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I am not particularly fond of figs. An occasional appetizer featuring goat cheese and a rare Newton constitute the breadth of my appreciation of this beauty of summer. My mother, on the other hand, was exceptionally fond of figs. She ate them not quite by the handful, like sunflower seeds or salted peanuts, but close. She would sit down with a Tupperware bowlful in her lap and finish them off one by one, pinching the stems between her fingers and bringing the figs to her mouth in a kind of slow and languid choreography. She was, as I said, exceptionally fond of figs. It is that fondness – hers not mine – that has had me at her fig tree, the one that anchors the corner of the backyard, every few days for the past couple of weeks, picking figs that I won’t eat but can’t see go to waste. I have thought a lot about Mama on those hot sticky mornings and hot sticky afternoons on which I have stuck my hands into the thick green foliage to harvest the ponderous globes that dangle from thick branches like pearl earrings on the sagging lobes of an old woman. I have thought about the way this tree in this yard mimics the one in her mother’s yard, how she and my grandmother stood in the shade of that tree and talked in a way they never talked inside the house, how I am just beginning to understand how women, all women, eventually become their mothers. The first morning I went to pick figs I was prepared. I had buckets and a step-ladder and kitchen shears. I picked right at a gallon and the pile of purple and chartreuse inside the black bucket was so strikingly beautiful that I took a photo before delivering them to a friend to make preserves. A couple of afternoons later, I was less prepared. I had just come from the garden where the okra and squash and cucumbers were proving to be faster in their production than Daddy and I were in our picking. I had no step-ladder and no shears, only a bucket. I immediately realized my mistake in trying to pick figs without a knife or shears or something other than my thumbnail to loose them from their branches and, in less than ten minutes, my thumb was pulsing and tender in the way that only someone who has spent a summer afternoon shelling butterbeans in front of a box fan would understand. I relieved the tree of all the figs I could reach from the ground and took the bucket home where I poured its contents into a plastic grocery bag and gently placed it in the refrigerator. I held my sticky hands under the kitchen spigot, staring at my thumb, red and slightly swollen, and it occurred to me that the simultaneous presence of beauty and pain, of abundance and discomfort, of sweet remembrance and lingering sorrow is an unavoidable juxtaposition. There is no calendar counting down days between wounding and recovery, no ticking clock for the watchful eye to monitor, no straight shot from here to there. There is only the reality of this day and the anticipation of the next. There is only sharing what there is to share, remembering what there is to remember, and loving what there is to love. Copyright 2023

It is both a blessing and a curse to be what my friend Jane calls a noticer. A brisk walk gets interrupted by urgent bird song and turns into a slow stroll and a one-person game of “Name That Tune.” A quick glance out the window on the way to empty the dryer becomes a private planetarium show as a shooting star is framed in the panes. And an ordinary trip to the grocery store becomes a lesson in philosophy. Or theology. Or both. The mother and little girl – probably four, maybe five – walked hand in hand toward me as I crossed the Publix parking lot. Engaged in conversation, they were both smiling. As I drew closer, I heard the little girl say, “I have one more patience.” I made eye contact and smiled, trying hard not to laugh. I did not have to have heard the previous conversation to know exactly what was going on. The little girl wanted to be done with all the errands – the picking up of the laundry, the mailing of the packages, the buying of the groceries – and she wanted to be done now. She, if she is anything like most of the children I know, had already asked if they could stop at McDonald’s or Dairy Queen or Chick-Fil-A on the way home. And her mother – God, bless her. – had just said, “Please, be patient.” Or “You need to be patient.” Or “If you can’t be patient there will be no treat.” To which the little girl had said, within earshot of this noticer, “I have one more patience.” I hold as precious treasures the funny things that the children in my life have said. I replay them in my head in moments when I am reminded of how quickly they went from being children to having children. I remember their sweet faces, utterly sincere and oblivious to the humor in what they’ve offered. As I walked through the automatic doors and grabbed a buggy, I found myself less charmed than provoked to deep thought. Patience, of course, can not be counted. One can not travel through the day with a full pocket from which one patience after another is drawn as circumstances require. There is no reservoir from which a single patience can be poured. By the time I’d maneuvered past the BOGOs, stopped to thank the lady in florals for the beautiful peonies I’d bought last week, and made my way to produce, thoughts of the young sage in the parking lot had been replaced by far shallower things: Will they have the bread I like in the bakery? Is the self-checkout really quicker? The thing about noticing, though, is that the thing you notice, the thing that slows you down and makes you consider, sometimes reconsider, what you know, well, it doesn’t leave you alone. It nags and pesters and bothers until you see what you’re supposed to see, hear what you are supposed to hear, grasp what has been dangled in front of you. Groceries loaded, I leave the parking lot and the voice of the little girl invades my thoughts again: “I have one more patience.” One. Just one. A single unused patience that, if spent in the current moment, will no longer be available. She was making sure that her mother understood the currency of the moment. I take a deep breath. Do I? Do I understand what I am using up right this minute? Do I have any idea of what is being squandered? In the background of my incessant preoccupation with something or other is there a moment that is gone forever without my noticing its worth? I remember the oft-quoted line from Mary Oliver’s “A Summer Day” – “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?” – and I realize for the first time that the most powerful of the descriptors is not wild or precious, but one. One. Just one. One patience. One life. One opportunity to notice, to notice it all. Copyright 2023

