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It was with gratitude that I ventured out on Christmas Eve morning. Gratitude, of course, for the season and its significance, but also gratitude that the cold had not frozen the pipes at Sandhill, gratitude for the father who had dripped those pipes for me, and gratitude that all the gifts had been purchased, wrapped, and, for the most part, already delivered. Swaddled against the cold in layers of clothes, my head lowered against the wind, I walked into the chapel for what my pastor was calling “Quiet Christmas.” The stone floors, the candles flickering in the crevices of the wall behind the altar, the whispers of the others as they entered transported me to a space where the loudest noise was the beating of my own heart. I cried through the entire service – the litany of remembrance and the lighting of the Advent wreath, the Psalter and the reading of the Nativity story from the Gospel of Luke, the giving and taking of Holy Communion. I left as the words of the Confession crowded out all other thoughts: “We have broken your law, we have rebelled against your love, we have not loved our neighbors, and we have not heard the cry of the needy. Forgive us, we pray.” Unsettled and just the least bit melancholy, I couldn’t bring myself to go straight home to the warmth of a fire and the twinkling of the lights on the Christmas tree and saccharine-sweet holiday music hailing from a satellite 23,000 miles away. So, I decided to drive through downtown where my memories of childhood Christmases fall against a backdrop of full sidewalks, the tinkling of bells as the doors of shops opened and closed, the tinsel-heavy decorations atop the streetlights, and mannequins in store windows sporting red and green clothes and awkward tilts of their plastic hands. I knew I would not find crowds and traffic, a huge tree on the courthouse square, or drivers jockeying for parking spaces, but I hoped I would find something. Approaching the railroad tracks, the weird intersection of East Main Street and Savannah Avenue, I began slowing. Glancing to the right I noticed that the fountain at Triangle Park was frozen. The cold had turned the dancing water into sculpture, the gurgles and splashes into silence. I parked the car, crossed the street, and pulled out my phone to take a picture, and just as I got to the fountain I realized it wasn’t completely frozen. The opposite side, the side toward the sun, had already begun thawing, the water in the reservoir quivering in the breeze. One, maybe two or three, drops of water hung precariously from the lower tier, as if they weren’t certain of their identity – still ice or, suddenly and once again, water? I took a couple of photos, crossed back over the street, and headed for home. I kept thinking about the fountain. And at some point I realized that the fountain had been my star, that it had led me to the something for which I had been looking, searching, seeking like a Wise Woman – the truth that frozen water, frozen hearts can thaw. The truth that the very nature of water, of hearts is that they do not remain in the same state forever. Christmas is, of course, followed almost too closely by the new year. Whatever it is about human nature that leads us to see the turning of the calendar as a prompt to start over, begin again, believe again, we all, in one way or another, see January 1 as opportunity. This year, I am seeing it as an invitation to thaw. Copyright 2022

When Adam and Kate were young, I drove them to school each day. We had a system for who got to choose the radio station on any given day (This was, of course, pre-Bluetooth/pre-Spotify.): Adam got to choose on Mondays and Wednesdays; Kate got to choose on Tuesdays and Thursdays; I got to choose on Fridays. As a result of this system, they both learned the words to more than one Barbra Streisand song and nearly the entire soundtrack to "Guys and Dolls." A couple of weeks before Christmas, the Friday morning offerings became seasonal and our particular favorite was Amy Grant's "A Christmas Album," the first track of which is "Tender Tennessee Christmas." In case you don't know it, the chorus goes: Another tender Tennessee Christmas The only Christmas for me Where the love circles around us Like the gifts around our tree Well, I know there's more snow Up in Colorado Than my roof will ever see But a tender Tennessee Christmas Is the only Christmas for me This morning, Christmas Eve morning, I was ready. I lifted the needle (Yes, I still have a turntable.) and dropped it gently onto the vinyl that is nearly 40 years old. It took only a couple of chords of the guitar to send me back to those days when the passenger seats were occupied by two towheads whose Santa lists included remote control cars and Teddy Ruxpin, remote control trucks and Cabbage Patch kids, remote control anything and Colorforms. They had no idea what Amy Grant meant by tender. But I did. It described the way my heart swelled like a post-Cindy Lou Grinch every time I looked at them staring at the lights on the Christmas tree. It described the way my eyes watered as I watched them on the risers with their classmates singing "Jingle Bells." It described the way my voice cracked every time I got to "where the love circles around us." They are parents now. They buy the gifts and wrap the gifts and watch their children squeal and dance and experience the very best kind of anticipation. I have no idea whether they remember the words to "Tender Tennessee Christmas." It is enough that I do. It is the only gift I want. The only gift I need. A tender Sandhill Christmas is the only Christmas for me. Copyright 2022

