Search Results

It has been, by my best calculation, at least twenty years that I've been choosing a word (or, on occasion, more than one) to be my focus for the year. A young friend of mine pointed out to me the other day that choosing a word for the year has become "a thing" and that she gives me credit for starting the whole trend. I'm flattered, Madeline. The first year there were two: flexibility and spontaneity, two behaviors that anyone who knew me at the time would not, for one minute, have associated with me. Turns out that giving myself a reach that vastly exceeded my grasp was indeed a challenge, but at the close of the year I was infinitely more flexible (even if by necessity) and vastly more spontaneous. In the intervening years I've adopted everything from serenity to risk, simplicity to release. Year before last, I gave myself five short phrases: Kneel more. Sing more. Rock more. Empty more. Stretch more. Last year, I started out with: Slow. Deep. Wide. Which became: Slow feet. Deep breaths. Wide arms. After several days in the week between Christmas and New Year's in which I kept seeing, hearing, sensing a single word, I made up my mind. "Still" would become word of 2022. Funny thing, though, I realized upon contemplation: It has multiple meanings (1. Still[adjective]]: not moving or making a sound; 2. Still [adverb]: up to and including the present or the time; nevertheless.), both of which sound like something worth contemplating over 365 days. But then, as though my imagination was in the mood for mischief, I thought of a third common meaning: Still (noun): apparatus used in distillation. And the question that came to me, that has stayed with me, is: What is brewing? What is being made? What is being purified down to its essence in me this year? I've told a number of folks that the day my Medicare card came in the mail, I stared at it for the longest time wondering, "How did this happen?" I knew, of course, how it had happened. It happened because I was born in an era with vaccines and antibiotics. It happened because I ate lots of good food and got enough exercise and wore my seatbelt. It happened because I did not intentionally abuse my body and because I have good genes. It happened because, as a result of a combination of things over which I have had limited control, I was lucky enough to live to 65, an age that lots of people never reach. John F. Kennedy, Princess Diana, John Lennon. My friend Jim, my aunt Tooster, my cousin Donna. It happened and I am grateful. Grateful enough to believe that there is a reason. Grateful enough to believe that while I learn to live still as adjective and adverb, I can also learn to live it as noun. And in the living let something fine and pure be born in me. Copyright 2022

I recognize her immediately. I am certain that she has recognized me. We make brief eye contact and keep walking, in opposite directions. I am following my rule – a rule she can’t possibly know, of course – that when I run into people I know only from court, people whose deepest secrets and most painful wounds have been laid open in front of strangers, I do not speak first. I wait for them. Wait for them to decide if they want to admit, even in the vaguest possible way, that they know me. I am in Walmart and it is the week before Christmas and I have checked my attitude at the door. I will not take loud breaths while waiting for the family of six blocking the entire aisle to choose among the cheaply scented candles. I will not turn my buggy on two wheels to maneuver around the gray-haired couple hunched over the crock pot display. I will not say too loudly, “Excuse me,” as I reach over the shoulder of the oblivious phone-fixated teenager standing in front of the strawberries. I’ve have tracked and backtracked across the entire store when I see her again. This time she stops. “You’re Miss Bradley, aren’t you?” I nod. “I thought that was you.” “I recognized you, too,” I say and proceed to explain the rule. “I wanted to let you decide if you wanted to say anything.” She nods. “You remember my boys, right?” Of course, I remember her boys. Distracted, rudderless, fatherless boys who showed up on my court calendar – one or the other or sometimes both – for increasingly serious offenses over a period of about 3 years. Tall and blond, like their mother, with bony shoulders curved into permanent question marks. Charged with felony-level offenses, they regularly shuffled into court in leg irons and handcuffs. She, their mother, was always there. Every single time. “They’re both in prison now,” she offers. “You want to see pictures?” She pulls out her phone: one photo of a skinny young man in prison garb holding a mop, one of a face covered in jailhouse tattoos, including two horns at the top of his forehead. She explains that the tattooed son is currently charged with murdering another inmate. “But he’s got a good lawyer,” she says. We bid each other adieus of some sort and walk away in opposite directions, me toward a house filled with festive food and bright lights and four generations of family, her toward a lonely, slow waiting for the next visitation day. The boys are, she has reminded me, still her babies and she loves them “no matter what they done.” I push my buggy toward the self-checkout. I pay for my toothpaste and cheese and two kinds of chips. I move through the next few days – holidays, holy days – joyfully and gratefully but always with her and her boys hovering in my peripheral vision. They will not be denied a place in my Christmas. They are the reminder that if the incarnation means anything, if God really is with us, if he came to smelly shepherds and frightened teenagers and old men who believed in magic, then he also came to all the heartbroken mothers and imprisoned sons, to all those who loiter around the edges and huddle in the dark. They are the reminder that, even with all my pious attitude-checking and pretentious rule-following, he came to me. Let heaven and nature sing! Copyright 2021