I was sitting on my bedroom floor, my arms reaching forward into the space I’d made by stretching my legs into a V. My hands were pressed down on the rug – flat, side by side, fingers apart. I must have seen my hands millions of times, but there was something about that moment that stilled me. I forgot about counting my breaths. I forgot about everything but staring, staring at my hands. It’s interesting what you see when you really look. You see that the hydrangea dangling over the edge of the fence is a million shades of blue and not just one. You discover that one of your eyebrows is slightly higher than the other. You notice that the towel in the shower is hanging just the least bit crooked and the faucet is dripping ever so slowly. Not that any of those disclosures, any of those revelations will alter the course of your life or even your day, but it can straighten you up a little, make you wonder what else you might have been missing. And I’d been missing my hands – the way the bones splayed like the tines of a rake, the way the veins curved and spread like tributaries of an invisible river, the way the skin folds crumpled like tissue paper. It has become a trope, a cliché, a rite of passage – the moment when one sees her hands and realizes that she is old – and I guess that is what this was, but it was also far more. I hadn’t just overlooked the aging of my hands; I had, for too long, overlooked their magic. They grip and grasp and squeeze. They clench and clasp and reach. They form and force and twist. They shape and sort and lift. And in every movement they teach. My newborn hands against the warmth of my mother’s flesh taught me that in order to reach, in order to hold anything I must first unclench my fists. My chubby toddler hands, wrapped firmly in the grip of my father, taught me what it means to belong to someone who can be trusted. My hands grew; my fingers lengthened; my muscles strengthened. I picked the flowers and built the sand castles and dug the tunnels that connected me to the earth. I made music on pianos and guitars. I swung bats and cast fishing poles and tossed horseshoes. And I learned to write. Gripping the fat green pencil tightly and watching its iridescent paint glimmer in the Georgia sunshine, I moved my hand across the Blue Horse tablet and made words. Miss Hagan told me which words to make, which words with which to fill my tablet and make her happy. Eventually, though, after I had mastered her words, I started making words of my own, words that existed nowhere else but inside my thoughts. And I realized that words – like the warmth of my mother, the grip of my father – could connect me to the world. They still do. The images and senses that begin in my thoughts find their way into the world, into the eyes and ears of other people, through my hands. Thoughts do not connect the thinker to the world. Thoughts do not communicate beyond the corporeal limits of the body housing the brain. Thoughts alone can not soothe, encourage, or incite. What can do all those things are words – words made visible, words that last forever when they are written down. My hands are old. They are bruised and scarred and wrinkled, but they still write. And that is magic enough. Copyright 2023

The sycamore has always been my favorite tree. The sycamore as in species. All sycamores. Its branches spread wide and fill the space around it, not in an intrusive or demanding way like the guy on the plane who commandeers the armrest before takeoff with nary an intention of relinquishing even the smallest sliver to you or anyone else, but in a inclusive, generous way, stretching and curving and bending in order to embrace, to draw in. Its leaves are the perfect color of green. They are broad and soft, big enough to use as fans on sultry summer afternoons if only they weren’t so limp. They dangle from the branches and flirt with the wind, whistling in a soft alto accompanied by the light percussion of limbs rattling against each other. The bark may be my favorite thing about sycamores. I was a young child when I saw my first piece of it loosed from the tree, all silvery gray and thin as a potato chip. It made me think of papyrus and I wondered if I could write on it. One look at the trunk from which it had fallen, however, brought on a wave of sadness I’d not lived long enough to understand. The splotches from which the bark had fallen leaving slick and unprotected skin looked like a healed-over wound, a scar left as a reminder of the wholeness that was no more. The sycamore has always been my favorite tree. The sycamore as in the one in my parents’ backyard. The one planted not long after we arrived on the farm, growing quickly, joyfully even to fill up the sky. It created shade for the long hot summers, drew a breeze from somewhere beyond the flat fields that surrounded the house. Its limbs grew in perfect proportion to the legs of the children that would one day climb it, invisible among the swaying leaves. It stood guard over the flower bed Mama planted and weeded and watered every spring and summer until the disease that would ultimately take her made gardening a pleasure of the past. And all of this is why I am grieving. Grieving a loss I didn’t even know we’d experienced until one day last week when Owen and I were walking up the road and noticed way too much sunshine pouring through the spaces between the pecan trees and the fig tree and the gardenia