventually meld into one single tableau, a revolving mural, sort of like the Cyclorama, with scene after scene of men in earth-colored clothing. I, on the other hand, will remember his first dove shoot. I will remember that it was on the Saturday before Christmas. That I was still trying to get the tree up and the house decorated. That I was fretting a little over the fact that I hadn't done my grocery shopping for Christmas Eve and that I had been less than diligent with my Advent wreath. And I will remember that he told me that he was going to put me on the naughty list not because it hurt my feelings, made me feel guilty, or bothered me at all. I will remember it because a couple of days later I realized the power of that statement. Santa isn't the only one with a naughty list. Each of us has one. And we add people to it every time they disappoint us or fail to live up to our expectations, every time they behave in a way in which we don't approve or make choices that are different from the ones we would make. We put them on the naughty list and withhold the gifts of attention and acceptance. We put them on the naughty list and deny them our respect and appreciation. We label them as “other” and justify it all. That kind of revelation is especially powerful at Christmas, the holiday centered on the story of a baby born in a barn, whose parents will soon flee an evil government and become refugees. I don’t want to be on the naughty list. But more than that I don’t want to be the person making the naughty list. I don’t want to be the person keeping track, keeping count, keeping score. I want to be the person standing at the back door and handing out popcorn to anybody that wants to come in out of the cold. Copyright 2015

The sunshine, coming from farther away now, is nevertheless clear and bright. There are geraniums still blooming in the big clay pots on the corners of the dock and there is just a hint of a breeze to ruffle the water. The long weekend, the weekend in which the Escape and I have heralded the Christmas season by drawing a circle encompassing nearly all of southeast Georgia, is winding down. My mind wanders. I remember where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing over the last four days. It’s Friday night and I’m in Dublin, smiling as Jackson extends his hand to shake that of Santa. It’s Saturday and I’m in Nahunta, reeling off packing tape to attach plastic poinsettias to an ATV for the Christmas Parade. It’s Sunday and I’m at Lake Blackshear, being fed stories and attention and homemade chicken pot pie. It’s Monday and I’m still here. My shadow is clear and distinct on the flat boards of the dock, but where it falls off into the water it becomes cloudy and dim, barely visible, as though my head has elected to disassociate itself from the rest of me, as though it has seceded from the imperfect union of the corporeal and the cerebral. I have only to back up a few steps to reestablish the single self, but the feeling of disintegration stays with me. I have left pieces of myself, like lint from a fuzzy sweater or sand from the bottom of a pair of flip flops, all along the way. A part of me stayed in Dublin in the blue-eyed gaze of a five-year-old. A fragment got caught in the crumpled candy wrappers left behind on the parade route. A shard, a scrap, a sliver will remain here when, in just a few minutes, I pack up and head home. The highway weaves in and out of towns, crosses roads, passes fields. It is a familiar route. My mind wanders. I find myself thinking of Ebenezer Scrooge. It is Christmas, after all, but it takes a while to realize why the villainous, stingy, self-centered Scrooge has made a cameo appearance in my reverie. I see him, accompanied by the various Ghosts of Christmas, moving between present and past, past and future, and I remember something I’ve heard, a theory about time, a theory that posits that everything that has ever happened or will ever happen is happening right now. The quantum physicists of the world probably lay claim to that theory, but it occurs to me that Ebenezer Scrooge may have proven it for them. May have proven that past, present, and future all exist right now, in this moment. May have demonstrated with the power of story that we are never separated from what we have experienced or what we are yet to know. May have given us an explanation for why the past, experienced as memory, and the future, experienced as hope, are as real as what is seen and heard, tasted and touched and smelled. May have offered me a reconciliation of that imperfect union of head and heart, body and soul. The parts of myself that I thought I’d left behind, I am beginning to see, are both there and here. The parts of myself that I have yet to acquire, I am beginning to sense, are already with me. And the proclamation of “Emmanuel!”, imprinted on cards and hung on banners and sung in hymns, means not just that God is with us, but that He always has been and always will be. I set out on Friday not yet ready. Two weeks into Advent I was not the least prepared, but I was waiting. Waiting for that moment of numinous beauty and improbable grace that would make it Christmas. I found it. Somewhere on the highway between Vienna and Hawkinsville in the face of Ebenezer Scrooge. Copyright 2015

