Search Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A moment of personal privilege, if I may: It is told that when the Irish poet Seamus Heaney enrolled his children in a new school and was asked by the admissions officer, “What is your occupation?”, he responded, “I write a little.” Hearing that story about the man awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past", I could do nothing but nod my head in agreement. Writers are notoriously insecure. We sit down (and only after slaying the mighty dragons of procrastination and ennui) to address the blank page with trepidation, frustration, panic, or all three, certain that this day, this hour will be the moment when the words finally dry up. We accept any kind words, any compliments about what we have written with tight smiles and brief nods, knowing deep within us that we are frauds. We never really believe that we are worthy of the title. That said, every now and then, someone not a friend or a relative or a friend of a relative, shows up to make me think that I am not a complete charlatan. One of those people was Pat Spurgeon. Because of my association with the family of Erk Russell, I knew who he was, but he and I had never met when, two years ago to the day as I write this, I received a Facebook message from him expressing his appreciation for my column. I believe I actually put my hand to my throat as I took in a deep breath. That this brilliant scholar (I know for a fact that he once used the Sword of Damocles as a metaphor in describing a team that knew it was in for a trouncing.) not only read my offerings, but took the time to let me know, was as good as having received an anointing of some special grace. I responded, of course, which led to a very occasional exchange between the two of us, each time prompted by his generosity of spirit in speaking about what he had read in the words I’d managed to string together. He described one of my columns as having “the fragile beauty of a spider’s web.” I think I may have wept. I was out of town last week when I learned that Dr. Spurgeon had died.. I’d been thinking of him just a few days before and, regrettably, had not sent him a message, the victim yet again of insecurity. What made me think that our friendship (and I did, still do, think of it that way) gave me permission to initiate a conversation? I regret, of course, not having done that. Not having taken the initiative to say, once again, what his own words had prompted in my heart. To say that those words had helped me learn to call myself a writer. Words are tender things. They are also powerful. Pat Spurgeon knew that. And he used that knowledge well. Godspeed, Dr. Spurgeon. And tell Erk I said hello. Copyright 2022

Forty-eight years ago, US 301 south of Statesboro was still a two-lane highway. Interstate 16 had not yet been completed, so there was no exit, no truck stops, certainly no tall water tower proclaiming the presence of an industrial park, just a long stretch of black-top punctuated by the occasional farmhouse and one country store. Forty-eight years ago, the road on which Daddy took us to live did not have a name and our mail was left in a mailbox two miles away. There was no stop sign at the dirt crossroad (Though, to be honest, there was really no need for one – Daddy’s truck and Mama’s car were the only vehicles that traveled through the intersection with any regularity and they were always going in the same direction.). Forty-eight years ago, we lived a long way from anything. Earlier this year, the announcement was made that the newest truck stop to be planted at the interstate exit would have a Burger King. A Burger King? I gasped as I lifted my head from the newspaper and gazed skyward. The thought of having a fast-food restaurant within five miles of my house left me a little discombobulated. Over a period of forty-eight years a person becomes accustomed to isolation, habituated to the idea that being too tired to cook at the end of a long day necessitates a 20-minute drive to town, used to never knowing the ease of having a pizza delivered to one’s front door. Daddy and I talked about the coming of Burger King – not exactly a sign of the apocalypse, but certainly an indication that civilization’s march toward us had picked up its pace. He was, I could tell, not particularly bothered, probably because his memories of US 301 reach back to the days when it wasn’t even 301, when it was, like all the other roads around here, made not of asphalt, but dirt. I, on the other hand, vacillated between being thrilled that I would be within 10 minutes of a fountain Diet Coke and horrified that the world was drawing ever closer to my untamed acres. A few days ago, I was on my way to speak to a civic club about books and writing and had just topped one of the