The road down which I habitually walk is, in places, sandy. As in, slogging across the dunes in order to get to the tide-flattened beach sandy. As in crossing the desert with a camel sandy. As in, I shuffle more than stride sandy. And in those sandy places my footprints are particularly distinct. I don’t always notice them, but this day, as I turn and head toward home, I do. And there before me is prima facie evidence of the fact that I am slue-footed. Some folks call it duck-footed or out-toeing. Not country people. Country people call me slue-footed. It means that I walk with each foot at a slight angle, probably no more than ten degrees, away from my body. Instead of a double straight line, my footprints are similar to the underside of what embroiderers call feather stitch. It looks, I suddenly notice, like I’m trying to walk in two directions at once. Both north and south simultaneously. This is not like me. I don’t vacillate. I am not double-minded. I know where I’m going, what I want, what I believe. It makes my stomach lurch to think that my anatomy might reflect something contrary to the way I see myself. On Friday, when the immediate danger of Hurricane Ian has passed us by, I text my friend in Hilton Head. She and her husband moved there from the inland a couple of years ago. This was their first hurricane. She responds that there was a lot of rain and a strong wind that was still howling, but no damage. She asks about us, about our houses, about the cotton. I am grateful to report that all is well. We start talking about what had been predicted – a path much closer to both of us, storm surge, flooding, six to eight inches of rain. “Amazing,” I tell her, “how quickly they can change direction.” “True,” she agrees with me, “in so many things.” I stare at my phone and see my footprints in the sand. I nod my head, acknowledging the blessing of changed direction, and then I shake it, considering the hubris contained in my straight lines. Unbending, unswerving. Have my straight lines created a storm surge in my own or someone else’s life? Have I walked through flood waters I could have avoided? Could changing my direction by only a few degrees have changed the trajectory of, well, everything? Has my slue-footed walk been whispering something important to me in all these thousands of miles up and down this road? And, if it has, what does it mean that I didn’t hear it? There are always, I have learned, more questions than answers. And the questions that do have an answer often have more than one. Like a geometry proof rather than an algebra equation. It is probably too late to change my stride. It is an improvement I am not going to attempt. But I am going to watch my feet and when they point somewhere interesting, I am going to at least think about changing my direction. Copyright 2022

Counting Candles It is the third Sunday in Advent. Tonight I will light the sole pink candle, the candle of joy. I’ve been putting it off all day. On the first Sunday, I lit the candle of hope. I struck the match and watched the tiny flame flicker with my breath as I read aloud the scripture and sang with unfeigned lament, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” its plaintive tones grounding me in the truth that hope is not wishful thinking, not a list mailed to Santa, not an expectation of deserved reward. It is the deliberate belief that what is right now is not what will always be. On the second Sunday, I lit the candle of peace. I tried not to think about Ukraine. I tried not to think about abandoned children and displaced families. I tried not to think about mass shootings and insurrections. I reminded myself that peace begins in me, in the release of anxiety over things I can’t control. And now the joy candle. I can put it off no longer. Earlier this week I traveled south, to the ocean, to say goodbye to a friend. The full moon was dangling over the marsh as I walked into the funeral home, its light diffused in the humidity. I went inside and moved among the brothers, the sisters-in-law, the friends. We told stories. We all remembered the same things even though some of us had never met. None of the stories took away the pain. So, now I find myself holding a match in my hand, staring at the candle that represents something I can not make myself feel. I notice that the wick of the joy candle has not been trimmed. After burning it last year, I’d just taken it out of the Advent wreath and put it back in the box with the others to hibernate. The blackened end is curved in on itself – like a candy cane, like a shepherd’s crook, like the back of a traveler carrying a heavy load. The wick is me. I grasp it between my thumb and index finger, bend it further still, and feel it loosen its grip. I hold it, for a moment, in the palm of my hand before tossing it aside. The match makes a scratching sound as it moves across the striker. I lift my hand, shielding the flame, to touch the newly-shorn wick. It does not catch at first. It, too, is hesitant to proclaim joy. But I do not withdraw my hand, the match. I hold it there, feeling the heat of the other candles, both dancing in the darkness. Finally, it catches. In less than a second the tiny orange tongue of fire becomes a tall golden flame. The wax begins to pool and then drip, a sacrifice to the blaze. I sit and watch them, the three candles, and confess that I do not feel joy, do not have peace, am finding it hard to have hope. And, then, I see the unlit candle. The candle that waits to be lit next week. The candle without which the circle of the wreath is incomplete. The candle of love. I am not alone in my sorrow, my feeling of being unmoored. I am not alone in my weariness, in the grief fatigue that stalks me after a year in which I wore more black dresses and mailed more sympathy cards than anybody should. I am not alone. And that, of course, is the proclamation of Advent. I am not alone. We are not alone. We wait, in expectation if not in patience, for the coming of love. Love that will break down all barriers. Love that will bind up all wounds. Love that never fails. The three candles glow. The fourth candle waits. And so do I. Copyright 2022

