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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

As I lay dying – And by dying I mean in the colloquial Southern sense of suffering from a physical malady nowhere close to terminal, but so irritating as to have left one unable to imagine for even a moment the possibility of a world without the present misery. – I was able to muster up enough lucidity and self-pity to remember that the day just broken was, in fact, my birthday and that I could not recall ever having been ill on my birthday and that it was, well, patently unfair to be ill on one’s birthday. As I lay dying – And by dying I mean in the existential sense that we are all, every moment and with every breath, dying. – for what eventually amounted to nearly an entire week, I let go of the self-pity, recognizing that when you’ve had as many birthdays as I have the law of averages is going to catch up with you eventually and you are going to be sick on your birthday and that, as with most things, fairness has absolutely nothing to do with it. So, as I lay dying, there was plenty of time for more than a few quixotic, fanciful, and/or irrational thoughts about everything from toilet paper to television to tenderness. Toilet paper: I have always been just a bit angst-ridden over paying extra for Charmin Ultra-Soft tissue. That angst has now been alleviated. That I still have a nose and that I do not look like W.C. Fields after going through, at last count, nine rolls of Charmin Ultra-Soft (as well as nine packs of pocket tissues which are, let the record show, nowhere nearly as soft as the Charmin), I will never again question the extra expenditure. Television: When I finally broken down and got a satellite dish, I removed the extra television from the bedroom. The expense of connecting said second television to the DirecTV account was simply not justifiable and I can watch only one at the time, right? As I lay dying, I couldn’t read because my eyes were constantly watering and so I was limited, for five days, to National Public Radio. During the annual fall fund drive. The toll-free number is seared onto my memory and I have less desire for a gray hoodie that says, “Public Radio Nerd,” than I would have ever thought possible. I am rethinking that decision about the televsion. Tenderness: I am fortunate to have so many friends and such a wonderful family, many of whom called to wish me a happy birthday. I did not answer their calls because they would not have been able to hear me, but I did – many many hours later – find brief solace as I played back the voice mails, the long string of familiar voices wishing me well without knowing that well is exactly what I desired to be. And beyond the birthday greetings, there were the check-ins, the tentative inquiries as to whether I needed anything, the generous offers to come “take care of” me. A couple of folks offered to drive across the state for that purpose and handled my swift rejections with a sweetness of spirit I might not have managed had I been on the other side of the equation. It was from those offers that ultimately came the only redeeming moment of the days that I lay dying. My niece Kate was one of those checking in. On Day Two she texted me that she had just spoken to her grandparents/my parents and that they were going to come by. “They don’t have to,” I told her. “That’s a useless thing to say.” I could hear her annoyance in the words on the screen. “And you need to stop teaching people to not try to take care of you when you need it.” I felt as though someone had popped my hand as I reached for an extra cookie, as though my favorite teacher had given me a bad grade, as though a photo of sick me was now in the dictionary next to the definition of reprimand. I wanted to pout a little. Except I knew she was right. As much as we talk about extending care and compassion to each other, we resist it being extended to ourselves. Is it pride? Or fear? Or some other equally dark character trait that prompts us to say, “I’m fine,” when we’re not. To say, “No, thank you,” when what we really want to say is, “Yes, please.” To pull away when what we want most of all is to be drawn in, surrounded by, embraced. We need to work on that. All of us. You. Me. We need to be able to say, “I need your help,” and then gracefully accept the help. We need to work on accepting the fact that life isn’t fair and sometimes we’ll be sick on our birthdays, but that, unless we are hell-bent on being stupid, we don’t have to experience it alone. Copyright 2015

I missed the eclipse. Through no fault of my own, I would hasten to point out. My view of the moon being covered by the shadow of the sun was covered by clouds, thick and bulbous and gunmetal gray. I kept going outside, looking up into the eastern sky which is, as it turns out, a rather large general area and while I had a pretty good idea of where the moon was supposed to be – somewhere up and to the right of the grain bins – I never got a single glimpse. I was disappointed. I am old enough now that when things happen that won’t happen again for a period of time to which people refer in something other than numbers – decade, score, century – , I stop to wonder whether I will be around for it. (If it’s true that it will be another twenty years before the super blood moon coincides with the lunar eclipse, I will be on the other side of the three score and ten birthdays mentioned with equal parts gratitude and resignation in the Psalms.) I am also old enough now to recover from disappointments with a fair amount of aplomb. When it became apparent that the thickness was not going to evaporate, that the eerie Jello-like tremble of clouds was not soon to dissipate, that no amount of Linus Van Pelt-level sincerity was going to grant me a glimpse of the big red beach ball of a moon, I gave up. Gave up by carrying myself back across the yard on wet feet, avoiding