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It is Sunday afternoon. There is a slight breeze – cool and gentle. Long sleeves are welcome. The sky is cornflower blue with clouds that look like dollops of sour cream plopped across its wide expanse. My steps make a crunching sound. That, along with the occasional avian tweet and the brushing of pine needles against each other high in the sky, is the only noise. I am struck by how peaceful it all is. It was Friday night. The pew on which I sat was straight and hard. The sanctuary was built of dark wood and stone. The stained glass windows shimmered with the last of the day’s sunlight and, as it faded completely, the service began. Though Saint Mark’s is an Episcopal church, this was not an Episcopal service. Not even a Christian one. Temple Beth Tefilloh is a tiny Jewish shul which shares a backyard with the imposing St. Mark’s. For this shabbat service, the first since the attack by Hamas on Israel, they have borrowed their neighbor’s facilities. They expected a crowd. And they got one. Going to church had not been the way I had expected to begin my weekend at the beach, a couple of days in which to celebrate my birthday with laughter and conversation and the scent of marsh and salt water mingled into the perfect sensory cocktail. I expected sunshine and frivolity. Expectations, of course, can be dangerous things. The friend who was hosting me, who has only recently made this town her new home, heard about the service and suggested we go, that we lend ourselves to this opportunity to pray for peace in Israel. The day’s gray clouds still hovered as we made our way up the wide concrete steps. I didn’t notice the police officer on the sidewalk. As we waited for sundown, I looked around the sanctuary at the men and women filling the pews. But for the vestments worn by some of the Christian clergy and the yarmulkes worn by the Jewish men, one could never have determined from which branches of God’s family each of us came. “A Call to Rest, a Call to Peace,” the first page of the program read and over the next hour and a half I did my best to follow the prayers and laments, Hebrew interspersed with English, led by the young woman at the front of the church. There were songs, all sung in minor keys. There was the blessing of the wine and, later, the blessing of the bread that, amazingly, resembled more than a little the service of communion in my own church. It was all meant to lead us into reflection on what was going on, is going on halfway around the world where it is not peaceful. It is Sunday afternoon again. On this long dirt road, alone but for my dog, I am safe, but I cannot stop thinking about those who are not. Friday night did something to me. I was reminded – not in a banal, cliche way, but in a powerful, tangible, feel it in my bones way – that what we share is what makes us human. Our differences – skin color, religion, ideas about how to repair the world so in need of repair – may give some of us the excuse to separate, ostracize, or even harm, but they will never change the fact that there is common ground, ground which lies within our hearts. Near the end of her sermon, Rabbi Bregman offered that, “Peace will come only when the hatred we feel for our enemies is less than the love we feel for our children.” I looked around me at the congregation, filled undoubtedly with parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, people whose thoughts, like mine, immediately filled with images of the children who are the objects of their love. There is nothing, I could safely assume, that they would not do to protect those toddlers, teenagers, grown men and women who will always be children in their eyes. What if, I wondered, moving through the dappled shadows of my dirt road, my safe dirt road, the best thing we can do for our children is love our enemies? What would that mean? What would that take? The sun is almost directly overhead now and the shadows are short. The road rises gently and one foot follows the other. I will cover three miles this way – one step at a time. It is the only way to do anything. Copyright 2023

For years, two dead pine trees have stood sentinel over the pond behind my house. The foliage long gone, all of the branches broken off, they have been simply two charred poles silhouetted against the blue sky. I don't know exactly when they were killed, but killed is what they were. Struck by lightning, they gave up all greenness, but not their spot in the soil. I've used the trees to navigate my way back to the house after wandering in the woods. I've used them to navigate my faults while wandering around trying to figure out a complicated answer to a complicated question. They simply stood there, still and stalwart, as though working to remind me of something I couldn't remember. A week or so ago, on one of the first afternoons that held a hint of fall, lured outside by a slightly cooler breeze