[On each Sunday in Advent this year, I am sharing some of my favorite Christmas columns from the past 25 years. This is the fourth and final .] Right about now, “How ya’ doin’?” becomes “You ready for Christmas?” and my voice catches in my throat because, let’s be honest, I never am. The Christmas letter that has come to be expected could be written, reproduced, and mailed (It has been.). The tree could be decorated within an inch of its artificial life (It is.). The gifts could all be bought (Not quite.) and wrapped with tasteful paper and wired ribbon (I can only hope.). The refrigerator and pantry could be filled to brimming with multiple units of cream cheese and condensed milk and pecans cracked and shelled by the hands of loving parents (Praise the Lord.) and I still would not be ready. Ready means preparedness and wholeness and availability. Ready implies fitness and qualification like an Army Ranger or a Navy Seal. Ready infers that I am somehow worthy to enter this holiest of seasons. No amount of wired ribbon or condensed milk, no number of empty stocking contributions, no measure of time spent reading Guidepost devotions can do that. I will ever stand at the edge of the stable wondering when one of the wise men is going to turn suddenly from his adoration of the baby and point me out as a fraud. This is what I am thinking when some unsuspecting soul smiles at me in the Walmart check-out lane and asks, “You ready for Christmas?” A few days ago, in the corner of a quiet coffee shop, at a table whose wooden top was scratched and watermarked, a friend and I bent our heads together in voices just above a whisper to talk about that, to confess what it feels like to not be ready for Christmas. “The season got here so quickly,” she sad. “Thanksgiving was hardly over before the first Sunday in Advent appeared.” It has nothing to do with shopping or cooking or decorating, we agreed, but everything to do with stilling one’s brain and filtering out the noise long enough to consider what it is we are supposed to be celebrating. That is the difficulty. The stilling, the quieting, the letting go of the ill-considered notion that what I do, accomplish, carry out has some impact upon the coming of Christmas, the coming of the Christ child into the world, the coming of the Christ into me. I have been watching the moon these last few nights, watching it swell into a consummate curve like a pregnant belly nine-months stretched. I have watched it, wondering with each rise over the edge of the darkening landscape, when it will be the perfect circle. It is a slow process, this coming of the full moon. It will not be hurried. It will not be slowed. It does not respond to my longing, my urging, my pressing. I think of my friends whose first baby, a girl, is due to arrive any day now. They’d been told by the people who are supposed to know such things that she would be here before Christmas. Those people had even suggested that they could make her come on a specific day, but consultation with baby Ella set them straight. She, too, will not be hurried. Nor will she be slowed. She is not withholding her arrival while her family gets ready. She knows that ready is what her family will become at the very moment they see her face, hear her cry, grasp her hand. That is the answer. Ready is not something we make ourselves. Ready is something we become by virtue of that for which we long. The moon will wax full, the baby will be born, Christmas will come. Copyright 2013, 2021

AJ is two-and-a-half. She and I spent about an hour the other day wandering around a mall in Atlanta. She strode purposefully -- dodging shoppers and strollers and the choo choo train of which she was not at all fond –, walked like she owned the place, exuding a confidence that made me envious. She paused regularly to identify colors and then raise her chubby little hand for a high-five. At one point she stopped, pointed her index finger at her eyes, which involuntarily closed, and said, “AJ eyes blue.” When I asked what color my eyes are, she replied. “Kap eyes green.” It was (though I don’t have to tell it to anyone who has ever experienced it) the most fun I've had in a while. It's amazing what a cute toddler who just happens to share some of your own DNA can do to your mood, even when the tree is not yet decorated and the cards are not yet sent. In addition to knowing all her colors, AJ knows all the letters of the alphabet. When she got tired of red and yellow and purple, she began calling out letters. “K...A...Y...,” she announced as we stood outside the jewelry store. “E...D...G...E...,”when we passed a clothing store of which I’d never heard. Outside GameStop, she encountered serifs for the first time. “G... what dat letter?...M...E...S... what dat letter? ...O...P.” And every single time, the last letter barely out of her mouth, she turned to look up at me and ask, “What dat say, Kap?” Tonight, with the tree finally decorated and the Christmas cards finally addressed and stamped, I walked outside to look at the sky. The moon, half brightly lit and half in dull shadow, had made its way to a spot directly overhead. Scattered in the eastern sky, a handful of stars flickered, four of them making a curved line like the blade of a scimitar. I stared like AJ looking at the curve on the bottom of the “t.” Humans began identifying patterns in the night sky centuries ago and from those patterns we created shapes. Bull and bear, goat and lion, ladles large and small. Images not tied to language or location, images not diminished by politics or viruses, images big enough to welcome the two-and-a-half-year-old in all of us because when we stare into the darkness we want to see something we recognize and we want to know what it says. In that sense, Christmas is a constellation – each shiny ornament, each woodsy wreath, each evocation of shepherds and magi, a pinpoint of light that we recognize as telling us something about ourselves. Each tired carol, each bedraggled bow, each hastily wrapped gift a flickering star connected to all the others in a shape that reflects our deepest desires, hears our questions, tells our stories, and illuminates the world. “What dat say, Kap?” It says, dear AJ, that no matter how hard the year has been, how conflicted we are about the year to come, we can stride into Christmas like we own it. Because we do. Copyright 2021