The town in which my mother grew up was about two blocks long in three of the four directions from the intersection that would one day, but not while she was there, have a caution light. The finest building in town was the bank. It was all stone and portico and pediments, the typical Classical Revival style that most banks built in the mid-20th century favored. I remember the bank from my childhood visits to my grandparents’. It was empty by then, and, to my 10-year-old eyes, lonely and sad. I imagined what it was like in the days when tellers stood behind high counters and pushed money through slots to waiting customers. I wondered what it would be like to cross the marble threshold, to push open the heavy accordion door that I just knew hung at the entrance to the vault. Given my early (and continuing) tendency to wonder about just about everything, this is not surprising. There is, though, a very specific reason why the bank in Collins fascinated me so and it has to do with an oft-repeated story about my mother. Mama was, according to everyone who knew her as a child, free-spirited, creative, and fearless. It was said by her father that she accepted every offer of a ride she ever received, asking where the driver of the car or wagon was going only after she was settled into a seat. She served as both funeral director and officiant for the funeral of all the deceased animals (pet or wildlife) in town. And, in a scene that has always made me think of “The Little Rascals,” she and a couple of her cousins, while hanging out at the train depot, as one does in a small town, climbed into a railroad car and found a large bag of candy corn (Their assertion that the bag was already open when they found it has been questioned.) from which they proceeded to take as much as they could eat. One morning, my grandmother asked Mama to go buy some eggs. It was the 1940s and children could still safely wander around small towns doing thing like buying eggs. Mama set out with a few coins and all the confidence in the world and proceeded to make her way to the bank where she sauntered up to one of the teller windows and, when asked what it was the teller could do for her, replied, “I’d like to buy some eggs.” That is the end of the story as it has always been recounted. A punch line, of sorts, but no big finish. I wasn’t smart enough to ask Mama what happened next, so I don’t know if the teller was helpful, if Mama was embarrassed. I don’t even know if she eventually got the eggs. There are a couple of reasons why that particular story poked through into my conscious thoughts today. Tomorrow is the second anniversary of Mama’s death and my thoughts are heavy with that realization, but, also, I heard on a podcast this morning one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott, say, “You can’t go to a hardware store to get bread.” She was talking about accepting the fact that none of us ever gets everything we want from other people. She was talking about letting go of the idea that we can guilt, manipulate, or even love people into doing what we want them to do. She was talking about forgiving people when you ask them for bread and all they have to offer is a screwdriver. Tomorrow will be the second Sunday in Advent, the season in which we are admonished to wait, a paradoxical thought when one realizes that Christmas is approaching with the speed of a cheetah and with the same danger. Whether it’s cold or not, we will, all of us, be shivering with uncertainty about the world, the future. Every gathering, particularly those with family, will be charged with the memory of old injuries and the fear of not having, not being enough. Is it any surprise that all the best Christmas carols are written in a minor key? We would do well, I think, as we hang the wreath and wrap the presents and produce more food than anyone can eat, to ask ourselves where we’ve been going to get something that isn’t there. You can’t go to a hardware store to get bread. You can’t go to a bank to get eggs. But if we understand Christmas, we know where to go, not just for bread and eggs, but everything we need. Copyright 2022

Like all good trees, it once held a swing. Like all good trees, it was climbed by multiple generations of children daring themselves to be brave. Like all good trees, it offered lush shade in summer. And like all good trees, it could not live forever. The tree, a white oak, was already over a hundred years old when we moved to the farm. It dominated the front yard of the house into which we moved. The thousands of acorns it dropped each fall fed the squirrels and gave our feet stone bruises well into November. Its branches arced over the dirt road and in its shadow we sat on the tailgates of pickup trucks to pull peanuts off their velvety green vines. Neighbor farmers parked their own trucks in that cool, breezy spot and leaned on the hoods – fertilizer caps tilted up just a little so as to see each others’ faces – telling tales, speculating on the harvest, and holding the world in place. And, then, one day, one of its limbs, thick and muscled like the arm of some giant pulpwooder, gave in to the wind of a summer storm. Daddy dragged it off. A few years later, a tornado that the National Weather Service never did acknowledge tore off another big limb. Daddy hooked one end of a chain to the John Deere and the other to the limb and dragged it off. And, then, last week, sometime deep in the night when the remnants of Hurricane Nicole swept through Adabelle, the last big limb ripped itself from the trunk and fell to the ground, amazingly missing the house. Sometimes you just have to admit that there’s nothing left to save, so my brother called a tree man who came out to take a look and confirm what we already knew, that the tree, with nothing but one spindly limb left, had to go. He said he’d be back in a few days. I long ago stopped being amazed by the breadth of things that can break my heart. The episode of “Little House on the Prairie” about the black child who wasn’t allowed to go to school. The fire that destroyed the original Statesboro