and the angled light of late afternoon, I took a walk and, before realizing what I was seeing, came up on one of the dead trees, now fallen, shattered into pieces of various sizes and scattered across the path, soft and porous, spongy like Styrofoam. I stopped short and stared at the flattened skeleton, already dissolving into the earth. My best guess is that the tree fell in the hurricane a few weeks ago. The wind was certainly stiff enough to have leveled my old friend. But it is also possible that a breeze far less significant forced the topple. There is no way to know. I resumed my walk, moving slower than before, shuffling my feet just a little through the pusley and clover and nettle growing along the edge of the field, my mood suddenly sour. It took me a minute to realize why I had moved from lighthearted to sullen, why stumbling across the remains of the tree had left me pouty and vexed. It is my nature to notice, to observe with curiosity, to watch attentively and, in the watching, attribute meaning. The beauty, the tenderness, the fragility of life demands – in my personal ethos – that we bear witness, that we remember, that we not forget. As the poet Maxine Kumin said, “It is important to act as is bearing witness matters.” The sight of the fallen tree was, then, an accusation, an undeniable charge that I had not paid attention. It had fallen without witness and it was grief that halted my steps, that forced a gasp from my chest. I turned around and headed back, forced to pass again the fallen tree. “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?” I considered the well-worn koan as I trudged ahead and found myself gritting my teeth and rolling my eyes at the revelation of the narcissism that made me think, if only for a moment, that I was the only worthy observer of these acres. Just because I didn’t see or hear the tree’s fall does not mean it was unwitnessed. The gopher tortoise whose wide undulating tracks cross my own, the white-tailed deer whose tip-toes flit through the underbrush, the crow and the robin and the sparrow that balance themselves in the tall branches of the sycamore, they all are witnesses to the ecology of this place. They are all, in their own ways, rememberers. Stepping carefully around the tree’s resting place, I can see that it has fallen toward the east, almost as though it knows something of human ways. Perhaps it does. Or, perhaps, they are the ways not just of humans, but of all who live and die and bear witness to the same. Copyright 2023

I unrolled the blueprints and pointed to one of the living room walls, the one directly opposite the front door. “Here,” I told the contractor, “I want a wall of bookcases.” It would be one of the few extravagances in my little house. It was a fleece of sorts, a way of manifesting my long held desire to live a life surrounded by books. In the months to come, the walls and floors and windows and roof would come together to create a house, but it was only when the bookshelves were installed that I could see a home. The shelves were painted bright white and there were tiny brass brackets that made it possible to accommodate books of any height. I carefully chose a place for each of my treasures – the Narnia books, Gone With The Wind, an entire shelf of Agatha Christie – and then stood back to gaze with reverent wonder. That was 31 years ago. The shelves would eventually hold a large collection of novels and memoirs, thin volumes of poetry and chunky reference books, hardbacks with glossy dust covers and paperbacks with splayed spines and frayed corners. Some of them bore signatures from authors who were my heroes. Sometimes visitors to Sandhill stood in front of the bookshelves and stared, absorbing (I choose to believe) the magic and wonder of all the words waiting to be read. Eventually the shelves were full. Not one more volume could be forced into the rows. The shelves were so crowded that I started stacking new acquisitions horizontally into the skinny spaces at the top of the books. Instead of inviting and generous, the shelves looked burdened and unkempt. Instead of tempting me to stop and peruse their offerings, they spurred me to look away, to ignore the dust and the fading spines. My extravagance had become an albatross. One Sunday afternoon not long ago, the late summer sun came angling through the windows like a spotlight. It made a grid on the floor in front of the bookcase, the grain of the wood stretched out like waves. I don’t know what prompted me to stop, to stare. I tilted my head to read the titles and, like dominoes, they fell from my vision as my eyes moved from shelf to shelf. The realization that came in that moment was stark and raw and surprising: Most of these books I would never read again. Many of them I hadn’t liked all that much when I read them the first time. It was time to make space for what is next. I started with the ones about which I had only a vague recollection