I long ago learned that I could, if I wanted, waste a significant amount of energy on totally pointless emotion. For example, the frustration that arises all too often within the confined space of an automobile. No amount of huffing and puffing or rolling of the eyes is going to accelerate the vehicle that has pulled out in front of me only to proceed at a speed comparable to that of a bicycle. Nor will it draw the attention of the driver of that vehicle away from his cell phone or her mirror. Learning something, however, does not always mean that one is capable of putting it into practice at every available opportunity. And so it was that last week as I was headed toward Athens and a long awaited visit with friends that would also include a football game I found myself huffing and puffing and rolling my eyes at the well-nigh unbelievable fact of having traveled only 4 miles in 30 minutes on what has perennially been the most desolate stretch of the interstate highway system, I-16. I took the next available exit without a completely clear idea of how to get where I intended to go, but feeling quite certain that, aided my own good sense of direction and the GPS embedded in my telephone, I could get there. Within moments of extricating myself from the serpentine string of cars and trucks wending its way west toward Macon, I felt my shoulders relaxing and my jaw unclenching. By the time I pulled into my friends’ driveway, I had promised myself that I would never again make that particular trip utilizing the chaotic loops of concrete and steel that encircle and constrain Atlanta. I had found a new way and it was lovely. Instead of being hypnotized by endless miles of flat gray asphalt, I had been energized by miles of open pasture. I had curved and twisted my way to Snellville along roads with names like Miller Bottom Road and Rosebud Road. I had crossed the bridge at Lake Sinclair and watched the water shimmer like rhinestones in the late afternoon sun. I had driven slowly enough to notice the old barns and the country stores along the roadway and the colors of fall in the trees that lined the fencerows. A couple of days later as I started home, reversing myself down those melodically named roads, I realized that I was actually eager for the drive. I wanted to see those trees from the other side, the lake in different light. I wanted to feel myself lean into the curves from the opposite direction. I wanted to watch the shadows slip and slide across the pavement markings, morph and melt into the ditches. I could have made the return trip the old way, via highways with six lanes, made claustrophobic and anxious by the swell of traffic racing around me. I could have zoomed and zipped, but instead I moseyed and meandered. I could have followed habit, but I chose not to because this is what I’ve learned: There is always more than one way to a destination. More than one set of directions that will get you to where you need to be. Clinging tightly to the map you’ve always followed, stepping deliberately into old footprints, ignoring the invitation to explore, you will still arrive, but you will miss the rhinestones dancing on the water. You will not hear the voices of the abandoned barns telling their stories. And you most certainly will not see the semaphores of red and gold leaves flashing out the message that this, yes, this is the way home. Copyright 2015

Some days, days when I know I will be home, days when I will not be driving, I don't wear my contact lenses. This makes absolutely no difference when I am reading a book or making soup or folding laundry. It does, however, make a difference, a rather large difference, when at some point I decide that indoors is not where I want to be. Once I walked all the way from Sandhill to the paved road, a distance of 2 miles, with my eyes closed. I don't recall exactly what it was that possessed me to embark upon that particular adventure, but I do remember it was a warm and pleasant day and, with memory, instinct, and the occasional brief peek out of the corner of my eye, I made it to the pavement without once stumbling into the ditch or over a rock, a limb, or an animal. But that was only once. Generally, I keep my eyes open when I walk. And when I walk not wearing my contact lenses it becomes a different kind of adventure. Sort of like “Alice Through The Looking Glass” or a virtual reality video game. Somewhere between slightly disconcerting and downright frightening. The trees in the distance look like a three-year-old’s green and gold finger painting. Unharvested cotton looks like an endless billboard of white polka dots. And