bush. It took a moment or two of staring to even see it – the sycamore tree stretching up and up just as it always has, but naked. Not a leaf anywhere. Daddy hadn’t noticed it either. We stood at the kitchen window and stared out at the skeleton, its graceful outline revealing its own kind of beauty. “Must’ve been hit by lightning,” he said in a tone I don’t hear often from a man who has spent his life acknowledging without sentimentality the life cycle of plants and animals. And people. He shook his head as I recited the wonders of this my favorite tree of favorite trees. “You’ll have to cut it down,” I muttered begrudgingly. “If it fell, it would take out the whole house.” “Yeh.” It was only then that I noticed the flush of green at the base of the trunk, a thicket of thin limbs leafed out in an explosion of sycamore leaves. “Look!” I pointed. “Some of it is still alive.” Somehow, despite the indefensible assault of lightning, some part of the heart of the tree had survived and was, even now, struggling to live, to recreate itself. From where I write, I can see it, still towering over the other trees, its bare branches looking for all the world like upstretched arms, reaching ever toward the sky. It may not succeed. But it is trying. The sycamore has always been my favorite tree. Still is. Especially now. Copyright 2023

A few weeks ago I had lunch with a group of my high school friends and one of them had the audacity to mention that next year will be our 50th reunion. It did not come as a surprise (We can all do math; we had Velma Kemp for algebra.), but it did come as a shock and that undeniable fact has been lurking along the edges of my consciousness ever since. Then a few days ago my mail included a high school graduation announcement from a young lady I’ve known since she was a toddler. It is lovely – printed on heavy stock with photos of the smiling graduate in cap and gown and a subtle caption regarding acceptance to her first-choice college. ‘Tis the season. I suspect that there will be more arriving in the next few weeks, but I can’t begin to guess from whom. I can’t keep up anymore – the girls and boys for whom I gave baby showers and attended recitals and took to get ice cream have become subject to soap opera aging, going from first graders in April to high school seniors in August. Just the other day I was driving down what used to be Lester Road, staring at the building that looks nothing like the high school into which I walked every day for four years and thinking about the girl I was then. That girl did all her assignments and never got a tardy slip. That girl bought a spirit ribbon every Friday and never forgot her locker combination. That girl had her future all figured out and never considered the possibility of deviation. That girl was smart, but not yet wise. I think she is now, though. She has lived through enough wars and political crises and cultural sea-changes to acknowledge that textbooks can never be definitive. She has experienced enough disappointment and frustration and grief to understand that a sterling report card and an honor graduate stole do not guarantee happiness. She has survived enough change to know that resilience is more important than perfect attendance. She has learned to say “I don’t know.” She has learned to say it whenever and wherever she gets the opportunity. She has learned that admitting ignorance is better than demonstrating stupidity. She has learned that “I don’t know” is the birthplace of curiosity and curiosity has fed her when nothing else could. She has learned to take some chances. Not the race-the-train kind or the intentionally-stupid I-dare-yous, but the ones that push her out of her comfort zone, the ones that require her to recognize, articulate, and face down her greatest fears. The ones that appear out of the ether like the voice of Gandalf or Yoda or God. The ones with no guarantee that the result will be what she wanted or planned. She has learned to pay attention. To everything. To the scent of cardboard boxes and the sound of a squirrel running through dead leaves. To the coolness of sheets on sunburned skin and the weight of a door being pulled open. To the echo of her own voice in the darkness. To beginnings and endings. To people – cashiers and receptionists and janitors, the people in the next booth, the police officer directing traffic at the intersection. Ultimately, she has learned that there is no finish line, no graduation, no moment when the work of becoming oneself is done. Copyright 2023

I started keeping a quote book when I was in college. It wasn’t really intentional, but one day I walked into a classroom and saw a quote on the chalkboard that made me gasp: “Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.” It is from an essay by Thomas Huxley, a 19th century English biologist and anthropologist. I doubt he had any idea that 80 years later his words would change forever a girl in the American South. In all the years since I have been forever on the lookout for phrases, sentences, and short paragraphs that articulate life’s great truths. I have been known to entertain, irritate, and/or bore my friends, family, and casual conversationalists with serial repetitions of lines from poems, holy books, novels, and – on occasion – obscure movies. Last Saturday I found a new one. I was listening to a podcast, whose name I can’t remember, when the interviewee quoted G.K. Chesterton, the English writer, philosopher, Christian apologist, and literary and art critic. “There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there,” he wrote. “ The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place[.]” I don’t think Chesterton meant home in the literal sense – home as in address or birthplace – , but as the state of being content, satisfied, fulfilled. The thing about quotes is that they usually take the shape of the experience of the person quoting them and these words struck me as accurate, potent, and particularly memorable. Late afternoon of the same day, I went walking down our road. (I’ve always thought of it that way – in the possessive sense. For decades no one who didn’t have my last name lived on this four-mile stretch of sand and Georgia clay. My mother’s drapes had hand prints where the panels met in the center, where one of us pulled them aside every time we heard a truck, curious as to who was so audacious as to travel down a road to which they had no right.) Above me, clouds skittered back and forth, forcing me to walk through alternate patches of sunshine and shade as the road narrowed into nothingness in the distance. I found myself remembering that when we first came here, when it was just becoming our road, it ended at the Canoochee River. The road itself stopped at the very edge of the cold brown river. A dead-end. I stopped. Or, more accurately, I was stopped. Stood there in the shallow ruts created as a result of the previous day’s rain as the truth became clear. G.K. Chesterton, scholar though he was, was wrong. There is a third way home. I have always been a good navigator. I am rarely lost. I am deft with maps and adept at following directions that include instructions like, “Turn at the instant mart between the CVS and the First Baptist Church and just keep going until you see a bunch of cars on the right.” That does not mean, however, that I have never reached a dead end. I have. On roads, with ideas, in relationships. Two facts have remained consistent in my unsuccessful attempts to get somewhere, figure something out, save something that is already lost. First, not every dead end is preceded by a bright yellow diamond-shaped sign warning you of its approach. And, second, unless you can fool yourself into believing that the DOT is on its way with graders and dump trucks and a whole lot of asphalt, you have to turn around. Turn around and go back the way you came. Turn around and acknowledge that that road was never going to take you anywhere you really wanted to be. Turn around and notice that the longer you walk or drive (or run, swim, bike, or fly) the closer you get to the place from which you started, a place that looks an awful lot like home. Copyright 2023

It looks like spring – wisteria is dangling over the ditch dropping small petals under the tires of passing cars. It sounds like spring – birds are trying to out-sing each other in the branch. It feels like spring – breeze like a whisper is tossing my hair into my eyes. I’ve been to my first baseball game and eaten my first strawberries. I’ve pulled out my shorts and repeatedly refilled the bird feeders. I’ve taken my car to the car wash for pollen removal (a useless task) twice. Call it faux. Call it fake. Call it false. It’s still spring. Except it’s not. Not really. And I can’t help wondering if it ever will be again. The farmers in my family have retired and for the first time in 50 years the fields that surround me have not been and will not be broken. They won’t be harrowed or planted. Irrigated or sprayed. Plowed or harvested. I will not wake up to the sound of a tractor’s diesel motor in the field outside my window and I won’t go to sleep to the sound of an irrigation pump’s diesel motor on the other side of the pond. I won’t stand on the front porch and murmur prayers of thanks when the rain comes or smell the peanuts as they come topsy-turvy out of the ground. When I was in fifth grade, we got our first chance to join 4-H. In filling out the application we had to indicate if our family had a connection to farming. It was a multiple choice question with three possible answers: (1) I do not live on a farm. (2) I live on a farm; my parents do not farm. (3) I live on a farm; my parents farm. My father was an insurance agent and my mother was a seamstress. Obviously, my parents did not farm. We did, however, live outside the city limits, which in my 10-year-old mind felt like the country, and our house sat on three acres, which was much larger than the subdivision lots where most of my friends lived. I can remember to this day how badly I wanted to check number 2. It was as if I somehow foresaw the destiny of my family, as if I my 4-H application was some kind of prophetic proclamation that the day would come when we walked into the life that had been waiting for us. It was as if I had always been a farmer’s daughter. And now, that life – having been equally hard and good, equally frightening and comforting, equally frustrating and tender – is changing. And so are we. I walked outside the other night a couple of hours after dark. The air had already gone moist and heavy and I could feel it descending slowly onto my bare arms. Above me the thinnest sliver of moon floated in the sky. Below it and to the right pulsed two brilliant lights – Jupiter and Venus. I stared for long enough that they turned into a drop earring – two diamonds dangling from a curve of gold, something an elegant woman would wear to a fancy party. What I have learned standing under this sky, staring out over these fields for the last fifty years has made me who I am. It has taught me to see earrings in the moon, to hear symphonies in bird song, to open my arms and embrace the entire world. It has forced me to face fears I didn’t know I had and celebrate gifts I did not know were mine. And I realized, with my chin upturned toward the universe that has no end, it still will. Spring will always come and I will always be a farmer’s daughter. Copyright 2023