armadillo holes as best I could, and climbing into bed. Two days later, halfway home from a walk in the damp dusk, I saw the blazing star. One solitary stalk clinging to the cliff edge of the ditch, a spiky iridescent mascara wand of purple, the first of fall. Feeling the need to extend greetings of some sort, I slowed down and turned toward it, only to see not one stem shivering in a breeze so slight I couldn’t feel it, but a patch of twenty, thirty, maybe more. So thin and fine were the flowers, like filaments in an incandescent light bulb, that they blurred into a low haze, arcing over the wiregrass and palmetto scrubbs like a single-color rainbow. I felt my chest rise despite the fact that I had not taken a breath and I realized that my body was filling, not with air, but with gratitude, a singular sensation combining awe and unworthiness with comfort and peacefulness and, most of all, belonging. Two days before, the afternoon of the night on which I did not see the eclipse, the blazing star had not been there. Or, if it had been there, it hadn’t bloomed. Or, if it had bloomed, it had not beckoned to me. Two days before, when I walked the same road, made the same footprints, I had not seen nor been seen by these extravagant heralds of fall, intent as I was to get home, intent as I was to see the eclipse. I missed the eclipse and I almost missed the blazing star. But I didn’t. This summer I read a book about a woman who spent a couple of years of her life chasing phenomenon – the migration of monarch butterflies in Mexico, bioluminescence in Puerto Rico, the aurora borealis in Sweden, the lightning display of Catatumbo, Venezuela. She lives, I noticed, in North Carolina. There is every reason in the world to chase the phenomenal, to seek out the wondrous, to experience creation from as many angles as possible. Every reason in the world to stay up late, get up early, run farther, hike higher in order to see and hear, taste and touch that which is astounding and extraordinary and remarkable. And part of the seeing and hearing and tasting and touching can be feeling disappointment when what you experience is not what you expected. But what is just as important, maybe even a little bit more, is understanding that the phenomenal is not limited to that which is far away or that which occurs only rarely. The phenomenal is everywhere. The phenomenal is here. And now. And no one has to miss that. Copyright 2015

Walking and Talking With Fear Summer has begun to fade and I want to stop the calendar right here, pause the passage of time for some period of time that will allow me to wallow in the sharp angle of light, absorb the clearness of the air, drink in and gnaw on the deliciousness of the moment. The turn of the season, summer to autumn, is right now, this minute, and this minute is not long. In the morning I linger, stand on the deck to stare at the sycamore tree and its leaves, already the green-gold of an old penny; to stare at the sky, empty of everything except birds lifting themselves from their nighttime roosts. They rise with an ease and grace I can’t help but envy, a freedom I cannot imagine, into a blueness so flat and even I find it hard to believe that it can contain their three-dimensional selves. In the evening I amble, take my time down the road and back as I leave my footprints on top of the chevrons embossed into the sand by tractor tires. Cotton blossoms, milky white and cotton candy pink, have folded themselves into prayer hands for the night and the breeze that rustles through the leaves tickles my arms and makes me wish for sleeves. The sun is already behind the trees. The last smear of color, a bleed of florescent pink, has faded and I am walking as much by faith as by sight. I can see the house, can make out the white lines of the rocking chairs on the front porch when I hear an animal sound behind me, a cross between a bark and caw. I search my memory for something to which I can attach the voice. There is nothing. And because there is nothing, into the nothingness springs fright. I stop. Turn. Look back toward the sound. Make sure that there is distance between us. I can tell that it, whatever it is, is seven, eight rows in. All is still and quiet for a moment. Then the cry again. Coyote? Surely not. They do not venture this far out of Jackson Branch Swamp. Bobcat? Raptor of some kind? Whatever it is, I do not want a close encounter in the low light near-night. I turn back and increase my pace. There it is again. This time on the other side of the road. It, whatever it is, has crossed the open space of road behind me, clearly disinterested or, possibly, as spooked by my presence as I am by his. Deep breath. Pace still quickened, I cross the yard and climb the steps. There is distance now between me and my uninvited companion, distance enough to sweep away the unwarranted fear, and I can consider what he might have been saying, what its raspy call was meant to announce. Stepping over the threshold into the warmth of lamplight the translation comes quickly: Fear, sudden and invisible, has a purpose. It pauses your thoughtless progress and makes you think. Forces you to be aware of your surroundings. Demands that you consider what you know and what you don’t. Then it pushes you forward. Out of the darkness, familiar though it may be, into light. I like to think that there is not much of which I am afraid. There are plenty of unavoidable things I would like to ward off as long as possible – the death of people I love, my own infirmity, winter – , but the inevitability of each makes fear, I’ve concluded, a wasteful use of energy and emotion. What I am wondering, after my encounter with what I’m now calling the Invisible Oracle of Twilight, is whether I might be too intrepid, whether I might benefit every now and then from a skirmish with something that makes my heart race, whether I might want to take a few more walks in the dark.

