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The wind was brisk today, tugging at my shirt sleeves as I walked toward the highway. From inside, looking at the high white clouds over the azure sky, one would never have known. Back at home, I sat down to write and noticed a file I had saved with the name “fragment.” I did not remember what it might be, so I opened it. After a brief scan, I closed it and opened another one with a similar name, forgetting for the moment that I was supposed to be writing a column, that I had a deadline to meet. Two sentences in, I had fallen down the rabbit hole. I was reliving a Saturday morning from a few years ago when the wind had also been stiff, hurrying across the open fields as though it was being chased. Sand was whirling in translucent spirals up and down the road, spinning up as high as the power lines and then diving back down to slap at the tiny little fronds of corn just topping the crusty surface of the fields. Deciding, I guess, that it was too windy to walk, but unable to resist the sunshine, I had filled a backpack with a book, a journal, a bottle of water and a bagel, striking out cross-country for the far corner of the farm where the little creek that feeds the big pond marks the end of cultivated fields and the beginning of woods. I had crossed the pond dam to get there and as I passed the dock – old and rotting and rarely used – the sun glinted off the water and bounced up on the rough gray planks in a pool of light that beckoned me like a siren. I forgot about the creek and stepped out gingerly, landing lightly on each plank to make sure that I didn’t end up in the cloudy brown water, easing out to the end of the dock where I opened up the cushion I’d slung over my arm. Sweet shrub bushes had grown up on both sides of the dock, on one side close enough that it hung over my shoulder like an old-fashioned stole. Spider webs, some so old that the dusty threads had been twisted together like yarn, stretched from post to post, vibrating in the breeze. The surface of the water moved in wide shallow arcs as though a large spatula was spreading icing across the top of a cake. It took a few minutes to settle into the quietness and stillness. I closed my eyes and lifted my face just slightly to absorb the morning sunshine. I slowed my breathing and let my shoulders relax. I concentrated on separating the sounds around me – wind through the trees, wind over the water, dogs barking in the distance, something (a frog, maybe) splashing into the water. I opened my eyes and stared at the reflection of the sun on the water, glowing, shimmering, pulsing with energy. I opened the book, read a few pages. Opened the journal, wrote a few lines. I don’t remember any of this. Not really. I can recount it only because of those few lines. A few lines that I would stumble over years later on another windy day. A few lines offering proof that in a world concentrated on change there is much that stays the same. A few lines that would remind me why I write. I get asked occasionally how, where, and when I write and I can answer those questions fairly easily. How? Generally on the computer, but a good bit of the time with pen and paper. Where? Most of the time at the desk where I practiced law for over 35 years, but sometimes in the big upholstered chair in my bedroom. When? Whenever. Nobody ever asks why. And that, of course, is the most important question. The answer is as simple and as complicated as the answer to the old minstrel show query as to the reason the chicken crossed the road: to get to the other side. I write to get to the other side of the mood, the observation, the question. To the other side of the image that seems to have no place in my thoughts, but which clearly means something. I write to remember the strong March wind and a gallery of spider webs and a rotting dock. I write to save the memories and I write to save the days. Copyright 2022

It can not possibly be called a lawn. The bit of acreage that surrounds Sandhill barely qualifies as a yard. In its previous incarnation it was a peanut field and, before that, a pasture. The grass – if you can call it grass – that grows there now is sparse streaks of bahia held together by henbit and dandelion. Yesterday, unwilling to part with something that I might need someday, I was taking an empty cardboard box out to the shed when I noticed the return of the henbit. It tickled my ankles as I reached carefully for each of the 27 cement squares that form the path to the shed. I looked down to see the tiny, purple, tongue-like flowers sprouted in thick clusters, their dark green leaves ridged like curly ribbon. Walking out to the road this morning to bring in the trash can, the green behemoth that, regardless of whether it is empty or full, jerks and bounces like the bull I saw at a rodeo once, I noticed that dozens of bright yellow dandelion faces had pushed themselves up into the sunlight. I couldn’t help smiling. I lost my smile, though, when I remembered. I’d made the chore of bringing in the trash can even more difficult than usual by doing it while wearing high heels and, as they sunk into the ground, I was reminded of why I was wearing them, why I was