The rocking chairs swing forward and back, their shiny white paint dulled by multiple layers of pollen I’ve yet to find the inspiration to remove. The narrow planks of floor are dotted with swallow poop, evidence of the ineffectiveness of the swallow deterrent my brother helped me install in the eaves. Last fall’s pine straw, flattened by rain, has escaped the confines of the edging around the shrubs and the yard is pitted with holes dug by dastardly armadillos. This is not the image of spring that I conjured while huddling in front of the fire. This is not the freshness, the brightness, the gentleness that filled my expectations. This is not the reward I deserve for having survived the dark and cold of winter. I give myself permission to pout. Except that I’m not really very good at pouting. I haven’t been since I was about three. In response to some horrible injustice I no longer remember, I had stomped outside and was leaning against one of the porch columns – my arms crossed and my lower lip poked out as far as it would go. Aunt Cookie, who was all of 13 at time and, of course, without the experience she would one day gain by mothering three children, thought that it was funny and that the way to correct my attitude was to tease me. She called me Pouty. It cured me immediately and forever. So, instead of continuing to glare at the front yard as though it were a sentient being and deliberately chosen to disappoint me, I move. Isak Dinesen once said that the cure for everything is salt water – tears, sweat, or the sea. I’ve always thought she was right, but in the absence of salt water movement is a good substitute. The backyard isn’t much better from a visual standpoint – The pollen on the screened porch is just as thick, the pine straw just as flat. – , but what I see is overcome by what I hear. Surrounding me is bird song. From the branch, from the trees at the edge of the yard, from the field, their tunes compete with each other and, yet, it is a single soundtrack I hear. I’ve often declared that I wish I could identify birds by their songs. The impediment to the fulfilling of that desire is the absence of a concurrent willingness to learn them. For that I have a delightful app on my phone. Merlin allows me to press a microphone icon and have the recorded sound immediately identified. Today, in a span of four minutes, Merlin informs me that my outdoor orchestra includes the Northern Cardinal, Killdeer, Carolina Wren, Pine Warbler, Eastern Towhee, Northern Mockingbird, White-Eyed Vireo, and Red-Winged Blackbird. More than a little curious, I scroll back through the recordings I’ve made since the first day of March: House Finch, Common Ground Dove, Brown-headed Cowbird, Chuck-will’s-widow, Brown Thrasher, Barn Swallow, Tufted Titmouse, Baltimore Oriole, White-throated Sparrow, Blue Jay, American Crow, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Eastern Phoebe, and Northern Parula. Twenty-two different species of bird. Hanging out (or, maybe, just passing through on their way home) in my backyard. Red and brown and blue. Black and orange and gray. Teal and gold and palest tan. And, if I can believe the identification of the White-Eyed Vireo, a dull chartreuse. I can’t move. I don’t need to. I don’t need a cure. I have it. It has been almost 50 years since this farm became my home. Most of the animals with whom I share it – the deer, the turtles, the rabbits, the squirrels, even the dastardly armadillos – are visible in one way or another. They leave tracks, they nibble away at my hostas, they dash out in front of my car. I know they are there. But the birds ... the birds are, for the most part, invisible. Except for their songs. Their glorious, ephemeral songs. The breeze picks up. The sun is melting into the horizon. I’ll go inside shortly, but for a few minutes more I want to listen to what I can not see. I want to pay attention with more than my eyes. I want to dwell in knowing that, in this wide and beautiful world spring is a gift and there is no reason to pout. Copyright 2023

April 13, 1979. Good Friday. I am a first year law student. We don’t have classes today and most of my fellow students are pouring over contracts and civil procedure and constitutional law. I am not. I am holed up in my one-bedroom apartment on Vineville Avenue reading The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, recommended to me by my friend Robbie, a second-year who couldn’t believe I had never even heard of The Chronicles of Narnia. (To be honest, I had not, at that point, even heard of C.S. Lewis, the author.) Without Amazon (which doesn’t yet exist) and Barnes and Noble (which does not yet have a store in every mall) I somehow locate a copy, which costs $1.95. It is slightly larger than my hand, thin, and printed on cheap paper and captures my imagination (notwithstanding the absence of an Oxford comma) from the first sentence: “Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.” The plot is simple, if fantastical, which one might expect from a book whose subtitle is “A Story For Children.” The four children are siblings, sent away from their home in London during the blitz of World War II to stay with an old professor in the countryside. In his rambling mansion, the children travel through a wardrobe into the land of Narnia, where they meet Aslan, a mystical lion, and discover their destiny to free the land from evil. The plot reaches a climax when Aslan offers himself up in exchange for the release of Edmund whose love of Turkish Delight has resulted in his capture by the White Witch. Aslan is killed and his shaved body left on the Stone Table, a large rock upon which is carved the law of Narnia, as Susan and Lucy watch and mourn. Outside the wide double window in the bedroom of my apartment, the sky is dark. The wisteria that grows along the driveway is fluttering, frantically resisting the wind that grows stiffer by the moment. I don’t notice when it starts raining. I am not in Macon; I am in Narnia. And I am sobbing along with Susan and Lucy. Even now, all these years later, I can hardly believe what happens next: I turn the page and read, “At that moment they heard from behind them a loud noise – a great cracking, deafening noise as if a giant had broken a giant’s plate.” and, at that exact moment, I hear a great cracking, deafening noise outside my window, the sound of a tree yielding to the wind, to the tornado that, as I am lost in Narnia, is streaking through town downing power lines, upending cars, throwing trees onto roofs. It is as though God has provided me with my own personal special effects. Later, when the rain and wind are gone, when the swelling in my eyes has gone down, when I’ve turned the last page and am staring out the window at what is now eery stillness, I can’t help wondering how I came to be reading of the death of Aslan, so clearly a Christ figure, on Good Friday, the day Christians commemorate the death of Christ. Matthew says, “The earth shook, the rocks split.” C.S. Lewis says, “The Stone Table was broken into two pieces by a great crack.” And I could say nothing. Nothing at all. Good Friday 1979. It may well have been the day that I turned into a mystic. The day I realized that the unseen is no less real than what I can touch and taste. The day I acknowledged that miracles are everywhere. The day I finally grasped the power of words. It’s been 44 years. And even now I enter Holy Week with a sense of expectation, as a magnet for whatever wonderment might be making its way across the landscape. With a prayer that I live within the magic every day. Copyright 2023