of subject, moved to the ones that no longer spoke to the person I have become, and after several hours ended up with a stack of 98 books – 39 hardcovers and 59 paperbacks. I placed them in boxes and put the boxes in the car for delivery to the Friends of the Library. The empty space around the books that were left made it possible to actually see the ones I loved, the ones that had inspired me and illuminated my mind. And there was room for other things I loved – the pottery bowl I had bought on a trip with some friends and the little Lane cedar chest I had gotten as a senior in high school now filled with tiny bits of paper and trinkets that memorialize my life. The whole process was, of course, a metaphor. It came to me as I emptied and dusted and rearranged. Without realizing it, I, too, had reached my capacity. Like my books, I need space, margin, edges into which I can bleed a little. I can’t, if I want to be respectful and reverent of this life I have been gifted, stuff my days, my head, my heart with every offering that comes my way. And, sometimes, I need to empty them of what is already there. Copyright 2023

This was not our first rodeo. Or first hurricane. And enough has already been said about Idalia by people who understand barometric pressure and millibars and the Saffir-Simpson Scale. I am still thinking about it, though, or – more particularly – what happens now. We call it the aftermath. The roads surrounding us were nearly all washed out and blocked with fallen trees. The ditches were flooded and the water in the pond down the way reached the top of its dam, quivering like a too-full cup. There was a dead frog lying in the middle of the road, away from all the tire marks, and I’m still not sure he didn’t drown. But we had it relatively easy. The power went out for only a few minutes. The turned-down rocking chairs didn’t get blown off the porch. I managed to staunch the leak that appears in the living room ceiling every time we get heavy rains. And the next morning dawned with bright sunshine and a cool breeze. Staring into the pale blue sky it occurred to me that the use of the word aftermath is always in the context of an especially unpleasant event or the time following something destructive. Aftermaths appear in the wake of financial collapse and mass shootings and natural disasters like, of course, hurricanes. Aftermaths exist in the space occupied by dreaded diagnoses and relationship rupture, as a result of loss and disappointment and death. And we are now, under this cloudless sky, in the aftermath. Which makes the etymology of aftermath, which I couldn’t resist researching, all the more interesting: The word was first used in the late 1400s and was originally an agricultural term from the ancient word “math,” which meant “a mowing.” The after-math was a mowing that took place after the first crop from a particular field was harvested. It involved the cutting, plowing, or, sometimes, grazing of whatever was left, a stewardship practice that kept anything from going to waste. I can stare out the window and remember the aftermath of Hurricane David in 1979 which involved hand-harvesting an entire crop of corn that had been laid flat by the Category 2 storm as it licked the coast at Savannah. Is stewarding what we were doing, I wondered, as we trudged through the fields lifting the slain stalks and breaking off the ears one by one, making sure that none went to waste? Is stewarding what we were doing as we waited in the dark and the heat for five days after Matthew in 2016, grieving all that had been lost, including two lives? I think so. Aftermath is not just what happens, but what we do with it. Aftermath is not just the recovery, but the learning from it. And there is much to learn from living in a place where hurricanes appear on a regular basis – the prudence of keeping batteries and candles and drinking water on hand, for certain, but, also and especially, the lesson of eventually. Eventually the wind moves on, the rain stops, the water recedes. Eventually the power comes back on. Eventually the traffic starts up again and Walmart reopens. Eventually we move forward, but – we can only hope – not unchanged. The limbs have all been picked up now. The carport has been swept clean of the litter of fading leaves. The county came out on Saturday to move the trees and scrape the road. Things are almost back to something like normal. Except – excuse the repetition – this isn’t our first rodeo. Anyone who has watched for, prepared for, lived through a hurricane (or a wildfire, a divorce, or a cancer diagnosis) knows that normal is a temporary condition. And all we can do is embrace the aftermath, the second mowing, the tending of what is left. Copyright 2023

