Search Results

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

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