Incongruent. It means incompatible, out of place, “not in harmony or keeping with the surroundings.” It is, strangely, one of my favorite words, despite the difficulty that my thick Southern tongue has in articulating all four of its syllables. In the presence of incongruence I sit up straight, stand at attention, widen my eyes. Confronted with a sight, a sound, a feeling that is out of place, my eyes widen, my ears perk up. I experience awareness, a sensitivity that makes me rethink my prejudices. Incongruence is salt on watermelon, flowers growing through cracks in sidewalks, a female umpire. One morning last week, incongruence met me on the dirt road. It was early. The sun had not yet broken the horizon, but the sky was lightening. It was still mostly silver, but I could see the slightest blush, the slightest bruise just above the tops of the trees. Approaching the crossroads, I was struck by a sense of the ethereal, as though my heart had taken a breath. So, as we do these days, I took out my phone, hoping I could capture the evanescence through the windshield. Just as I pressed the button, a pair of headlights appeared over the crest of the hill. The brightness of halogen pierced the mist through which morning was making its slow gambol and the bucolic scene I had hoped to capture was morphed into something different. Incongruence. I took a quick look at the image saved in pixels. My first thought was of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” The painting and my photograph had in common a periphery of darkness and an off-center source of light, but other than that there was no obvious reason why my image of early morning in the country would have reminded me of a painting of late night in the city. My second thought was, like the eternal student I shall always be, to compare and contrast. How are they alike? How are they different? What evoked the memory of one from the experience of the other? It took me days to figure it out. Days in which I kept imagining the headlights and the silver sky in the photograph, the empty streets and the lonely diners in the painting. Days before the word “incongruent” appeared unbidden in my thoughts and set me on an extended contemplation of the idea that beauty and purpose and meaning can exist only within the experience of the opposite. Despite whining about the relatively mild winter that is just gone, I would not be able to luxuriate in the warmth of spring had I not shivered in the wind on the way to the mailbox. I had no idea how much I loved the farm until I’d left for college and was told I couldn’t come home for six weeks, six weeks in which I heard not a single low moan of a single cow. And that photograph? It would have become just another of the hundreds on the camera roll on my phone had those headlights not cut through the dawn. Copyright 2023 I like consistency and predictability. I depend on dependability. I function best in a state of fulfilled expectations. But incongruence is what keeps me tender to beauty and receptive to the gift of change. And incongruence is one of my favorite words.

I am on my way to town in silence. Getting a head start on my Lenten intention to reduce the noise in my life, I’ve decided that the car will be a no noise zone. No radio. No podcast. No telephone. Like the blind woman whose hearing becomes more acute in the absence of sight, I am hoping I will see better in the absence of incessant sound. What I see at the moment is the way the late winter sun bounces off the windshields of the passing cars, the way it casts shadows shaped like road signs across the asphalt, and the way it has made the land drying out from the recent deluge crusty and sharp. For nearly fifty years I have watched the sun, the shadows, the sharp. This morning, though, it is different. There has been an addition to the landscape. Something new at which to stare. A parade of blue and green surveyor’s flags march along the right of way like a Lilliputian drill team, each one thin and straight, hoisting into the sky a brightly colored banner that snaps in the wind like a sheet on a clothes line. Behind them, farther removed from the apron of the road, a sign protrudes from what used to be – what has always been as – a field. It announces that the acres will soon be covered with concrete and metal, that they will be the home of a corporation whose name is a made-up word, nothing more than a series of hard syllables. Progress, they call it. It is important to make clear that I am not opposed to the corporation. Or the progress. Still, it’s only fair to acknowledge that change is never easy and when it comes to land, well, as Daddy always says, they ain’t makin’ no more. Once they turn cotton fields into parking lots there’s no going back. I shake my head, turn my thoughts back to the flags. There’s something about them, something familiar. A story that is trying to retell itself. And, then, I remember: Years ago, when I finally acquiesced to the fact that I wasn't too good for satellite television, I had to get the co-op to come out and place flags along the path of underground power lines that run into my house so that the satellite people didn’t plunge me into darkness or, worse, the absence of air conditioning by digging where they should not. It seemed to be going to a lot