High School building on College Street. The softness of my sweet Ginny’s golden fur and the whisper of her last breath as the vet’s thumb pressed the plunger on a hypodermic needle. The long walk down the center aisle following a casket out into the sunshine. I’ve stopped being amazed, but the heartbreak is always just as raw. And it is now. Now that the tree has fallen. According to the formula of the International Society of Arborculture, the tree was over 180 years old. It grew from an acorn that fell, was planted, somehow found its way into the dirt before Walt Whitman wrote “Leaves of Grass,” before New Mexico and Arizona were states, before Henry Clay even thought of the Missouri Compromise. Hard to imagine. The tree man (heretofore to be known to me as “the tree undertaker”) came back. With three or four other men and a bucket truck and saws big enough to scare anybody, he took it down. I wasn’t home at the time, but when I returned I stopped to take a look, take a picture, take stock. In the center of the stump, around which was scattered sawdust the color of early corn, was a hole. A dark, ragged hole. The heart of the tree had rotted away. It is always the case that rot begins on the inside. That decay spreads from the center. And that, as I mourn the loss of the tree, I would do well to remember what took it down. Copyright 2022

My very first class at Wesleyan College was Survey of American Literature taught by Dr. Leah Strong. The class met on the second floor of Tate Hall. The ceilings were tall, the walls plaster and the dark wooden windows so heavy that when they were opened, which was fairly often because there was no air conditioning in Tate at that time, you could hear the chains creaking in the sashes halfway across campus. It was a beautiful Indian summer day and the sunshine seemed to move in waves with the breeze that ruffled the leaves of the gingko trees that grew outside. My classmates and I, probably 10 or 12 of us, were sitting in old wooden desks whose tops had been scarred with 50 years of graffiti carved by the pens and pencils of daydreaming Wesleyannes. We’d been there for several minutes and I was wondering just how long one was supposed to wait for a professor (I learned later that the “rule” was five minutes for an assistant professor, 10 for an associate, and 15 for a full professor.) when a figure came scurrying through the doorway. It was a short, chubby gray-haired woman wearing grannie glasses, black polyester pants, a Hawaiian print shirt and shoes my father would call brogans. She was carrying under her arm, not a briefcase or a textbook or a sheaf of lecture notes, but a motorcycle helmet. She strode determinedly across the front of the room, set her helmet down in the middle of the desk and then walked around to the front and jumped backward onto the desk, leaving her short legs dangling like those of a marionette. She looked around the room at us and said, “The definition of poetry...” We hurriedly opened our brand new spiral notebooks and poised our pens over the clean white pages. “The definition of poetry ...” She looked around the room again. “When I was a child, my father used to bring home packages of paper pellets. These pellets were the size of BB’s and when you dropped one of these pellets into a glass of water it would slowly begin to unfold and unfurl until, a few minutes later, the pellet had become a beautiful flower. Each of the pellets was different. Each one produced a uniquely beautiful flower.” She looked around the room a third time. “The poem is the pellet and you are the glass of water.” I realized I was staring. I had not written a single word. And all I could think was “Oh, my Lord, I’m going to love college.” I don’t know how many times I’ve told that story. It is one of the seminal moments of not just my college education, but my life. It articulated a truth that I’d carried around in my heart, believed with all my heart, and never been able to put into words. Now I could: Beauty exists without permission, without license, but it needs a vessel, a conduit through which to make itself known. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to speak to an audience, mostly students, at East Georgia State College. I told them the story of the paper pellets. And I told them about The Little Prince, my favorite book which is also, now that I think of it, about a uniquely beautiful flower. It’s all now become an earworm, repeating itself over and over as I make the bed, answer emails, walk down the road lined with bright yellow asters and broom sedge as tall as a 10-year-old. The idea of beauty, of all things, needing help to accomplish its purpose is astonishing. And perplexing. A whole different way of thinking is required if we acknowledge that particular truth, if we admit to ourselves that beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder, but dependent upon the beholder, if we accept our own responsibility in bringing beauty into the world. I watched the sunrise this morning. Pale stripes of orange and pink and peach, a few streaks of deep purple. They would have been there – the stripes and streaks – even if I hadn’t seen them, even if I hadn’t stood in bare feet on a wet deck, hugging myself against the chill. They would have been there, but they wouldn’t have been beautiful if I hadn’t seen them. But I did and, because I did, they were. Copyright 2022