Early in the morning, after the egg yolk sun has broken the horizon, but before the oven of summer heat descends, I can sit outside and experience the waking of the day. I feel the dew on my bare feet and smell the thick air. I catch a glimpse of squirrel or rabbit hustling into the undergrowth. And, of course, I hear the birds. It is not, however, a well-rehearsed chorus that greets me from the branch, but the cacophony of an elementary school playground. My avian neighbors all chatter at the same time, tenors and sopranos practicing their scales in assorted keys and tempos, each one, it seems to me, auditioning for the same part. The number of species of birds identified by the app on my phone in the last ten months has risen to 57, most of them recorded in the morning, but I still can not identify on my own more than five or six. As I write each new identification in my tiny turquoise notebook, I remind myself that I can appreciate the diversity of bird voices – like humans – even if I don’t know each one intimately. A few mornings ago, I stepped outside and, after greeting the world with a symbolic stretch of my arms, sat down to listen. My usual greeting from crow and mockingbird did not materialize, but there was plenty of chatter, including the echoing staccato of a woodpecker somewhere high in the trees. I leaned forward as though a few inches could draw me close enough to recognize the various songs. Was that soft whistle a wren? The short tweet a cardinal? I opened the app and began recording, watching the screen light up with a photograph of each bird it recognized. I was right – wren and cardinal, along with kingbird and mourning dove. And, then, in response to the resumed tap-tap-tapping, the app produces a photo of the red-headed woodpecker – its bright vermilion cowl falling down to black shoulders and stark white chest. No surprise. Except that the sound by which the woodpecker was identified wasn’t a song, was it? It turns out that woodpeckers hammer – technically “drum” – against a loud or resonant object, for some of the same reasons that other birds sing, that is, to establish and defend territory and to find a mate and the drumming is, in fact, the woodpecker equivalent of singing. It just doesn’t sound like anybody else’s. I was almost 13 in the summer of 1969, the summer that Mama Cass Eliot released “Make Your Own Kind Of Music.” It was pop at its best – catchy tune, easily memorized lyrics – and, to an awkward almost-eighth grader who was just beginning to understand the tension between fitting in and being true to oneself, it was an anthem. An admonition. A reminder that not all songs sound alike. I sat a while longer, thought about the kind of beauty that exists only in variety, the sort of strength that is found only in differences, the knowledge that is gained only in the multiplicity of experiences. And all the while, somewhere deep in the thick summer foliage, a woodpecker was vehemently throwing his head against a tree in perfect time: “Even...if...no...body...else...sings...along.” Copyright 2023

I have a column due in less than 24 hours. It is not yet written, but, instead of writing it, I am sitting under an oak tree in the backyard at a picnic table (at which, it occurs to me, I’ve never had a picnic), staring at ground dimpled from the hard rain that came last night. Somewhere in the brush nearby there is a dove cooing. His call and the rustle of the leaves are the only sounds. The temperature is 94 degrees. Anybody with half a lick of sense would be inside in the air conditioning. I am startled to see two red leaves at my feet. They are tiny, each about the size of an address label, and mottled. Their stems are short and each one narrows to a thin point like holly. I noticed the other day that the sycamore leaves are getting a bronze cast to them and there is a little gold on the wild grapevines that twine in and out of the maples and scrub oaks in the branch, but this – two little red leaves – make it clear that summer is, as it always does, fading. It may be the heat that eventually sends me back inside, but I think it’s the melancholy, the pensive sadness that the two red leaves injected into my mood. It will be weeks before the days are noticeably shorter, a couple of months before anything like a chill greets me at the back door, but already I am grieving. I love summer. And she is leaving me. I sit down, stare at the computer screen, wonder if perhaps the turning of the seasons should be the subject of the as-yet-unwritten column. It is a fleeting thought. Fleeting because it occurs to me that I may have already said just about everything there is to say about the first school bus rattling down our dirt road and the scent of fields being burned off and the wistfulness that descends with the withering of the last hydrangea. I’ve been writing about such things for a long time; I have written about the enticement of school supplies and the way purple and gold wild flowers spring up overnight, about peanut trailers and hurricanes, about good harvests and bad. Is it possible that there are no new stories to tell? That I have reached the