of trouble, I thought. Couldn’t just about anybody, I thought, draw a straight line from the power pole that stood sentinel at the edge of the field to the box outside the house? Based upon the forms I had fill out and the time it took to get an appointment, the answer to that question was no. So, the nice gentleman from the co-op came when he said he would and, in a matter of about three minutes, established, by the poking of bright pink flags across my yard, the location of the lines sending a very clear message of “Don't dig here.” A negative imperative. A warning that if you do, you will be sorry. There have been moments, I find myself thinking, that it would have been helpful to have my own personal survey crew. Somebody to have gone ahead of me as I encountered treacherous terrain, somebody to mark the places I had no busy digging. Somebody to plant colorful little flags along the path, gentle reminders to watch my step. Now that, I can’t help thinking, that would be progress. Copyright 2023

I’ve never wanted to go to Las Vegas, never had the slightest inclination to gamble, see a magic show involving tigers, or gawk at the vast array of humanity that throngs its streets on any given night. And, yet, I went. Sandra and I met each other at church camp. She’s says we were eight; I thought it was the summer we were ten. It doesn’t matter. We spent one week every summer up until we were sixteen going to Bible study in the morning and church services at night, doing crafts and playing tetherball in the afternoon, and ordering from the canteen a strange concoction we called, in those unenlightened days, a suicide. We spent one week every summer whispering in the dark, laughing at jokes we didn’t understand, pretending to ignore the boys who thought they were flirting. We went from Keds to Dr. Scholl’s to platform sandals. For one week every summer we leaned into each other. The other 51 weeks of the year, we wrote letters. We both agree that it was the letters – written on Hallmark stationery and Current fold-over notes, addressed in loopy cursive and sent with five-cent stamps – that kept us close, that fed an unlikely friendship between the blonde city girl whose favorite activity was shopping and the brunette country girl who loved nothing better than reading, the friendship that has now lasted nearly 60 years. Sandra was at my law school graduation; I was the maid of honor at her wedding. I still have the key hook she gave me when I bought my first home 37 years ago and every time I open my desk drawer I see the brass letter opener that was a Christmas gift so many years ago that the engraved initials have nearly worn completely away. She is with me, in one way or another, every single day, despite the fact that we’ve never lived in the same place, not even the same area code. Thus, when the younger of Sandra’s two daughters Lindsey texted me a photo of her engagement ring, a joyous surprise that was followed shortly thereafter by the request that I officiate at her wedding, I ended up flying across the country to a city I’d never wanted to go. You do that for the people you love. And, now, finally home after a delay in the last leg of the journey (We were told that the hold-up in our flight from Atlanta to Savannah was caused by the Chinese spy balloon and the closing of air space in Jamaica.), I am not, as I thought I would be, falling asleep immediately. I am, instead, staring at the thin strips of pale moonlight filtering through the blinds, images of the past four days unreeling through my mind like the digital billboards lining Las Vegas Boulevard: the endless queues of limousines at the entrances to the casinos, the low mountains edging the valley surrounding the city, the high-end shops tended by disinterested skinny girls staring at their phones. Those images, though, die quickly as my breath slows and my body relaxes. In their place rises the brightness of the sun angling through the winter sky and falling on the bride and groom as they repeat their vows. In their place appear the radiant smiles, the tight hugs, the spontaneous laughter of sincere congratulations baptizing the moment. In their place emerges the settled knowing that the artificial can exist only because of the reality of the genuine, only in comparison to what is sincere, only in the context of what is true. The day after the wedding – after all the photographs had been taken, after the fancy dresses were put away, after Elvis appeared at the reception and led us all in a rousing version of “Viva Las Vegas” – Sandra and I sat on a bench with our heads, both of them now gray, bent toward each other, reflecting on the little girls we used to be, the women we have become. We laughed, we cried, we questioned. Right there in the middle of the city where fake is celebrated, where pretend is applauded, where glitzy and gaudy are standard fare, we linked our arms and held each other tight before, once again, saying goodbye. What happened in Vegas, at least this time, won’t stay in Vegas. And I will be grateful every day of my life. Copyright 2023

The window screens fluttered in the wind. The gas logs hissed like a whisper that I couldn’t quite make out. The drumbeat on the metal roof fell into a rhythm. Andante? Adagio? What is the tempo of rain? Suddenly, I am 17 again. I am living on a dormitory floor with an inordinate number of music majors, most of them small-boned and large-eyed, delicate and fragile at first glance, as if the music had drawn out their marrow, used it up, and left the vessel empty and startled. I used to stand in the courtyard and watch them in the practice rooms – long straight hair hanging down the sides of their faces like swing chains, curved shoulders holding arms that angle into wrists into long pale fingers. When all the rooms were full, each one occupied by an earnest talent, the row of windows look like frames on a strip of film, no color, just lights and darks, no distinction among faces. The sounds, of course, were anything but the same. Some of the occupants caressed the keys, coaxed the notes out of the