A.J. is three years old. Three is, to my mind, the optimum age for humans. Three-year-olds can walk (until they don’t want to and then the nearest adult is always willing to carry), they can feed themselves (if not without mess), and they can carry on a conversation (albeit with limited verb tenses). Most importantly they still believe things – like magic and anything their adults tell them. Last Sunday A.J. and I went looking for acorns. I have known and played with enough three-year-olds to know that anything sounds inviting when suggested by an adult using words like “Wow!” and with appropriately outrageous facial expressions. Thus, when I suggested that we might find ACORNS! under the big oak tree, she was all in. We crossed the driveway that separated us from the tree, my wrinkled hand holding her chubby one, and I bent over slightly to scour the ground for acorns. A.J. mimicked me and stared with intensity. “Look,” I pointed, “we found some.” I picked up several of the smallest acorns I’d ever seen and dropped them in her outstretched palm. “Do you know what will happen if we plant one of these acorns? One day it will grow up to be a big tree like this one.” She tilted her head and gazed up into the dark green canopy of leaves without a shadow of disbelief in her face. “Let’s plant one.” I grabbed a short twig and began scratching in the dry ground. What I managed to create was more a depression than a hole, but – with those huge green eyes watching – I dropped an acorn and attempted to cover it with a few grains of sand. “I don’t got one,” A.J. sighed and then picked up her own twig and began scratching at the dirt, determined to plant her own acorn. With both our efforts to make a difference in the world completed, we headed back toward A.J.’s mama, whose own hand I’d held when she was three, whose own green eyes had stared at me with wonder. “Look, Mama, I got pine cones!” she squealed as she held out her hand. “Acorns,” I corrected. “Acorns, Mama! I got acorns!” Time froze for a moment. Not just long enough for me to become wistful, but long enough for me to remember the afternoon the week before when I’d been out walking in the quiet of early fall, so quiet that I could hear acorns and pine cones falling around me, landing in the sand with a soft thud. One of the things that fell, though, was different: a short twig, still bearing green leaves, had landed among the fallen acorns with one stubborn acorn still attached. It was beautiful, but it was sad. I realized, standing there absorbing the scene – my Kate all grown-up and her A.J. growing up so fast – , that an essential part of any acorn becoming an oak tree is the letting go. The acorn has to loose its grip on the limb that is all it’s ever known. The acorn has to separate itself from the leaves that sheltered it from the wind and kept it attached to its source of nourishment. The acorn has to risk the fall to reach the earth which is where it will change into what it was meant to be. Three-year-olds are perfect humans, but they will not remain three. They will not always need to hold our hands. They will not always believe everything we say. One day they will, like acorns, let go. And with any luck they will land softly on the way to becoming trees. Copyright 2022

This past Saturday afternoon, after the Saturday morning on which we laid to rest yet another family member – this one far, far too young –, I suspected that my usual four miles might be too far to walk carrying the burden of that grief. It felt ungrateful to remain indoors, though, on such a balmy afternoon. So I set forth. I’d made it just past the grain bins, roughly 200 yards, when I saw something along the edge of the road that I did not recall seeing before. One of the things you learn when you have more plants for neighbors than people is that the plants, like people, tend to move in and out. For every goldenrod and beautyberry that has shown up faithfully every September for the last 50 years, there is a hyssopleaf thoroughwort or a cornelian cherry that suddenly one year pops through the undergrowth like refrigerator biscuits coming through their cardboard can. This plant was one of those. There is an app on my phone that, utilizing a photo I take, identifies plants and animals (I’ve not used it on animals yet. Let’s just say that plants don’t have teeth or stingers.). Sometimes it asks me to take another photo from a different angle. Sometimes, even after additional photos, it acknowledges that it’s not sure exactly what the plant is and can’t be more specific than family or, at best, genus. But sometimes it knows exactly what I’ve discovered growing in a ditch or along the edge of a field and proclaims in big letters across the screen, “You’ve identified a new species!” I opened the app and took a photo of the tiny green plant with lots of short green leaves which the app immediately identified as St. Andrew’s Cross, native to this area, preferring our dry woods and acidic soil. When it blooms, it produces yellow flowers. I identified a few more plants as I strolled, not the least interested in getting any cardiac benefit and every bit interested in just clearing my head of the weariness that had been my companion for too long. There was hairy lespedeza and shrub lespedeza and camphor weed, which I’d seen a hundred times, but never named. I recorded paper mulberry and tropical milkweed and, just for the fun of it, walked into the field and confirmed that what Daddy and Keith are growing is “upland cotton.” And I smiled every time the app proclaimed, “You’ve identified a new species!” On Monday, I watched the Royal Family and the United Kingdom lay to rest their mother, their grandmother, their Queen. I confess to a fascination with the British monarchy that is beyond explanation or reason. I confess to taking sides when it comes to their intra-family shenanigans. I also confess to crying – more than once – during the hours-long pageantry of rites and ritual, pomp and circumstance. I cried for Princess Charlotte, only seven years old, in her mourning clothes and Princess Anne struggling to keep her face composed and the corgis watching their master pass one last time. I cried when the Queen’s Piper played, “Sleep, Dearie, Sleep” and the baby-faced pallbearers of the Grenadier Guards on the last leg of their journey strode slowly and confidently into St. George’s Chapel. And I cried when the Lord Chamberlain broke the wand of office signifying the end of his service to the Queen, even though I had no idea at the time who he was or why he did