wearing dress clothes, why I had put on makeup on an ordinary Tuesday. Because it was not an ordinary Tuesday. I have for years boasted that I have 41 first cousins. Over the past six months or so we have, in the parlance of the country, buried three, plus two spouses. On this not-ordinary Tuesday, we would bury another. To be honest, I am tired of funerals – tired of hearing about them, tired of attending them, tired of writing about them. It would feel indulgent if I didn’t know that I am not alone in my weariness. We drove down back roads, past the State Prison and fields readied for planting and a surprising number of solar panels, to the house where Denise and Terry reared their three children, where their three grandchildren are evidenced by a trampoline and a PlaySkool slide proudly planted in the front yard, where my dear cousin’s prowess with a camera is on display in every room. I hugged people I’d not seen in decades and those I’d seen a month ago at the last funeral and I never sat down because I couldn’t bear to get comfortable. When I couldn’t say, “I’m so sorry,” to another soul I went outside to walk around the yard, Denise’s yard, overflowing with exuberant azaleas – hot pink and blush pink and the color they call flame. Regal white irises fluttered in the breeze and deep pink camellias, just beginning to brown at the edges, drooped languidly amid the deep green foliage. Nary a dandelion, nary a hill of henbit. I remembered standing at the altar less than a week ago, staring into the eyes of my minister, feeling his ash-laden finger move over my forehead in the sign of the cross. “It is from ashes that you have come,” he whispered, “and it is to ashes that you will return.” Yes, yes. I know. Naked we came into the world and naked we shall return. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. You can’t take it with you. Yes, yes, I know. But standing in the shade of these tall pine trees and weary with the fatigue of repeated grief, I wanted to yell back, loud and long. I wanted to challenge reality. I wanted to argue, like the lawyer I was for so long, the case for repealing death. Suddenly, like my pastor’s tender finger had become a flattened palm, like I’d been slapped hard and my cheek left stinging, I was reminded that if spring means anything, if the Lenten walk toward Easter is worth observing, the case has already been pled and the verdict already rendered. I know that, too, but the value of my faith is that I can walk in orthodoxy and still have questions. I can place my hope in a contradiction and still search for reason. I can live in peace and never stop yelling. And you can know this, Denise: I will never stop yelling. Copyright 2022

It is almost spring, I think, as I step outside in the early morning. The trees are budding, the tips of their branches frothy and green. The birds have begun emptying the feeders with ravenous speed. These obvious clues, these visible hints do not convince me, however. I have been deceived before and the memory is sharp. I have no intention of remanding my big coat to the hall closet just yet. By evening my resolve has weakened. I am walking the edge of the yard in near darkness when a soft breeze floats in from the west over the empty field. It pulls gently on my hair and tickles my bare arms. It is a trigger for a rapid succession of memories all associated with spring. I am ready to give in – infatuated with the ficklest of seasons – but in that moment, the very minute in which I am turning my face into the breeze, my brain whispers, “This is not spring. It is only the edge.” Edges can be dangerous places: the edge of a cliff, the edge of a knife. To live on the edge is to live without regard for safety or propriety. In the days when people, even the smart and educated ones, believed the earth was flat, maps labeled the space beyond which explorers had not yet navigated with the simple declarative statement, “Here lie dragons.” The threat of fire-breathing reptiles was, apparently, the strongest possible warning against getting too close to the edge. I take a couple more deep breaths and go inside, wondering what could possibly be dangerous about believing in spring. A number of years ago, a sweet boy and I were having a conversation over breakfast during which I asked him how things were going in first grade. He shared that he liked “all the math” and reading because “that’s the most important.” “But,” he continued, “I don’t like fairy tales because they always have a happy ending. It’s not like that.” I still remember feeling as though I’d been slapped. Even first graders, it appeared, know when they are being lied to. And that, of course, is the danger of the edge of spring. The edge can go either way. The edge isn’t committed to one side or the other. The edge can lie. Later, after all attempts to fall asleep have been hijacked by the mental replaying of every lie I have ever been told, I tiptoe outside. What is left of last week’s full moon is covered by clouds. An owl, roosting deep in the branch, hoots softly as a night bird of some kind screeches from nearby. And the breeze, the same teasing breeze, wafts across the yard, up the steps, and curls around me like a hug. It is said that there are only two ways to die – with a broken heart or with regret. I made the choice long ago. The edge of spring may slice me open, but I will never be sorry that I got close enough to bleed. Copyright 2022