low hills that make our roads interesting in a rainstorm. In the shallow ditch to the left, I detected movement and glanced over to see two small creatures, one directly behind the other, running in perfect synchronicity. As I drew closer, they darted into the road and it was only then that I realized what they were – coyote pups. The existence of coyotes in my corner of the county is, to use Mama’s phrase, a known fact. In early fall, when the sun has set and the sky is still light, I can stand in the front yard and listen to their long, plaintive cries float across the landscape like the sound of a distant train. Some of our neighbors, neighbors we didn’t have and never anticipated 48 years ago, have shared stories of chickens and pet goats being killed by coyotes brave enough to venture out of what we call Jackson Branch Swamp. Coyotes, though generally shyer than most, are as much my neighbors as deer and tortoises and red-tailed hawks. Yet, I was surprised. As surprised as I had been about Burger King. And the juxtaposition of the two, the same emotion being experienced in such wildly different ways, gnawed at the edges of my thoughts for days. One of the gifts of age is that your edges get softer. You learn to be careful using words like always and forever. You stop expecting consistency and dependability from things like cars and politics and people. You develop the ability to hold back the hordes of anger and frustration and envy by taking a deep breath. Or two. It makes you wonder if you’ve grown tired, that you have settled, that you are old. And, then, something surprises you. Makes you sit up straight and hold your breath for a minute. Ignites the pilot light of your curiosity and launches your imagination, as Buzz Lightyear says, “to infinity and beyond.” Reminds you that as long as you remain curious, as long as you are willing to be surprised you will never be old. Copyright 2022

The beach looks like a battleground. Scores and scores of horseshoe crabs lay up-turned on the damp sand, empty of the gills, the mouths, the legs that once made them alive. I am careful where I step, reverential as I would be in any graveyard. Farther down, I come up on a shark head, ten or twelve inches long, the color of the sand. I can’t tell if it was cut or gnawed from its body. I see it just in time to avoid, my feet jerking awkwardly away. At the water’s edge a handful of dead shrimp, the color of mahogany, are clumped together, a mound of decaying flesh. Dark clouds move slowly toward the shore, a perfect pall for the horseshoe crabs. For the shark and the shrimp. For me. The beach is normally my place of solace, of refuge. It is where the rhythm of the waves recalibrate the rhythm of my breath, my heartbeat. It is where my smallness and my unimportance become reasons for gratitude, where solitude and invisibility become strength. It is where I stare at the horizon and am reminded that all shall be well. But not this time. Not today. Today the smell of the sea that so often mesmerizes me is overwhelmed by rot. Today the ragged black rocks of the jetty look like nothing so much as the half-submerged spine of a dragon. Today my feet keep sinking at the water’s edge, reminding me of all the things I have lost, all the things I am losing. It doesn’t take long to recognize the emotion rising like the tide in my chest. It is resentment, different from simple disappointment in that, while both involve unfulfilled expectations, resentment (by far the more dangerous of the two) arises from a feeling of entitlement, a belief that what is expected is also deserved. Unchecked and unconfessed, resentment nearly always turns into bitterness. Only hours later, not nearly enough time for the checking and confessing, I open my phone to see the news of the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting. I see the photos of the children holding honor roll certificates on the last day of school, just hours before their lives are extinguished by a madman. I watch the numbers rise with each new report. How can I feel entitled to anything when a small town in the hill country of Texas has had its heart ripped out? When parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters are mourning so deeply they can not comfort each other? The next morning it is time to leave. Time for the three of us, who have done this every year since 2011, to pack our suitcases and empty the refrigerator and load the cars. Time for one last group hug, one last whisper of gratitude, one last promise do to it again next year. The three of us met when we were only slightly older than the murdered children in Uvalde, children who deserved the chance to sit on the beach as 65-year-olds and remember what it was like to be a child, children who got the chance to marvel over long-time friendships, children who should have gone to college and fallen in love and had families. Whatever weight I carry, whatever disappointment I feel, I carry and feel it as an adult. Any resentment I feel, that any of us feels, should be on their behalf. Copyright 2022