it. I listened to the hymns, the scriptures, the prayers and I was reminded, as I always am when I allow myself to be in the moment and let go of the urge to be productive, when I listen with my heart as well as my head, that we are all the same. For a moment, I stopped crying. I think I may even have smiled. Without the use of the app or even my phone, I had identified (or, more accurately, re-identified) a species. Its Latin name is homo sapiens, but we usually just call ourselves human beings. Royalty or commoner, British or American, whatever labels we attach to ourselves or others, we share everything that matters. We love our families, mourn our losses, summon the strength to perform our roles. And, as Queen Elizabeth observed over 20 years ago in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks in America, “Grief is the price we pay for great love.” Homo sapiens means “wise human.” We aren’t always. Sometimes we are petty. Sometimes we are prejudiced. At various moments we are lazy and ill-tempered and stingy. But even then we are alike and it is in our sameness that we find the ability to forgive, to heal, to grow. Copyright 2022

Today is Labor Day. The first thing I do is hang the flag. I unfold it carefully, making sure that it does not touch the floor. I slip it onto the wooden pole and struggle, as always, to get the small leather loop fitted into the metal clip. I step out onto the front porch, lift the flag into the brace, and tighten the bolt that holds it at the perfect angle, red and white stripes curving with the pull of gravity. Today, they say, is the end of summer. Later I decide to take a walk. The woods are quiet. The birds have all gone silent in the heavy heat of mid-day and the only sounds are the deep rumble of thunder to the south and the rhythmic crunch of my feet on dirt not yet dried out from yesterday’s rain. A swarm of swallowtail butterflies circles my legs, darting and diving, pausing occasionally to light on the grass along the edge of the road. Half a mile in, my arms and legs are sticky with perspiration, adhesive that grabs the sand I am kicking up and glues it to my ankles, my calves, my knees. My t-shirt has bloomed with Rorschach blots. Our progress up the hill – Owen’s and mine – is slow, plodding really, moving against an invisible tide of heat and humidity and time. There is no way that today is the end of summer. No way. But there are signs. Signs that the inevitable turn of the seasons is upon us. Bright yellow asters have sprouted in the ditches. Rosy pink cotton blossoms have begun their obligatory fade. The first gold leaves have lost their grip on the oak trees and floated to the ground. Soon enough the deep growls of combines and grain trucks will float across the landscape. Soon enough the scent of burning fields will seep into the house. Soon enough the trees will be naked and the air will be chill. Today, though, it is still summer. The hydrangeas are still blooming and the dragonflies are still hovering and the days are still long. I turn to head home. The rhythm of my steps is interrupted every so often by a shuffle, a low kick against a rock, a twig, the remains of an empty cup thrown from someone’s truck. The slightest breeze climbs the hill and licks my face and I forget, for a moment, the heat. I notice, instead, the sunlight, spread like melted butter on a biscuit. And the drone of millions of insects so low to the ground. And the way the mimosa leaves bounce in the heavy air. I stop to break off a stem of boneset and rub its oily stem between my fingers as I climb back out of the ditch. I wave to a neighbor in a white pick-up truck. If it turns out that this is the last day of summer, I am gathering it like a crop. I am harvesting every sound and scent, putting them up in Mason jars, storing them in the root cellar of my memory for the dark and cold days to come. I don’t know as I walk that I will forget to take down the flag. That I will leave it dangling through the night, collecting dew, and reflecting the light of the crescent moon, its curving stripes a protest against everything that ends. Copyright 2022

Most people assume that the A stands for Ann (or the more sophisticated Anne). It does not. It stands for Annette, my father’s older sister who was 22 when I was born and 63 when she died of emphysema. I was 40. There are a lot of things that make me think about Tooster (the family name given her by my toddler father who couldn’t say “Sister”). The way my family uses her name as a verb in describing someone who has reached her saturation point with foolishness and succumbs to the urge to say exactly what she thinks. Summer’s first hydrangea. Prednisone. I don’t know exactly when Tooster’s youthful habit of smoking first began manifesting itself in respiratory difficulties. I don’t know if those difficulties or, maybe, a comment from her beloved son Billy for whom the phrase “would do anything” is not the slightest exaggeration was the impetus to her quitting. I don’t know when the difficulties became full-fledged emphysema, but I know she fought that disease as hard as I’ve ever watched anyone fight anything. If you’ve ever observed someone laugh while dragging around an oxygen tank, you understand a little about how she approached the disease. In fact, that is pretty much how she approached life. There was absolutely nothing about which Tooster couldn’t laugh. I was in my 50s when the chronic allergy attacks with which I had suffered since my freshman year in college upon leaving the friendly pollen of Bulloch County for the not-so-friendly pollen of Macon (It’s amazing what a 30-foot difference in sea level can do to your breathing.) were joined by asthma and, as a result, introduced me to the world of steroids. By this time Tooster had been gone for over 10 years, but that first prescription label reading “prednisone” and the breathlessness that made it necessary prompted in me an appreciation I had before then been incapable