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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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