The first time I saw a beautyberry bush, sprouting from the up-side of a ditch not far from Sandhill, I wanted one. Sometime after that, with the help of a friend, I dug one up from another spot along the road and transplanted it to what I thought would be the perfect location in the backyard. It died. I decided not to take it personally and thereafter took the position that, despite its Art Deco shape and pop art colors, the beautyberry bush was not meant for the tameness of yards. It belongs in ditches and on fence rows, in the shadow of pine trees and in the path of gopher tortoises. And every year about this time when I am delightfully surprised by the first poke through the summer underbrush of its fuchsia and chartreuse, I am reminded that wildness is precious. So a few weeks ago when I was pulling grass out of the patch of dirt I call my herb garden, a small square that borders the deck and has turned out to be particularly hospitable to rosemary, sweet mint, peppermint, and lemon balm, I looked twice at what bore a striking resemblance to a beautyberry bush growing under the deck. Looked twice because it’s dark under there. Looked twice because I couldn’t imagine that something that big could have grown there without my noticing it. It was a couple of feet high and the branches splayed out over about four feet. The leaves, even in the dim light, were clearly and eerily chartreuse, but there were no berries and I convinced myself that this plant was just a weedy cousin of my favorite deciduous shrub. A few days later I am back and there is no need for convincing; the tight clusters of berries have popped out up and down the skinny branches. The beautyberry is native to South Georgia and is an important food for two of our iconic wildlife – bobwhite quail, who prefer the berries, and white-tail deer, who tend toward the leaves. It’s not going to be hard for the quail to avail themselves of the buffet now spread under the deck. They can tiptoe right through the pennyroyal and nosh away. The deer, however, are going to have to settle for the saw-tooth oak acorns that have begun falling at the edge of the driveway. In light of the recent snake activity in the vicinity, there is no way I am crawling under there to dig up a bush that, based on my past experience, might not survive transplantation anyway. And since the beautyberry is known to repel mosquitoes, I am thinking that its placement directly under the chair where I like to read and watch the hummingbirds is downright fortuitous. Squatting among the fading stems of mint and staring into the dimness, I can’t help but consider the irony that something I tried so hard to cultivate has appeared on its own, unexpected and undeserved. And maybe, I’m thinking, it is the unexpectedness and the undeservedness that creates the beauty, that turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. That it is never the object itself that is lovely, that is precious, that is holy, but my attitude that makes it so, my amazement at its appearance, my astonishment at its arrival. That it is entirely up to me what beauty comes into my life and what beauty remains. Copyright 2015

The three new boards on the deck are the color of honey. They are planed into barefoot smoothness and stand out against the other boards, the ones that are weathered gray and splintered in places despite my best efforts to keep them water-sealed. Even at dusk, when light and depth perception have faded, the new boards are visible, glowing like wizards’ wands. It was the skinny heel of a pair of dress shoes that alerted me to the danger. Piercing the softened wood, the not-quite-stiletto made a puncture wound twice the size of a ten-penny nail and nearly pitched me down the steps. I caught myself and I wondered how in the world this one spot had rotted and rotted so invisibly. I did not know that there were two other boards on their way to disintegration as well. I called the carpenter. It is what one does when something made of wood is in the need of repair. It is what one does when one recognizes the need and the futility of attempting the repair oneself. I was not at home the day the carpenter came. I suspect that there was a great deal of noise, much heaving and hoisting and hammering, as the nails gave way and the three decaying planks yielded. Force applied to overcome resistance. All I saw was the end result. New boards. Order restored. It is Saturday morning. I do not wake to an alarm. I wake to a breeze that is gentle and sunlight that is warm and I decide to have breakfast on the deck. As I sit down in one of the chairs that circle the table, the chairs that have sat on the deck for close to ten years in sun and rain and, a couple of times, a dusting of snow, I feel it sink uncomfortably beneath my weight. I hear cracking and crunching as the pieces of the metal frame fall into rust-colored shards at my feet. Something