of having. My entire life I’d heard stories about Grandma Nancy, Daddy’s grandmother, who died of asthma. For most of my life I’d known about Tooster’s struggles to breath. And now the third generation (Apparently, such things skip the men in our family.) of a clan that is generally incredibly healthy, was learning what it feels like to hear the wheeze and feel the weight of the struggle. Last week my menace showed its face again and again I ended up with a prescription for the corticosteroid (not the illegal anabolic kind) that, according to the Cleveland Clinic, decreases inflammation and reduces the immune system’s response. I always have two responses – I immediately feel better and I immediately start thinking about Tooster. Well, actually, I don’t just think about her; I talk to her. I tell her I’m sorry I didn’t know how hard it was for her to keep working, to keep mothering, to keep laughing. I tell her that I, as one does with age, appreciate the example she was for me without even knowing it. I tell her, because I stupidly never told her when she was alive, that I am grateful for my middle name. We use the word honor somewhat flippantly these days. We say we are honored to accept an invitation. We say we are honored to do a favor. We say we are honored to write a letter of recommendation, to be chosen for a team, to accept a job. I’ve done all those things, but none of them compares to the honor I’ve received in having the parents of two tiny little babies give those babies my name. I think of those babies – now a handsome and articulate 11-year-old whose mama used to work for me and a beautiful and creative 27-year-old whose parents I introduced to each other on the first day of law school – and I think of Tooster, all at the same time. I think of them and I see how we make and live out legacies. I think of them and I understand how time is always flowing in two different directions. I think of them and I take a single easy breath. Copyright 2022

The line of cars stretches all the way up the exit ramp. Bearing tags from Cobb and Cherokee, Fulton and Fayette, the cars are loaded down with suitcases and boxes and teenagers chomping at the bit for their first taste of freedom. They idle, then inch forward a few feet at a time, their occupants totally unaware that this is the pace of life. That, despite the adrenaline threatening to send them into a Tasmanian Devil whirl, they will not be able to make everything they want to happen happen within a day or, at most, a week. I know to watch carefully and, sure enough, at the last possible moment a small white sedan accelerates to dart across my lane and turn left toward adventure. “Go ahead,” I mutter. “You will learn soon enough how much you will have to depend upon the wisdom of the people you don’t know to get you safely and productively through the next four – or five or six – years.” It was August of 1974 when I made that turn, off a different interstate and toward a different college. I wore jeans and leather sandals and what we call a smock top, one Mama stitched on the Singer sewing machine whose hum had been the bass note of my childhood and the memory of which can still lull me to sleep on a summer night. The four of us – Mama, Daddy, my brother, me – set out from the farm that had so recently become our home as though this trip was just another ride to church or to visit my grandparents. As though everything about us would not be different at the end of the day when they returned without me. Watching the white sedan and the silver compact and the blue SUV pulling a U-Haul trailer, I couldn’t help remembering that 17-year-old. She stood on the sidewalk waving goodbye, calculating how long before the car would be out of sight under the canopy of oak trees and she could return to the room where the people in the car had deposited a trunk, a plastic milk carton of LPs, the portable record player on which to play them, and a couple of plants that Seventeen or Glamour or somebody had suggested would help make the room homey. She stood on that sidewalk, over which she would eventually take thousands of steps, confident that she was ready and certain of what she was there to do. She imagined that she would learn many things in college, but – to be honest – she thought it would probably be only a slightly more difficult level of memorization of facts and recitation of other people’s arguments. She figured the friends she would make – because, of course, she would make friends – would be very much like the friends she already had. She supposed she would hear opinions on politics and religion that were different from those with which she was comfortable and she was sure that she could consider them without any real danger to the truth as she already knew it. She had no idea. The memory makes me patient with the white sedan. I can slow down, I can refrain from blowing the horn, I can wave on the child inside to all the big moments awaiting him. I can do that because, despite the fact that my textbooks were actual books and my exams were taken on paper and the only telephone to which I had access was at the end of the hall, I understand everything he is feeling, everything everyone in all the white sedans and silver compacts and blue SUVs are feeling. And, because I am old now, I also understand everything the parents accompanying them are feeling. I learned a lot in college and I hope all those who have come to our town for their great adventure learn a lot, too. I hope they learn that stillness is just as important as activity. I hope they learn that knowing how to pay attention is essential to happiness. I hope they learn that beginnings and endings always overlap. And I hope – please, Lord! – that they learn how to drive. Copyright 2022