[On each Sunday in Advent this year, I am sharing some of my favorite Christmas columns from the past 25 years. This is the third of four.] The night falls fast. Like a proscenium curtain – heavy, velvet – loosed from its restraining ropes and tumbling to the floor of the stage. Just moments ago there was still a thin line of neon orange trembling along the horizon. Not now. Now it is hard dark. On the other side of the sky, as though its rising forced the orange line to sink, is the full moon. In the presence of wispy clouds it looks as though it is shivering, as I am, in the cold. Just a little shiver. A little chill. A little like Christmas. I have visitors tonight. Adam and Jackson are silhouettes in the spill of light, hands in pockets, booted feet spread wide. I have become accustomed to the invisible fingers that grab my throat every time I see them like this, every time I have to blink at least twice to remember that the man, not the boy, is my boy. Jackson and his sister and their cousin are the great delights of my life, this strange season of my life I’ve yet to understand, but there remains a deep poignance to the memories of their father, their mother as children. Especially at Christmas. And it is moments like these – not the twinkling light moments, the tinkling glass moments, the jingling and mingling moments – that feel most like Christmas. The minor chord moments, sad and plaintive, a little out of tune, are the ones that draw me toward the manger with its overwhelmed teenagers and astonished shepherds. Inside, where the only decoration is an advent wreath with cattywampus candles, Jackson proclaims that he and I can get the tree from the shed. That we don’t need the help of his dad, the heft of the big-tired, extended cab pick-up truck. Armed against the night and what might be roaming armadillos with nothing but a flashlight, we shuffle across the wet grass. “Whoa!” he exclaims when he sees the boxes of ornaments stacked on plastic shelves. “You’ve got a lot of decorations!” “Yep,” I tell him, “but first the tree.” The artificial pine comes apart easily. Jackson hoists the top two sections over his head like the Stanley Cup and starts toward the house; I follow with the fatter bottom third, the flashlight swinging, throwing weak shards of light through the bare tree branches, guiding this boy, who is also mine. The tree goes up, the lights come on. We carefully hang the ornaments. Jackson picks his favorite – a blown-glass nautilus shell studded with glitter and rhinestones. He gasps when I show him one that is 45 years old. To hang the star, he climbs my highest stool and leans in as far as he can. My job is to hold him steady. He climbs down with a big smile and a bigger sense of accomplishment. I feel it moving through me, the minor chord progression to major. Even now the manger is expanding to make room for exultant angels and extravagant magi. Even, I pray, in a few days, me. Copyright 2019, 2021

[On each Sunday in Advent this year, I am sharing some of my favorite Christmas columns from the past 25 years. This is the second of four.] It is the season of wonder, after all. And, so, I have been wondering. Wondering how long it takes to decorate that huge tree at Rockefeller Center. Wondering how a person is supposed to learn all four verses of any particular Christmas carol now that school music programs are “holiday” performances. Wondering how our little planet looks from the satellite that takes the photos for Google Earth when all the houses in all the cities and towns across America have their Christmas lights turned on. But mostly I’ve been wondering who I am in this year’s Christmas play. One year I got to be an angel, but that was only because there were only two blonde girls in our Sunday School class and the script called for three. I don’t remember ever getting to be Mary, gazing beatifically at the baby doll wrapped in a flannel blanket and lying in a what somebody thought looked like a manger filled with a variety of hay that would never have existed in Bethlehem. (Directors, even when they are elementary school teachers, tend to type-cast and meek and mild has never been my strength.) Usually, I was the narrator, the one with the words. Which makes it interesting that this year the character I’m feeling an awful lot like is Zechariah. Pious and proper, wise and mature, he’s the one who couldn’t bring himself to believe in a miracle and got struck speechless as a result. Maybe it’s just because I’m tired. Lots of time on the road, away from home, and the negotiation of more traffic and social conventions that I’d like is a slow but steady drain. Maybe it’s because, in the last few weeks, a lot of people whose mortality I’d managed to ignore have become seriously ill or died. Nothing like a thinning of the generational cushion between oneself and ultimate vulnerability to give one pause. Or, maybe, like Zechariah, it’s because I’ve been paying too much attention to the acting and not enough to the experiencing. Put on the priestly robes. Check. Walk respectfully into the sanctuary. Check. Light the incense. Check. Get out of there and go home. Mail the Christmas