The fence that marks the property line between our farm and our neighbors’ woods is hardly a fence at all. Rusted wire drawn between fat lighter posts has, at various points, drooped into uncomfortable hammocks, and, at others, flattened itself completely on the pinestraw covered ground. I don’t know the hours that I have spent roaming those woods, picking my way carefully over fallen trees, ever on the look-out for, depending on the season, snakes and gopher tortoise beds. Vines stretch and curl from one tree to another creating in some places a canopy that turns the sunlight into dapple. Old timber roads are barely visible, but they – along with the knowledge that moss prefers growing on the north side of things – have always gotten me home on the occasions that my wandering has left me wondering and not paying a lot of attention to where I am. A couple of old deer stands, like the turrets on a castle, keep watch over all manner of small animals – rabbits and squirrels and foxes – to whom the woods belong. I understand that I am just a visitor. A friendly one, but still an interloper into their world. Occasionally, very occasionally, I have taken someone with me into the woods, invoking a quiet that not many people can maintain. The woods are not a place for words, for people who can not speak with their eyes. I took a couple of friends back there once and two deer, startled by our approach, ran within a couple of arms’ lengths of us. Even the friend who is a biologist was mesmerized by their proximity, their beauty. Proximity and beauty. They do not always exist simultaneously. And when they do, they are deserving of our attention, perhaps, even, our protection. As Owen and I (bundled into my Michelin Man coat and wearing two pairs of socks) began our walk yesterday, I was startled by the sound of diesel engines. It is winter. There is no farming going on. I turned my head to determine from whence it came. The sound grew fiercer. This was no tractor engine. It was deeper and violent, like the sound of a Jurassic Park dinosaur. I realized, with a sharp pang, that the sound was coming from the woods, the woods that, in my heart, I consider at least as much mine as my neighbors’. And I knew, just from the sound, what was happening. Timber is a huge business in this state. It provides jobs, it builds houses. I know this. I am a farmer’s daughter. I understand that trees are, in some circumstances, just a crop. But knowing this does not keep me from grieving. Knowing this never prepares me for the broken trunks thrusting themselves in the air like bayonets, the nakedness of the dirt, the emptiness of the horizon. It is just another example, as grieving always is, that there are things over which I have no control. I woke up this morning and the roar was so loud I could hear it inside the house. It jolted me, on this day after I have buried yet another person whose life was intertwined with mine, to an awareness that not only do proximity and beauty not always exist in the same moment, but neither does opportunity. The beauty of the woods, its nearness would have meant nothing over these years had I not seized the opportunity to experience them. They would have been nothing had I not made them mine. As it is with trees, so it is with people. It is possible that I may not walk there anymore – in that exact landscape, in that exact space, being held by the arms of those exact trees – but I did once. And in a world where few things last, that memory will. Copyright 2022

I couldn’t sleep. I knew better than to think that staying cocoon-like in the warm bed was going to make the migraine stop its steady pulsing, so I swallowed the pills with a prayer for efficacy and rolled back the covers. I have of late made it a practice to begin each morning by walking outside, centering myself in the day, in the world by looking toward the eastern sky and its slow illumination. Some mornings the pink and gold are electric. Some mornings they are pale. Every morning they are a reminder that I, as the poet said, am stardust. That whatever awaits me on the calendar, the to-do list, the inexhaustible mental inventory of tasks, it is small and insignificant compared to sunrise. The sun is not awake at 4 a.m., however, and the horizon was still black and flat as the pages in an old photo album. I turned my gaze up instead and directly overhead was the moon, a waning crescent, a circle with a large bite taken out on the left-hand side. Its edges were smudged by either cloud cover or, maybe, just the cold. The sky was a blackboard, the moon drawn with chalk by a chubby hand. I shiver just a little, pull the fuzzy bathrobe a little closer, and think, It is good to be alive. It has been nearly two years since the world closed down on March 14, 2020. It was the day before my AJ’s first birthday party. It was cancelled. I settled instead by watching her smash her cake on a cell phone screen from 220 miles away. And that was only the beginning, of course. In