The Breeding Bird Atlas of Georgia, published in 2010 (my copy of which is signed by one of the editors and was a gift from my friend Loretta that same year), weighs in at a hefty five-and-a-half pounds and contains 497 pages. It is beautifully photographed and provides a map for each of the 183 species included which marks each of the Georgia counties where it is possible, probable, or confirmed to have been seen. I confess to not having picked up the Atlas in a while and did so this week only because I couldn’t find what I was seeking in the Audubon Field Guide to the Southeastern States, a much smaller and lighter book. What I was seeking was the identity of a beautiful yellow bird that appeared on the deck earlier this week. I actually saw him quite by accident, just happening to glance through the French doors off the bedroom as I was making the bed or folding clothes or something equally quotidian. Claws curled around the back edge of the metal chair on the deck and head lifted in a majestic tilt, his coloring shocked me. Deep yellow with a touch of verdigris on the wings, he threw off a strangely dull glittering. I have never seen a yellow bird at Sandhill before this one. Fire-engine red cardinals, deep gray mockingbirds, royal blue bluejays, soft brown wrens keep me company all the time. Occasionally, I get a glimpse of the jaunty red cap of the pileated woodpecker and sometimes my resident red-tailed hawk swoops low enough that I can make out his rust-colored derriere. But before now there has been no yellow. It grieves me te say that the Atlas did not provide me with a definitive answer. The closest species I could find to what I saw was the white-eyed vireo, a bird of which I, prior to finding it on page 252, had not known existed. “Of the four vireo species breeding in Georgia,” I read, “the white-eyed is the only one regularly found in open scrubby habitat.” Except for nor appreciating the derogatory, i.e., “scrubby,” description of my abode, I found the description of the vireo mesmerizing: both parents help build the nest and both take part in incubation. The vireo has as many as six to 10 distinct songs, most of which are learned from the father, but some of which are learned from bird neighbors. I checked the map to make sure that the vireo was a geographic possibility. A small circle signifies possibility; a small triangle, probability; and a small square, confirmation. The shape placed on the map in my corner of Bulloch County is a triangle. There are only 82 triangles in the entire state. Which means, of course, that my spotting of the white-eyed vireo – if, in fact, that was what he was – could be of avian importance. Could be or, rather, could have been if I’d noted the exact date and time of observation. Knowing the temperature could probably have been of help as well. Alas, I am not, as I have noted before, a scientist. I get far too lost in widening my eyes and gasping when I encounter something amazing. If I write down anything at all it is how the observation made me feel, what it made me remember. I have friends who are scientists. Some of them call or email me when I say something patently wrong. For that I am grateful. As long as there are people like my friends and like the editors of the Atlas, people who write 5-pound books and include all the details, I am free to wander and marvel and call it all magic. Copyright 2022

Morning at Sandhill has its own choreography. Open the back door. Watch Owen perform yoga stretches as he surveilles the backyard. Wait for him to turn his face upward in a non-verbal request for a scruff or two under his chin. Speak the word “okay” in a sufficiently serious tone of voice that he understands it is time to move beyond the threshold and into the day. Not every morning unrolls in such an orderly manner. Some mornings when I open the back door, Owen’s buddy from next-door, Smokey, is waiting to stuff his long black German Shepherd nose into the crack, always believing that he will be invited in. On those mornings, yoga stretches and neck scruffs are forgotten and Owen rushes through the door without encouragement. Some mornings, when the weather is cold or wet, Owen does not even rise from his bed, but, instead, curls into a tighter ball, willing himself into invisibility and exhaling deeply as I close the laundry room door and leave him alone. This morning was not like any of those. This morning Owen moved toward the open door, not the least bit lethargic or yoga-like, paying me no attention at all. His nose twitched