point of repetition? But, then, isn’t repetition the very nature of story? Don’t we begin every fairy tale with “once upon a time”? It is, I think, to remind ourselves that we are not alone, that there is nothing that has happened, is happening, can happen to us that has not already happened and been survived once upon a time. The best stories are always told from the universal point of view, the perspective of relating to the whole of humanity. The best stories are the ones that sound familiar when we hear them for the first time. The best stories, the very best stories, have something about them that make us say, “Me, too.” I am reminded of my father’s lifelong invocation of the Deuteronomic exhortation to rehearse it in their ears – to never stop telling stories of persisting through challenge, of defying the odds, of remaining loyal to a cause, a goal, a person. Because a story told over and over is a story that is believed. Perhaps, then, I haven’t said everything there is to say about the end of summer, the arrival of fall. Maybe there is in the red leaves a recognizable memory, in the cooing of the dove a familiar refrain. Maybe the melancholy is less a sadness than a goad, a prod, a gentle nudge to keep telling the stories. Somewhere a school bus is slowing to a stop, its brakes squealing in the afternoon heat. Somewhere a leaf releases its grip and glides to the ground. Somewhere the growl of a combine reverberates across the landscape and into the sky. Copyright 2023

A dirt road is a canvas. In ways that concrete and gravel and macadam never can, it records those who travel its course. It paints a picture and tells a story with each footprint. When Owen and I go walking, we generally always encounter the tracks of some animal or another – the wide scoot of a turtle edged in the lacy drag of its flippers, the tiny fleur-de-lis of wild turkeys. During dry spells I can look closely in the clay at the top of the hill and make out the heart of a deer’s hoof. After a soaking rain, that same hoof leaves a crevice as distinct and deep as a cookie cutter. Snakes leaves smooth ribbons from one ditch to the other. The pawprints of raccoons make it look as though they walk on tiptoe. The delicate embroidery stitched by the talons of mockingbirds and killdeer and crows are indistinguishable to me, but I am still very careful not to step directly on the beauty they have created without even knowing it. The other day, out walking with no business doing it in 90+-degree heat, I stopped to look at some bird tracks, particularly small and close together, as though something was hurrying her along. As I stared and Owen hurried over to sniff at whatever it was that had taken my attention from him, my racing brain articulated a single word: evidence. Since I retired from practicing law, I haven’t thought much about evidence. I haven’t had a need to consider Title 24 of the Georgia Code and things like admissibility and relevance. One never stops being an attorney, though, never stops analyzing things and people from the standpoint of believability. Thus, I stood in the middle of the road and, like a juror, came to the conclusion, without ever actually seeing the bird, that a bird had walked across the road sometime in the past. It’s been a couple of weeks since the encounter and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. This is the conclusion to which I’ve come: Regardless of my deliberate intentions to pay attention, to notice, to observe, I am an eye-witness to very little. Most of what I know has been deduced, reasoned, concluded only after an examination of the evidence. I wake to find puddles in the yard and I say, “It rained last night.” I see smoke in the distance and I think, “Something is on fire.” Owen suddenly goes dashing off into the woods and I call out, without having seen a squirrel, “Stop chasing that squirrel!” There is another element, though. In the pages and pages of the King James Bible imprinted on my neural pathways is the Book of Hebrews’ definition of faith: “the evidence of things not seen.” The word faith is nowhere to be found in Title 24, but it might as well be because that’s exactly what is required to deduce, to reason, to conclude that puddles come from rain, that smoke comes from fire, that dogs – and people – chase things they will never catch. Most days I see only evidence of what is happening in the world around me, but I know that, in the words of every attorney in every opening statement in every trial, “the evidence will show ...” and, based on that evidence, I make a deliberate, intentional, willful choice to believe. Believe that rain makes puddles and fire makes smoke. Believe that birds cross roads and dogs chase squirrels. Believe that everything I see is evidence of an invisible truth that is the biggest story of all. Copyright 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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