the nearly 700 days since, I’ve lost four cousins to COVID. Daddy lost one of his best friends and my friend Debra lost her mother. My doctor and nurse friends have exhausted themselves beyond exhaustion and my teachers friends have been called upon to be people and things they were never trained to be. There have been postponements, then cancellations, too many to remember and I have managed all sorts of human interaction – business meetings, book clubs, church services, conversations – staring at a checkerboard of faces reminiscent of The Brady Bunch opening credits. Masks hang from the turn signal in my car and antiseptic wipes stay in the door pocket. I carry a proof of vaccination card with the same nonchalance as I carry my driver’s license. The world is different. I am different. Except that to the greatest extent possible, I am not. I am still mesmerized by words and charmed by small children and humbled by the moon – waxing, waning, full, or invisible. I am still just as likely to cry watching the Olympics, to pick up an acorn, to wear aqua. I will admit, though, to being more tender than I was before all the losses, more sensitive to differences of opinion about things I would have previously thought no one could question, more comfortable in my own mortality. I can hope that I would have attained all that without all the sadness and disappointment and frustration. I can hope the heightened awareness would have manifested itself just by living a curious and generous and expansive life. I can hope, but I don’t know for sure. Some gifts come no other way but by walking through the fire. I will never be grateful for the pandemic and what it took, but I am learning that in the hours before the sun appears there is always something else visible in the sky. Copyright 2022

Yesterday morning the dawn was all pink and peach, the world blushing into wakefulness. This morning the dawn was all silver and gray, the day reluctantly moving toward life. January has, so far, been a bit confusing, temperatures rising to 82 degrees and falling to 35 within a few hours. Blindingly bright sunshine rushed out of town by heavy clouds. It is as though the cosmos itself is unsure. Peeling off the layers of turtleneck, sweater, and what I call my Michelin Man coat for a single t-shirt and, just as quickly, piling them all back on has made me more than a little unsure myself. Am I supposed to be worried that climate change is accelerating or just grateful for the balmy days? Am I supposed to see the schizoid weather as a symbol of something else? Despite the usual cold, January is one of my favorite months. The farm is still and quiet. The fields are hard and the rows cut in preparation for spring are peaked like meringue. The trees, whose shapes in spring and summer are like that of a teenager’s prom gown, full and floaty, are undressed, their branches knotted and bent into dowagers’ humps. I can see so much more, so much better. But, then, there is the wind. The wind waters my eyes into tears that tremble but can not fall. . The wind draws my shoulders into knots that my hands are too cold to massage away. The wind chaps my lips and burns my ears and freezes my toes. I can find no shelter in the wind. There was a storm a few nights ago. Very little rain, according to Daddy’s gauge, but lots of wind. Several dead trees along the edge of the road had given up the ghost and simply laid down, breaking into pieces that revealed their rotted cores. Three of my six rocking chairs were blown off into the shrubbery, their skids across the porch leaving wide white streaks. It was not until the next day that I noticed the consequence of the wind’s campaign in the backyard which was littered with small branches shaken from the sycamore tree, fallen to the ground like a game of Pick-Up Sticks. It took a while to gather them, to make a pile at the edge of the branch big enough for a small bonfire. In all the bending and straightening, something drew my attention upward and I saw a large branch that had broken off and been caught by a lower limb. It looked like a wishbone, dangling above the ground, swaying just a little in the breeze. I reached to pull it down, angling myself away from the spot I assumed gravity would draw it and, with a couple of tugs, felt the branch give way and fall at my feet. While I was staring up, though, I noticed that all over the tree there were buds, tiny little arrows pointing toward the sky. In the dead of winter, the sycamore was readying itself for spring. And then I realized that none of the branches I had tossed into the pile, not a single one, had a bud pushing through its bark. The wind, in its biting and cutting, had pruned away the unfruitful, had made the sycamore ready to bloom. The natural world never lies. The natural world, left to itself without the interference of humans, knows how to keep itself alive, how to keep its balance maintained. The cosmos, it turns out, may be less unsure than I thought and my watery eyes and knotted shoulders and chapped lips, it turns out, may have a purpose. I will know come spring. Copyright 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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