letter. Check. Hang the wreath on the front door. Check. Get the gifts bought and wrapped and delivered and the parties attended and the hostesses thanked and ... Poor Zechariah. Doing exactly what he is supposed to do. Following all the rules. And he gets interrupted by an angel who offers him a miracle. But, because it doesn’t fit into what he knows, what he expects, what everybody waiting in the temple courtyard knows and expects, he doubts and, because he doubts, his ability to tell the story is taken away. Poor me. Doing exactly what I am supposed to do. Following all the rules. Have I been interrupted by the offer of a miracle and doubted? Is that why I’m feeling speechless in this holiest of seasons? Like most miracle tales, Zechariah’s doesn’t end in silence, but in cries of joy and shouts of laughter. The angel’s promise materializes. An impossible thing is made real. And, finally, Zechariah gets to tell his story. A story made better by the building tension of imposed silence. A story made more compelling by the passage of time. A story made timeless by the knitting of skeptical and miraculous, human and divine, earth and sky. This year I am Zechariah. I am lighting the incense and listening for the whisper of an angel. And I will be silent until the time for telling the story comes. Copyright 2012, 2021

I am wandering around my backyard which is covered in leaves. Narrow oak leaves with edges like the teeth of a bread knife, coffee brown from almost the moment they loose themselves from the tree, overlap with wide veiny sycamore leaves that fade slowly from flamboyant chartreuse to mottled gold to mahogany. The rattle of the dead leaves beneath my feet sound, in one moment, like bones breaking and, in the next, like a covey of quail lifting from the broomsedge. As the afternoon chill begins to find its way into my bones I head back toward the warmth of the house, stopping abruptly when I notice an especially large sycamore leaf that has parachuted onto the back steps. It delicately straddles green and gold and, in the act of picking it up, I realize just how large it is – my splayed hand covers only about half of it. There were some people at my house not many days ago, people who had never been there before, and they took note of the trinkets lying around – the iron pins from the Glennville-Register Railroad that once ran through our farm, the feathers stuck in vases and the nests tucked into bowls. I told them what I always tell people who are not quite sure what to make of my collections: “I’m like a child,” I say. “I bring things in from outside.” Thus, the sycamore leaf comes inside. Over the next few days I watch its color fade, its edges curl. It is no longer bigger than my hand. This week marks the first anniversary of my mother’s death. Even as I move through ordinary moments like making stock from last week’s turkey, putting away the pumpkins, and ordering my Christmas cards, I am aware of its approach, so it is really no surprise when I find myself staring at the leaf and thinking of Mama. Over the last years of her life, her color faded and her world began to curl in on itself. The arms that opened in embrace of everyone, especially children, drew inward, as though she thought she could hold herself together in the wake of the disease that was stealing all she knew of the world. It was enough, at times, to make me question much of what I knew about reaping and sowing. This week also marks the beginning of Advent and I realize that for the rest of my life the celebration of the one, the first Sunday in Advent, will be joined to the observation of the other, my mother’s death. Yet another conundrum in my feeble attempt to live out a religion built on paradox: the last coming in first, the meek inheriting the earth, God taking on the limitations of humanity to demonstrate his love. On Sunday night I sit down to light the first candle on the Advent wreath. I open the old hymnal to “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and sing to no one but myself its plaintive words in its minor key. This night, more than ever before, its tone fits my mood. And, then, as though my captive self has actually been ransomed, I am remembering the way that Mama would, at totally unexpected moments, burst out singing, the way she would reach up and smooth Daddy’s hair into place, and the way she talked to the dogs as though they were human. I remember how funny she was without ever meaning to be and how she could never stay mad for long. I remember how she taught me everything I would ever need to know about how to love myself and other people and the world. In the light of that moment, the paradox suddenly becomes less paradoxical and the odd proximity makes sense: In one hand we hold death and sorrow and despair. In the other we hold life and celebration and hope. And in the liminal space in between, the space that is the heart, we hold the only bridge between the two and that is love. Copyright 2021