in the first sniff of morning air and his dark eyes stopped their scanning on a spot at the edge of the yard. A big brown rabbit sat under the oak tree nibbling at the bird seed that had been knocked out of the feeder. I didn't dare move. I knew that the slightest motion would send the rabbit scurrying and the scurrying would send Owen dashing off the stoop, chasing the poor rabbit into the undergrowth. Quiet and still, my eyes moved back and forth between the rabbit and Owen. Eventually the rabbit stealthily moved away from the shade of the tree and toward the edge of the brush. Owen remained alert and immovable. Deciding to believe that he sensed, but did not actually see the rabbit, I urged him outside and closed the door. Whether a chase ensued, I cannot say. The day moved on and I could not stop thinking about the rabbit. Dark brown, bigger than any I have seen around here lately. I imagined his warren, his mate, perhaps some kits. I decided he must have survived several seasons – avoided the snakes as a baby, the raccoons as an adolescent, the coyotes and foxes as a adult – to get to be the mature rabbit at the edge of my yard. The thing is, I decided as I walked down the road beneath the warming sun, rabbits are not all that different from humans. You don’t get to be grown, to be a mature human being, without surviving a few things. Without getting a few scars. Without having run from and eluded some enemies. My father is 86 years old. I have watched him longer than I have watched anyone. I have watched him stand in a dusty corn field, eyes and arms lifted in supplication for rain. I have watched him gently wipe the face of my dying mother, his bride of sixty-six years. I have watched him, heard him eulogize his own parents and more than a handful of friends. I have watched him, in the way of all creatures, scar and bruise and survive. A day later, a day after I met the rabbit, I saw Owen stretched out in the sun chewing on a bone. It was dry and white and old. Too dry and too white and too old to belong to the rabbit. Still, it was evidence of the life of something – an opossum, maybe, or an armadillo – and it reminded me that, while life of any length involves scarring and bruising, it also, eventually, involves ending. I do not want to consider this. I would rather stand quietly at my door and watch rabbits. Copyright 2022

I don’t know what it is called. And after all the unsuccessful research, I don’t even want to know. I am strangely and unusually satisfied with the idea that, at least this once, not knowing the name of something is, in fact, preferable. It grows on a thin straight stem, smooth and straight like a green straw, and its satiny leaves all sprout from the bottom like a fountain. The flower itself is tiny, smaller than a thimble. It is white and shaped like a tulip, the petals cupped into a circle and overlapping each other in almost indiscernible layers, little children lined up in staggered rows. On some of the petals there is the very smallest amount of deep purple, almost as if someone had dipped them in blackberry juice or stained them with a pinprick of blood. At least 25 years ago, back when Sandhill could still be called a new house (Ginny, my golden retriever, and Fritz, her sister who lived down the road, could still find crunchy bits of concrete that had broken off in the construction process.), I grew tired of the bands of empty crust that lined the foundation and, though I had neither any real interest in gardening nor the means to do it properly, I began considering putting things, flowering things, into the ground. I don’t remember from which magazine I ordered it, but the “carpet of wildflowers” seemed just the thing: easy to plant and, because they were wildflowers, legitimately neglectable. Disappointed a bit by the size of the carpet, I decided to roll it out near the back door, between the outside faucet and the tall metal pole that I still used to bring in, on a clear night, three television stations. I followed the instructions – I think there was something about “covering with a light layer of soil and watering thoroughly.” – and left the wildflowers to their wildness. This was in the fall. By spring I had forgotten about the carpet. If anything bloomed I probably mistook it for one of the many colorful weeds that grew in the field grass that I call my yard. By the next spring I had realized that perhaps the tiny little seeds had needed something more than a light layer of soil and thorough watering. In all the springs thereafter only one flower sprouted – a happy jonquil, a flower I thought for certain grew from a bulb and not a seed and which the nice young man trimming the weeds along the edge of the house absentmindedly sheered to its root. I eventually planted other things, things that