piano; others attacked with vengeful spirits, exorcising some invisible demon of time and talent. Different composers, keys, tempos all came pouring out the windows together and, yet, did not sound discordant. I went to the practice rooms a few times myself, took my three years of piano lessons and my John Brimhall arrangements for easy piano and tentatively entered a place I did not belong. Only on Saturday night when the music majors, as a body, left first floor Porter a ghost town was there a place for me, a scratchy tumbleweed. I never stayed long. My uneven, tentative attempts were too hard, too loud for a Steinway. My fingers were always tired, discouraged, and embarrassed at their ineptitude. I felt like an unworthy priest entering the Holy of Holiest, certain I would be struck down and dragged out dead by the cord tied to my ankle. Leaving, though, walking out into the stillness and quiet of a near-deserted campus, sheets of music shoved up under my arm, hands stuffed into my pockets, I was lighter, less bound than I had been. Music will do that. Sometimes, in the late evening, when the sun had long since drifted to bed behind the lake, I would stand outside and listen. Once I wondered what would happen if all the thick white squares of acoustical tile laid out on walls and ceiling were ripped down, whether all the music would escape. Whether every measure played over and over until it became as unconscious as breathing, every andante and adagio, every piano and forte would come spilling out through the doorways, into the hall, and up the cavernous stairwell, echoing off brick walls and steel handrails, rising like heat through the empty floors above. Whether all the sonatas and nocturnes, the preludes and etudes and concertos would explode out the open windows, rush into each other and become a whirlwind around the fountain before moving up the loggia steps in one direction, down the hill toward the lake in another, grasping at loose sleeves and hair, filling ears and eyes and open mouths. And, then, having spent itself, dissolve into the whisper of an April breeze. Even now, in the rhythm of the rain, I can hear it – the music mixed with distant laughter and the sound of glasses and silverware in the kitchen on the third floor, the music and the sound of the wind in the camellia bushes, the music and the water in the fountain splashing lazily into itself, the music, the music, the music. Copyright 2023

The new year is but a few days old. It is not yet Epiphany. The twelve days of Christmas are still being celebrated in some places. Not this one. At Sandhill, Christmas is over. Lured outside by Alexa’s self-assured voice telling me that it is 68 degrees (Not warm, but warm enough to walk.), I realize halfway across the yard that Alexa can not be trusted. The wind is cold and angry. My eyes begin to water as my face is slapped with dust that has been turned into spinning tops. There is a stand of pine trees up ahead that should be a buffer. The stiff needles will trap the wind in their stickiness, confuse it in their denseness and send it back into the branch from which it came. The closer I get, the clearer it becomes that I am wrong. If the trees do anything at all, they concentrate the wind into an intense series of gusts. I plow forward another quarter mile or so, leaning into the wind and grumbling under my breath, before deciding to bow my head (It is already bent to my chest.) in defeat. I don’t have to do this, I say to myself. This is not fun, I say to myself. I will just turn around, I say to myself, and the wind will be at my back. Except it isn’t. The wind is not at my back as I reverse direction. The wind blows where it will and it wills, at this exact moment, to spin itself 180 degrees. One of my favorite words is epiphany. (I am also particularly fond of gobsmacked, juxtaposition, exacerbated, and awestruck.) It is from the Greek word “epiphaneia,” which means “bringing light.” Up until the 17th century, epiphany was a strictly liturgical term and was spelled with a capital letter, but by the 19th century it had, without the capital letter, come to mean “a sudden insight or revelation” or “a moment of sudden understanding of something important.” The change in wind direction, the contradiction of what I thought I could expect, is producing an epiphany. I recognize the signs – I feel my eyes growing larger, I feel my breath enlarging my chest, I pause my steps without intending to – , but I can not articulate what it is. There are no words. Not yet. January 6 – Epiphany, with a capital letter – comes and goes. A few days after, I pick up a book and notice that I have, on some previous reading, underlined this from Marcus Aurelius: “There is nothing Nature loves so well as to change.” I stare at the words. I bristle. Despite what I have said about wanting to clean out the attic, wanting to have fewer migraines, and wanting to wear fewer black dresses in 2023, I do not love change. I never have. I have – and still wear – clothes I bought in the early 2000s. I have lived on the same dirt road since 1974. I count among my dear friends people I met in first grade. I read the quotation again, in its entirety this time: “Get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change.” Get used to it? Become accustomed to the idea? Accept it as truth? And, suddenly (so I can be sure that this is, in fact, an epiphany), the words come. The words the wind was howling into my hesitant ears. Yes. The answer to the questions, all the questions, is yes. Get used to the fact that life - not mine or anyone else’s - will never be neat and tidy. Become accustomed to the reality that pain, even as I resist it, serves a purpose, if only as a reminder of what it means to be in health. Accept as truth that death will come to everyone I love and, until it comes to me, I will put on black dresses and bear witness to their lives. I can learn to love not just change, but the process of changing. I can embrace not just the idea, but the opportunity. I can. In the light of epiphany, but only in that light. Copyright 2023