[During the season of Advent, I will be sharing four of my favorite Christmas columns from the past 25 years.] The season is upon us. Advent. Preparation. It is time to cut the tree, dust off the ornaments and make the lists. Time to check the calendar and sign the cards and wrap the gifts. Time to stand in line and stop in traffic. Time to get it all done in time. Christians have been observing Advent since sometime around the fourth century. My own observance is a relatively new one. I am still burning the original purple and rose candles that came with the wreath that now sits in the middle of my kitchen table. The sun will soon disappear behind the pine trees at the edge of the farm. The silvery gray of late autumn will settle over Sandhill like a blanket and nighttime will begin its predictable creep over the landscape, into my thoughts. I am wondering why I am doing this. What difference it can possibly make. I pull out a chair and, spurred by what is quite possibly nothing more than guilt, promise myself that this year I will be diligent. I will not get too busy to light each candle in its turn. I will -- on the first and second and third and fourth Sundays of Advent -- calm myself, still myself, give myself the time to reflect. Holding the match over the matchbox, I look at the unlit candles. The wicks are black and brittle. Lines of dripping wax have marred their colors with uneven streaks. One tilts just a bit to the side despite my best efforts to straighten it. They remind me that – despite the frivolity and gaiety, the bells and carols, the good-will and neighborliness in which we cloak ourselves this time of year – it was not into a world of light that the Messiah came, but a world of darkness. Every day brought the drudgery of political oppression, religious persecution and economic despair. The past was a sad indictment of the Jews’ failure as a people. The future promised nothing but more of the same. For four thousand years they had been waiting. In darkness. The words they rehearsed in their children’s ears had become dull in the repetition. The memorials of stone they had built had been lost in the years of wind and rain and neglect. Did anyone still believe? Could anyone still believe? And at that moment, into the silence came the voice of an angel. A divine herald, a prophetic courier with words of promise and hope, a message to the world that what is now is not what will always be. A message for all the world. But the only one who heard it, the single soul with whom Gabriel shared the news was one simple girl. No one else. Not the High Priest or the commander of the occupying army. Not the ruling governor or a learned scribe. Just a simple girl with a wild imagination. Wild enough to stay there and listen to the messenger angel call her things like “highly favored” and “blessed.” Wild enough to listen to him tell her she was going to be the mother of the long-awaited nearly-forgotten Messiah. Wild enough to believe. Twenty-first century Americans aren’t all that different from first century Palestinians, I think. I am no different. I, we struggle with our past failures, wrestle with current crises, worry about a future we can’t predict. What will it take for us – for me – to see through the darkness? Only one thing. The same thing it took for Mary. Call it a wild imagination or call it faith. Either way, it requires eyes that see the invisible. Ears that hear something in the silence. Hands that extend in the direction of the irrational, the impossible, the unthinkable. I pause, breathe deeply, strike the match. I light the first candle. The flame leaps up, flickers, steadies itself. Across the room the small light reappears, a reflection in the window. The solitary candle becomes two and in the window beside it three and then four. The candle of hope. Hope that the darkness will not always envelop the earth. Hope that the promise will be fulfilled. Hope that each heart that still listens will echo the whispered assent of the simple girl: Be it done unto me according to thy word. Amen. Copyright 1995, 2021

H enry James, who lived in New England where they have four distinct seasons and the highest temperature they ever get is around 80 degrees, once said, “Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language." Obviously, Henry James never had pound cake. I can not say – or type – “pound cake” without seeing a rolling montage of Thanksgiving dinners, baby showers, .birthday parties, funeral meals, and class reunions at all of which the lowly pound cake reigned over every other delicacy of whatever kind. Dense and slightly sweet, and, if baked correctly, golden brown with narrow fissures breaking across its domed top, pound cake is the quintessential Southern dessert. It may well be the metric by which a Southern cook is measured. Many years ago, Katherine and I convinced Grannie to let us enter her pound cake in the Homemaking Exhibit at the Kiwanis Ogeechee Fair. After numerous protestations that her cake couldn’t win any contests, that it probably “wouldn’t be fittin’ to eat,”, and that she was only agreeing to do it because she loved us so much, she made the cake and, in keeping with the fair rules, wrote out the recipe she knew by heart on a 3"x5" index card. Katherine and I delivered the cake and recipe card to the Homemaking Pavilion on Sunday afternoon and on Monday night we could hardly wait to get to the Fairground where we found a shiny blue ribbon hanging over Grannie’s cake. That year for Christmas we had the blue ribbon and the recipe card framed. It hung on Grannie’s kitchen wall until Alzheimer’s took away her ability to live alone. After Grannie died and her daughters were going through her things, Aunt Linda called to tell me that the blue ribbon was mine. I hung it on my own kitchen wall and looked at it daily, remembering the veiny hands and knotted fingers as they moved slowly over that index card. One Saturday morning I decided to make Grannie’s pound cake. I’d never made one (But, then, I’d never made much of anything else at that point.) and I couldn’t say with any certainty what possessed me to try that day. I took the recipe down and gathered from my pantry and refrigerator all the necessary ingredients, noting the special instructions about adding the eggs one at a time and alternating wet and dry ingredients to make the batter. It was at that moment that I realized the rest of the recipe was on the back of the card and, of course, invisible. The panic was quick and thick. I imagined myself pouring out the batter and never mentioning to a living soul that I had attempted such an arduous task. But then I had a thought: Aunt Linda would know what came next. So, I called. No one answered. Fortunately, Aunt Cookie did. She walked me slowly through the pan preparation and the batter pouring and the actual baking of the pound cake and I felt that I would die from gratitude. I took a big chunk of pound cake to church the next morning, a gift to Cookie for coming through for me. I left it in the car and the aluminum foil was warm when I handed it over to her. “Please,” I urged, “let me know what you think about it.” A few hours later she called, proclaiming, “It was delicious!” I was simultaneously relieved and proud. And, then, she added, “It tasted just like Mama’s.” The five most beautiful words in the English language. Copyright 2021