actually produced flowers and foliage, colorful things like lilies and irises and hydrangeas. The television antenna gave way to a satellite dish and Ginny was followed by Lily and now Owen. Things changed. And, then, a couple of weeks ago, just a few days before the party at Sandhill to celebrate the publication of my third book, the unnamed flower pushed its little head into the air, bobbing back and forth with the stiff breeze and smiling with every bob. Twenty-five years. Twenty-five years covered by dirt and darkness. Twenty-five years ignored and forgotten. Twenty-five years turning into something amazing. I would like to be able to congratulate myself on my patience and give myself credit for believing in invisible seeds. I would like to think that my occasional glance had at least a bit to do with the little flower’s determination and resilience. I would like to say that I was not totally surprised by its ta-da. But I was. I was shocked and stunned and stupefied. Like a person always is when anticipation has faded to waiting and waiting has faded frustration and frustration has faded to giving up. Like when it is too hard to hold on in unending silence. Like when whatever you thought you knew turns out to be wrong. But, also, like a person always is in the presence of a miracle. I don’t know its name, but I shall call it miracle. Copyright 2022

I tucked my chin into my chest and plowed forward against the wind. My feet came slowly up off the ground, a lesson in physics as they moved in opposition to the invisible force. Tears fell not from sadness but from the pressure, squeezed from my eyes like water from a sponge. I could have stayed inside, could have listened to the wailing around the corners of the house from a nest in front of the gas logs, mesmerized by fake flames as easily as real ones and wondering what that tells me about my gullibility. I could have stayed inside, convincing myself that wind this hard was sure to stir up even more pollen. I could have stayed inside. But I didn’t. I wanted, no, I needed to walk. To stretch, to flex, to exert. And now I had become the immovable object set against the irresistible force. When I finally struggled my way past the open fields on both sides of the road, to the spot where my brother’s planted pines acted as a windbreak, I was able to stand up straight. I squared my shoulders and raised my eyes to a landscape so familiar I have traversed it in the dark. Mama used to tell me about the house – I think it was her grandmother’s. – where one of the daily tasks was to sweep the front yard. The road in front of me, under my feet, looked as I imagined that yard, swept smooth of pebbles and pine cones, resembling sifted flour. In a matter of minutes, probably, it would be pressed down by tire tracks and shoe prints and all the many things that settle onto the ground when the wind takes a breath. Wind. Breath. I unexpectedly found myself remembering that the Hebrew word for wind, “ruach,” is the same as the word for breath and also the same as the word for spirit. The wind that dried out the earth after the flood is the breath that enlivened the animals and they are both the articulation of those attributes that make us human, for example wisdom and compassion, but also envy and cowardice. Wind and breath and spirit. All the same. But different. I arrived back at home feeling a tightness in my chest and hearing a wheeze, the soft whistling sound that announces, as if I didn’t know, that the dust, the pollen, the wind itself had invaded my lungs, were trying to take my breath. I found the inhaler, shook it rapidly for a few seconds, and, in a choreography I have learned well, exhaled completely before pressing the pump of the inhaler as I breathed in deeply. My great-grandmother died of asthma. My namesake aunt died of emphysema. In a strange way, this is what they left me and I think of them every time I avail myself of the convenience and the miracle my doctor calls the rescue inhaler. I think of them and wonder, where was their rescue? I admit without embarrassment that my thoughts, my remembrance of the two women, one of whom I never even knew, would not be as frequent if what they’d left me was a set of china or a chest of silver. This struggle to breathe is our generational connection, a strange heirloom in a family that has few tangible ones. I managed a deep breath. The inhaler had vanquished the wheeze and the in and out of breathing became, once again, reflex. Outside the window I could see the trees still bending, the dirt still rising in sheets and swirls. Wind and breath and spirit. Another kind of trinity. Wind to remind me of the vastness of creation. Breath to remind me of my fragile humanity. Spirit to bind me to all that is life. Creation, humanity, life. Ruach. Copyright 2022