else has begun wasting away without my notice. I don’t call anyone this time. Repair is not possible; replacement is the only option. Four chairs find their way into the metal waste bin at the recycling center. Four new chairs find their way into the back of the Escape and home to Sandhill. This has been the summer of necessary maintenance. Porch repaired and repainted. Shrubbery pruned down to nubbins. Dangling closet shelves rehung. And now the deck repaired and the chairs replaced. So much work to keep this place, this house, my home safe and comfortable, a place of solace and consolation. I’d be a fool not to consider the possibility of a message in there somewhere. And, if not a message, then at least a suggestion, a hint, an intimation that maybe this isn’t just about the house. But I am a fool. About many things. I am a very busy fool. Whatever the message, it will have to wait. I stand with my hands on my hips considering placement. I move the table a little further from the rails. I push the chairs in, pull them out, make sure there is enough room. I step back to get the full effect. It is then that I realize that one of the chairs is straddling, front legs on an old board, back legs on a new. I don’t know if I should laugh or cry or sigh or shake my head. This is no whisper, no slight nudge. This is a pronouncement, an edict, the kind of declaration that allows for no ignoring. “You will listen,” the house, the deck, the chair are all saying. And so I stop to hear. Hear the truth that discernment is knowing the difference between what can be repaired and what must be replaced. Hear the truth that necessary maintenance is not just for houses, but for relationships and attitudes and dreams. Hear the truth that I will always be standing with one foot in the past and one in the future, straddling departures and arrivals, my arms stretched to embrace both that which is lost and that which remains. Copyright 2015

The front porch at Sandhill is a room with no walls. I have sat here to watch the sunset blaze with colors from the Crayola 64 box, to watch deer across the way eating their fill of my daddy's peanuts, to listen to the wind chimes call out to someone I can not see. One night I made room for a long table around which friends gathered to share food and celebrate good news. Tonight I have come out hoping to see the moon. And tonight, for the second night in a row, I am disappointed to find the liquid circle of yellow obscured by clouds. They are thick and thin, a vast piece of cotton batting stretched out into an irregular thickness by celestial hands. It is still. The wind chimes hang like weights in a grandfather clock, held in plumb by gravity and humidity, moving not at all. Six empty rocking chairs of slightly different shapes and sizes and states of needing paint sit like sculpture, their long white lines still visible against the falling night. I am reminded of the old parlor game question: If you could invite anyone, living or dead, to a dinner party, who would you choose? I ask myself, If you could have anyone, living or dead, sitting in these six rocking chairs, tonight, under the thick clouds, in the stickiness of midsummer, who would you choose? Names and faces flow through my mind like movie credits. They divide themselves, like sheep and goats, without my conscious thought. Most of them, for totally acceptable reasons like preferring air conditioning, end up with the goats. The ones left, the sheep, are huddled together in a small flock. All of them are people I actually know. No celebrities or politicians. Not even Jesus or Gandhi or Mother Teresa. Some of them have died, a few are still alive. I must narrow them down. There are only six chairs after all. Who do I really want out here with me on this muggy night with no stars and a shrouded moon? Who would want to be out here with me in this room with no walls and a growing number of mosquitoes? Who would be willing to sit in the stillness and let the stillness do all the talking? I struggle with wondering whether they would all get along, whether anyone would ask who else was going to be there, whether there might need to be assigned seating so that any particular two of them don’t end up side by side. Suddenly, without a hint of breeze, the wind chime tones out six notes. Six single notes. They sound like the beginning of an orchestral overture. I wait for more, but there are no more. Six notes. One for each chair. Through the deepening darkness I can still see them and I can almost see the notes flutter and fall into their singular seats. I feel as though I have been rocking, like a chair, planting my feet to move forward, lifting them to fall away. The faces are coming into focus. They have, it turns out, invited themselves. They are, in fact, the people who are always here, always on this porch, always in this wall-less room that is my heart. Copyright 2015