First grade, then second, all the way through fifth was, quite simply, one day of amazement after another. The low, flat mid-20th century architecture that was Mattie Lively Elementary School presented not a clue to the casual observer that within its red brick walls astonishment turned to wonder, magic conjured by nothing more extraordinary than chalkboards and tempera paint and construction paper. Most mesmerizing of all were the science documentaries in which time lapse photography was utilized to demonstrate how the moon moved across the sky, how tadpoles turned into frogs, how a bud became a rose. In the necessary darkness, my slack-jawed marveling went unnoticed. Leaning forward so far as to almost touch the head of the classmate in front of me, I believed if I stared hard enough, held my eyes open without blinking that I could identify the very moment of metamorphosis. The moment when what was became what is. To be honest, I could not have articulated that at 8 or 9. But, then, I didn’t need to. It was enough to feel it. The weather today was especially balmy for early November. The sky was Crayola cornflower blue and it was warm enough that I had to change from long sleeves. The breeze was just substantial enough to ruffle the leaves still dangling on the trees, but the landscape was, otherwise, quiet and still. Leaving the stands of pine trees behind as I walked, I heard a popping sound, syncopated and soft. Acorns, I realized, were falling. Into the dusty red clay, they bounced like balls, landing haphazardly in piles or rolling into seclusion as if acorns can be introverts. Some had been crushed by wide truck tires, spreading their pumpkin-colored insides across the road like Rorschach inkblots. Yesterday they were not falling. Yesterday they were dangling from the scrub oaks that line the road, bright green ball bearings wearing jaunty berets. And yesterday they were not a time machine carrying me back to childhood and dim classrooms where I first learned to stare at things that are alive, that morph from one stage to another imperceptibly. I stopped and stared. I had questions. At what moment did they start letting go? Was it sometime in the night when the temperature dropped? Did they shiver and lose their grasp? Was it this morning as the sun began drying up the dew? Did their stems release them like a hot pot handle? The answers afforded us by falling acorns and budding roses are not always satisfactory. They tell us that clear lines – a sure before and a fixed after – are not always knowable. Which stitch transforms a skein of yarn into a sweater. Which brick makes a wall. Which word, which touch, which smile turns a friend into a lover. Falling acorns and budding roses are here, it seems, to remind us that life, not just elementary school, is meant to be one day of amazement after another. They teach us, often in the dimness where shapes are smudged and sounds are muffled, that we would do well to lay aside our stop watches and simply watch. Copyright 2021

It was pure serendipity. That a meeting would actually be held in person, rather than via ZOOM, was the first indication of magic. That that meeting would be held in Statesboro, just minutes up the road from Sandhill, and that my friend Lea would be one of the attendees was the second. The final sign, the abracadabra-point-the-wand-in-my-direction sign, was that this meeting, this in-person meeting, would be held the week of my birthday. And not just any birthday. The big birthday. The one for which the government sent me, months in advance, that brand new red, white, and blue card that announces to all the world, especially medical personnel everywhere, that I am old. The one for which I would be very grateful to experience some magic. Lea and I have known each other for over twenty years. We’ve known each other long enough that we can invite ourselves to spend the night at each others’ homes. Enough to know that the self-invitation will always be greeted with a “Yes! When will you be here?” And, since between the two of us there have been 40 birthdays, enough to learn the exact kind of celebration that produces wide smiles and deep sighs of gratitude. I could not wait for her to get to Sandhill. She arrived with a smile that lit up the backyard, with a pat on the head for Owen, and with stories, lots of stories. She also brought birthday gifts including a small ivory hand-thrown pottery planter with shallow bumps along the rim that felt like Braille, like words in a language I did not know but wanted – no, not just wanted, but needed – to learn. We went to supper at one of my favorite restaurants – magically open because I thought they were closed on Mondays. We sat outside and let the conversation of the other diners, the clink of silverware, and the sound of the traffic merge into an incantation for peace and well-being. We talked and talked and talked until I understood why we use the phrase “catching up” for describing conversation between people who have not been together in a while, until I knew we were traveling abreast of each other, moving at the same pace and seeing the same things, at least for one night. Back at Sandhill, after we’d walked outside to see where I’d hung her Christmas present from last year, the sign made of driftwood and shells that says Home, and to watch for a few minutes the clouds backlit by the moon, Lea said, “Years ago – I think it must have been for a big birthday. – I texted you to wish you a happy birthday and you responded with, ‘The view from here is beautiful.’ At first, I thought you were talking about the age, the place you were in life. And I thought about what a great thing that was to say, to feel. “And, then, I realized you were talking about where you were physically. That you were standing on a balcony looking out at the ocean and the moon.” We both laughed. I remembered that birthday. Remembered it well. Remembered standing on that balcony alone and watching the moon tremble as though it, too, was afraid of what came next. I would have called the view from where I stood hard. I would have called it disappointing. I would have called it unclear and scary. I would not have called it beautiful. In retrospect, though, I would . And I do. I have lost enough, gained enough, seen enough in the ensuing fifteen years to understand that the view from every birthday is beautiful. That standing on a balcony with the vastest of the ocean at my feet, that waking to sunshine over a field of cotton wet with dew, that simply breathing and walking around is enough. Copyright 2021

It was October. The first Monday. It was damp and cold and my Girl Scout uniform was not nearly warm enough, not even with the matching sweater. My beret was bobby-pinned on or it would have flown off in the wind. Marching bands stood tuning up and tractors sat idling as the crepe paper streamers on the floats they would pull fluttered in the building breeze. Tiny ballerinas shivered even as their mamas shoved their arms into jackets that would cover their pale pink leotards. Politicians poised on the backs of convertibles, floor room shiny and driven by men in white shirts and ties. Horses whinnied with impatience. Marching in the Fair Parade was no small thing in those days and so it didn’t matter that I was freezing, that my eyes were watering. I trembled from both the cold and the anticipation. There was also a little fear that I would falter in the very important task of carrying the flag. There were no flag holsters in those days, so I would have to carry its entire weight – held against my right hip, right hand over left hand on the staff – the entire mile and a half of the parade route. Past the First Baptist Church and the Courthouse and Piggly Wiggly and the library. Past the cheering spectators filling the sidewalks, classmates and family and people who worked in the stores where Mama and I bought shoes and fabric and notions. Past my entire world. And then a man from the Kiwanis Club was waving us out into the street. I lifted the flag, tucked the staff against my side, and joined the parade. The parade ended in what some of us, after all these years, still call the Rose’s parking lot. The floats, engineered by people with no knowledge of engineering, were looking a little ragged. The fake columns leaned precariously and the beauty queens (who had naively used those columns to steady themselves as they bounced down Main Street) tottered dangerously on their high heels as they reached for solid ground. The politicians’ broad smiles had worn off completely and the ballerinas were whining. It is always odd that when I think about the parade (And I have been thinking about it for 50 years.). I don’t remember the parade proper. Except for the vague recollection of my family’s voices calling out to me from somewhere around the old post office, the images that resurface every year about this time are always the before and after. Like those juxtaposed photos in women’s magazines (or, more accurately these days, on social media), there is no record, no evidence of the period in-between, the moments after the before and before the after. It saddens me. But should it? Can a 12-year-old know anything about paying attention to the moment? Can a girl on the edge of adolescence know anything about how quickly time passes, how soon now becomes then? Can I, with all the benefit of what we call experience, predetermine what I will remember? Can any of us? That we remember at all, that somehow our brains enable us to retrieve sights and sounds and smells on demand, as well as to be suddenly attacked by them from behind, is nothing short of a miracle, is nothing less than absolute magic. The parking lot emptied out. My wrists ached from the weight of the flag. When we got home Mama gave me aspirin and put me to bed. Copyright 2021

It was Monday night. It was the first game of the three game series against the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Braves had managed to win only one game of a three-game series against the San Francisco Giants and had seen their lead in the National League East dwindle to one paltry game. If it wasn't what the manager calls a must-win, it was pretty close. The Diamondbacks led 3-2 going into the top of the 5th inning and, then, as magic tends to happen, the Braves started getting hits. Not just hits, doubles. One right after the other. And then there was a home run that went nearly 500 feet. At the end of the inning the Braves led 9-3. Not much happened over the next three innings and by the top of the ninth, most of the Diamondback fans had departed, leaving only Braves fans, of which there was an unusual number, in the bleachers at Chase Field. The cameraman panned the crowd to land on one of baseball’s archetypal images: a father and son cheering on their team which, in this case, was the Braves. The little boy had a full face, a short haircut, and a body that still bore the softness of childhood. The little boy was standing close to his father and his forearm pumped repetitively