The last daylight had just oozed from the sky when the rain started. About twenty minutes later, the satellite stream on the television broke up and another ten found us, me and Owen, in complete darkness. And silence. It’s amazing how much noise electricity makes. I lit a few candles and got into bed. I did not close the blinds (What was the point?) and lay there for the next hour staring out the window at the cotton field, lit as though by a strobe light, erratic flashes followed by utter darkness. The thunder rumbled deeper than usual, like the roar of a dragon being awakened from a centuries-long sleep. I’ve never known whether you really can measure the location of lightning by counting seconds between the strike and the sound of thunder, but that does not mean that I don’t count. I do. But this time I didn’t. This time I welcomed the nearness of nature’s reminder that I am in control of nothing. Sometime after dozing off in the warm darkness, I was awakened by the familiar buzz and click of electricity’s restoration. I blew out the candles, turned out the lights, and went back to sleep, imagining the damage that would greet me in the morning. I’ve lived on this square of dirt for 37 years. I’ve picked up after hurricanes and tornadoes and an ice storm that left us without power for five days.. I’ve watched ordinary summer storms march across the fields like a parading platoon and leaving deep ditches across the rows. I’ve seen, from this vantage point, every of possible combination of precipitation and wind and the one thing they have in common is that they always leave a mark. Be it puddles deep enough to soak the axle of a pick-up truck or limbs the size of a grown man’s thigh, a couple of fertilizer buckets of leaves clogging a gutter or rocking chairs standing on their heads in the shrubs, or, most difficult, a 50-foot pine tree broken at its roots and blocking the road, there is always damage. This storm, this two-hour light show that took out the power and emptied over an inch of rain on thirsty ground, would be no different. Except it was. I walked outside the next morning to survey the damage. I couldn’t find any. Not one branch littered the yard. Not one piece of furniture lay on its side. Not one bird feeder had been slung from its perch. Not one. The storm came, showed off, and demonstrated its power, all without leaving a trail of destruction or, even, disarray I stood in the sunshine staring at everything I could not see, everything that didn’t happen. Except for the damp squishiness of the grass and the jauntiness of the cotton plants – newly blooming all pink and white and rose – , one would never have known that there had been a storm. But there had been. I saw it, heard it, felt it, and, unwisely, judged it by every other storm I’ve ever seen or heard or felt. There’s a sermon there. And despite the fact that it feels as though I’ve arrived just in time for the benediction, I got the message. Copyright 2022

The morning after the night when the rain on the metal roof woke me from a semi-solid sleep, I got up to find a limb dangling from within the sycamore tree that stretches across a significant portion of my backyard. Not much to notice, really. Sycamore trees, at least in my experience, are particularly susceptible to wind and rain, their tender branches, like hearts, are easily broken. But there was something jarring about the image framed by the windows in my bedroom. It was a “what’s wrong with this picture” puzzle and I couldn’t tell, at first, what that something was. I dismissed the thought and made a note to get outside before it got too hot and drag the limb away. Later, after it had gotten too hot – because these days anytime after seven in the morning is too hot – , I went outside. The limb was probably eight to ten feet long and was hanging with its amputation pointed up and the attached branches and leaves pointing toward the ground as though it was a spear tossed from the sky. I walked around and around the grass-bare circle under the tree, searching for the place from which the spear had broken and found nothing. Perplexed and wondering just how bad my eyesight had become that I could not see the large empty spot in the foliage that had to exist as a result of the limb’s breaking, the puzzle solution came to me: All the leaves on the limb were completely, crackly brown. The broken limb did not belong to my tree. It had been severed from some other tree, at least four or five days earlier. If that was the case (And it did seem to be the only solution.), from whence had it come? And what in the world had it looked like flying through the night like a missile? I managed to wrest the limb from the live ones cradling it, realizing only after I’d begun pulling and twisting how heavy it was, and, when it was finally free, left it lying in repose in the bright sunshine and devilish heat that would soon drain it of any remaining moisture and make it easier to drag away. It is still there, the alternating waves of extreme heat and sporadic rain standing in the way of any attempts at removal. Whenever I glance out the window or walk outside to water the hydrangeas or fill Owen’s water dish, I’m confronted with the mystery. I’d like to know the whole story. But at the same time I don’t want to know. Like the recently destroyed Guidestones in Elberton, the creation of a myth (or several) around its origin and the manner in which it found its way to me has been a fun occupation. And the questions to which it has given rise have, even unanswered, anchored me yet again in the knowledge that Nature is not erratic or chaotic, is anything but disorderly. Hurricanes and tornadoes, floods and droughts, wildfires and melting glaciers have consistent and predictable patterns and designs, even if sometimes they are too long, too broad, too mystical to see. I am grateful that the limb didn’t hit the house in its flight through the darkness. I am equally grateful – perhaps even moreso – that the limb came, silently and invisibly, with its reminder that I am small and I live in a universe big enough to include both my flying tree and galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. Copyright 2022