what I know is a field of dried and naked peanut vines looks like a unwound bolt of black seersucker. When I am walking without the benefit of my contacts, depth perception vanishes at about fifty yards and the world beyond that point is absolutely flat. Except, of course, that I know it’s not. And as I keep walking into that knowledge I experience the truth of it. I keep walking and eventually I get close enough to the trees and the cotton and the peanut field to make out their edges. I keep walking and eventually my eyes focus so that I can detect not just height and width, but depth. I keep walking and I am reassured that what I have always known about trees and cotton and peanut fields has not changed just because my vision is bad. It occurred to me today, after I got back home and was thinking that, really, it wouldn’t have been all that much trouble to have, at least, put on my glasses before I started out, that life is a lot like walking without your contact lenses. What you see isn’t always what is. And what is won’t be changed by your inability to see it. Some days my emotional vision is bad, as near-sighted as my physical vision. It’s generally when I’ve not taken care of myself, not kept up the practices that feed my soul, not been brave enough to say no when I needed to. On those days, things up close – the laundry to be dropped off, the groceries to be bought, the call to be made – are clear, but things in the distance, in that uncertain and scary place called the future, look anything but. On those days it’s important to remember that what might look like a finger painting could well be a tree and the only way to find out is to keep walking. Copyright 2015

I almost missed October. My favorite month. I almost missed it by spending days and days indoors avoiding dust and pollen and all manner of things that inhibit breathing. I almost missed the exquisitely slow sunsets that bleed out over the cotton fields, transforming the exploding bolls into shimmering globes of pink and gold. I almost missed the deliciously cool dusks that slide down the sky like a satin negligee as soon as the last color disappears behind the horizon. I almost missed the first sycamore leaves curling and crisping and the last of the wildflowers bursting forth. Almost. But not quite. Because Sunday afternoon I could take the quarantine and accompanying lethargy no longer and, donning a mask that made me look like an extra in a low-budget Deep South “X-Files,” I set forth. The road was, in fact, dusty and the fine powder of decaying peanut vines seemed to hover over both sides of the road. I didn’t care. My wheezing breath inside the mask sounded like Darth Vader. I didn’t care. I needed to feel the acute-angle sunshine, see the purple and gold spikes of color, hear the sweet sigh of wind through the broom sedge. I needed to and I would. I stopped to take in at least four different shades of purple and stepped over the ditch to snap a photo of yellow asters, catching a tiny stinkbug riding the disk flowers in the center as though they were a mechanical bull. I watched a stand of silvery red grass as big as my front porch shimmer like a ballgown in the breeze and wished I had my Audubon guide to teach me its name. I walked up the first hill, down its other side, and back up to the crossroads where, in the distance, a double rifle crack reminded me that I was not alone in the October afternoon. Two miles is not far, but it had been weeks since I’d walked them. I could feel the muscles in my back and legs stretch hungrily. Movement is nourishment. Motion is food. I was tired when I got home. My face was hot and my chest was tight, but I was content. I had felt and seen and heard October. I am no longer surprised, but I remain astonished by the synchronicity of life’s quotidian moments. I am no longer caught off guard, but I am still disconcerted when events over which I have absolutely no control are synced into a sequence of moments within my one single existence. I am not frightened, but I am forever awed when, for example, I spend an afternoon protecting myself from the inhalation of dust and open my prayer book the next morning to find that the reading from the Psalms includes this verse from Chapter 103: “For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.” For a second or two, I stood between the choice of laughing uproariously at the ludicrous coincidence or crying inconsolably at the singular providence. Stuck between the two, I chose the third option – quietness and stillness enough to hear the voice that whispered, “That which would harm you is within you. That which you would avoid in an effort to protect yourself is the source of your humanity. That which takes your breath is the very stuff of which you are made.” I almost missed October. But I didn’t. From the dust of creation, the dust of myself, she lured me out into her last days, her fullest days, her days of deepest truth. Copyright 2015