even as his face, his tired little face, reflected no animation. He could have been the only one in the stadium doing the tomahawk chop, but it would not have mattered. He was locked in. The camera stalled and stayed on the little boy as Chip Caray noted, “Look at that little fellow. He’s still chopping. Bless his heart.” And with that, I burst into tears. I have found, over the years, that my tears are not always predictable or even appropriate. I have cried on meeting newborn babies for the first time and on viewing television commercials during the Olympic Games. I have shed tears over the deaths of people I loved and of imaginary people in books. I have cried in joy and in anger, in empathy and in frustration, in awe and in exhaustion. But, before now, I have never cried over a little boy doing the tomahawk chop in Phoenix. After catching my breath and wiping my eyes, it felt important to figure out why I’d found myself weeping. I realized, after eliminating fatigue and hunger and loneliness as possible triggers, that I hadn’t been crying for the little boy, but for myself. I have been the fan who stood cheering long after it made any difference at all. I have been the one to refuse to leave early, clinging to the truth that, as Yogi Berra said during the pennant race of 1973, “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over.” I have been the one in the near-empty stadium chopping, chopping, chopping, wedded to the ridiculous idea that my arm would make the difference. It’s funny the power we think we have, the power we long to have. The Braves won by a final score of 11-4. The little boy and his chopping had nothing to do with it, of course, but it kinda felt like he and it did. It kinda felt like he had single-handedly, with his soft little arm, held the Diamondbacks at bay. It kinda felt like I had, with my tears, helped just a little. Bless our hearts. Copyright 2021

Many years ago I was in Atlanta to attend a continuing legal education seminar, a requirement of the State Bar for maintaining my license to practice law. The seminar, like all of them in the days before ZOOM, was held in a large hotel ballroom and I, as I always did when possible, had found a seat on the back row. The first presenter was well into his sixty-minute talk when a distinguished gentleman entered the room and took the empty seat beside me. I pegged him immediately as an “Atlanta lawyer” – tall, nice-looking, graying at the temples, wearing an expensively-cut dark suit. We nodded at each other and I turned my attention back to the speaker. At the conclusion of the session, as people pushed their way to the coffee at the back of the room, the gentleman turned toward me and stuck out his hand. “George Busbee,” he offered as way of introduction and, thanks be to every adult who had ever pressed upon me the importance of good manners, I took his hand and replied, “Kathy Bradley.” George Busbee served two terms as Governor of Georgia, almost the entire time I was in college and law school. He was on the ballot in my very first election. And now he was sitting next to me like just another lawyer needing continuing education hours. I couldn’t have told you a single thing about his tenure or his policies, but – because Daddy liked it so much – I remembered his campaign slogan: “A work horse, not a showhorse.” I couldn’t wait to get home to tell Daddy. That memory came back to me this morning as I walked. It seems an improbable thing to have come to my mind as I scuffed through the dust and paused occasionally to reach over the ditch for a wildflower, but it makes perfect sense if you know that a little over a half-mile from home I got a glimpse of beautyberry. I love beautyberry. It is the prima donna of wild plants. Its fluorescent purple berries shout from amidst the green undergrowth, “Look at me! Look at me!” And one can’t help looking. The stems are long and slender and the leaves, a startling yellow-green, cup the globes of berries as though making of them an offering. It is the kind of plant that would light up a room. The kind of plant for which tall, elegant vases are made. But also the kind of plant that I no longer approach with anything other than a camera. I have tried over and over to bring beautyberry inside and every time, no matter how gently I trim the stem or pinch the leaves, the berries drop from those stems in a purple avalanche leaving nothing behind but a good switch for a disobedient child. The beautyberry flirts and preens and teases. It infatuates and lures, but that is all it does. The beautyberry is a showhorse. As I stared at its plumage and absorbed that reality, I remembered George Busbee. The work horse. When it comes to public servants, the work horse is what I want. It is what I, when I was a public servant, tried to be. I don’t have much use for a showhorse. The afternoon wore down and I felt a question rise: Why can’t something be both? I did not much care for the question nor for the voice that whispered it. I could not, however, ignore it. “The Atlanta lawyer that sat down next to you all those years ago,” the voice continued, “looked every bit the part of showhorse. It was only after offering his name and, with it, his story, that you identified him as a workhorse. Consider well the distinction. The beautyberry is a work horse, even if it doesn’t work for you. It grows in sandy soil. It manages to thrive among vines and palmetto scrubs. It resiliently waits for rain. The beautyberry has to be a work horse in order to survive.” I am reminded of the Buddhist koan that says the converse of a great truth is also truth. If one cannot be both a work horse and a showhorse, then it is also true that one can be both. I have absolutely no plans to bring in any beautyberry, but I have every intention of remembering its lesson with every glance. Copyright 2021