We Who Stand As Trees

Two weeks ago one of the young sawtooth oaks in the backyard was still clinging to its winter leaves – tight little wrapping paper tubes of brittle brown. The bigger leaves were long gone; these were the recalcitrant ones, the obstreperous children determined to have their own way.

The air was warm that morning. The sun was bright. The verbena I’d planted last summer at the corner of the deck was already blooming purple and spilling over the concrete edgers I’d put in place to keep it contained. What was the oak tree still doing holding on to winter?

I started wondering how, exactly, the tree’s new buds might force the leaves to fall, how the sap might begin pumping in a rhythm akin to a heartbeat, each pump jarring the leaf a little looser until eventually, like the criminal hanging by his fingertips from the 30-story ledge, there was nothing to do but drop. I could almost see the sticky life-juice pushing through the thin bark, could almost hear it screeching with false bravado, "Hey, you! Yeh, you, yesterday’s news, outta here!"

A couple of days later I pulled into the driveway (in daylight, thanks to the time change) and saw the oak tree covered, ballooned in Coke-bottle green buds and matching leaves. The armature of branches was all but completely hidden by the froth. Not a single brown cylinder remained. Not even on the ground.

I’ve grown accustomed to the natural world’s prestidigitation. It cannot be watched closely enough to observe the change as it happens. It performs its magic in secret, under cover of darkness or solitude. Overnight the grass needs cutting. In the afternoon you water a rosebud; in the morning it is in full flower; by evening it is fading.

But this was different. Not the ordinary wizardry of spring. That many leaves do not drop and disappear that quickly.

Still studying the suddenly voluptuous tree over my shoulder, I started toward the back steps and noticed the pine cone seeds. They fanned out over the carport floor like fairy dust, salmon pink translucent wings weighted down by seeds the color of doe eyes. They’d been lifted from their trees of origin, carried across the landscape between earth and sky, and deposited at my doorstep by invisible gusts of warm spring wind.

And, of course, that is how the oak tree got naked so quickly, too. The wind. Warm spring wind.

The new buds chafed for the dead leaves to fall of their own accord and the dead leaves held to the branch with righteous anger. The new buds, full of new life, impatient to see sunlight, feel raindrops, convert carbon dioxide into oxygen trembled with anticipation while the dead leaves trembled with fear. Neither could do anything but wait.

Wait for the wind. Wait for the outside force. Wait for the shaking that would strip to naked the strong skeleton and re-dress it in newer, better attire.

We all like to think that we are the managers of our lives, that we make the choices and create the timelines, that the decisions of when or if to hang on or let go are ours and ours alone. To take that approach occasionally may be appropriate, but to live one’s entire life that way is to live in denial.

The truth is that we are all trees. We sprout leaves. We produce fruit. We offer shade. In season. But seasons change. And so we must stand in the wind, roots holding us up straight and tall, and watch as it blows and gusts and tears away all that is dead in order that we may see all that is alive.
 
Copyright 2011

Age to Age

It is grainy and gray, faded and fragile to the touch, a newspaper clipping from 1966. I am bent over it with a combination of amusement and incredulity. The caption says that it is a photograph of Girl Scout Troop 370 on a field trip to the Statesboro Herald. It identifies the twenty or so girls, row by row. There in the middle is my name.

I don’t remember the visit to the newspaper. I don’t remember Mr. Coleman showing us the printing press. I recognize very view of the faces in the photo. That is the incredulity. The amusement arises from the smile – the goofy, tight-lipped grin – on the face of the little girl that was Kathy Bradley. I can’t help laughing out loud.

And I can’t help staring.

Ten years old. That would be fifth grade. Mrs. Trapnell’s class at Mattie Lively. That was the year my friend Gail got rheumatic fever, the year I got so good playing marbles with the boys at recess, the year I got my long ponytail cut. It was the year I went to Mrs. Russell’s classroom for reading, was the narrator of the end-of-school program and spent a week in June at Camp Safety Patrol.

I remember all that, but I don’t remember this imp, this scamp, this child who might just burst at any moment from the sheer volume of joy that has risen up through her chest and into her face. What has made her so cheerful? Is it the jaunty green felt beret? Is it the excitement of the field trip? Or is it just being ten years old?

"The great thing about getting older," Madeleine L’Engle, the writer best known for her children’s fantasy books, once told the New York Times, "is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been." The quote comes to mind later as I find myself contemplating the little girl with the silly smile. If I have not lost her, where is she?

Certainly she remains in my still-strong penchant for the cookies she sold, but I am not certain that I can detect her features in the face I see in the mirror each morning. I cannot swear that her curiosity or self-confidence or insouciance lingers in the posture I feel compelled to maintain most days. And I am absolutely sure she is not racing me to bed on the nights when life’s inevitable blows leave me spent in body and spirit.

It wasn’t so many days later that I saw a couple of Girl Scouts camped out at a grocery store entrance, card table covered in cookie pyramids of Thin Mints, Trefoils, Tagalongs and Samoas. I watched from a distance, listened to their sing-song voices call out, "Would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies?" I was stopped cold.

The words, the timbre, the chill in the air became the shaped notes of a song I knew by heart, its sheet music locked in a bottom drawer of my memory. Right then, right there, the ten-year-old me showed up from wherever she’d been hiding, vacationing, held ransom.

She dropped a cool, slick marble in my hand and my thumb bent to shoot it. She handed me a Blue Horse notebook and I spread the pages open across its spiral wire to see fat, loopy cursive vocabulary words. She offered me a pair of stark white Keds with a blue rubber label on the heel and I tightened the laces to go outside to play dodge ball.

I looked down to straighten my badge sash and when I looked back up she was gone. Except, of course, she wasn’t. She was exactly where she’d always been. With me. Inside me. Me.

I will always be ten years old. And fifteen. And thirty. And forty. I just may need to be reminded

Copyright 2011

Yard Work

It is not spring. One look at the calendar confirms it, but on this Saturday morning you could fool anybody. The branch is ringing with overlapping bird calls and the sky is baby blanket blue. The breeze is so slight as to not seem a breeze at all, but something like the close breath of a lover. There is no resisting the pull.

In shorts and a t-shirt I take a book outside to the deck and start to read. And in less than ten minutes I start to wheeze.

I am allergic to the ligustrum bush that grows at the corner of the house just off the edge of the deck. Eight or nine feet tall, its thick leaves stay beautifully green all year and it requires no attention except the occasional pruning to keep it from completely obscuring the bedroom window nearby. Said beauty and self-sufficiency are what have kept it alive for the ever-how-many years it’s been since I discovered that its pollen, inhaled into my respiratory system, result in a significant decrease in breathing function.

What I always do, in response to the ligustrum’s attack, is to sigh, gather my things and go inside. Without thinking. But today – What is it about today? – I don’t. Today I sigh, gather my things, go inside and make a decision. Today is the last day that I will be hindered, hampered, prevented, precluded. Today is the day I act.

Mama and Daddy are outside, too, duct-taping hose pipes together to irrigate some newly planted grape vines. I cross the yard and make my request: I ask Daddy, sometime when he has time, not necessarily today, just sometime, to take his chain saw (It’s a big bush.) down to my house and cut down the ligustrum bush.

"What about now?" he asks, just as I knew he would. "But I’ll tell you this. If you just cut it down, come spring it’s going to sprout back up. Why don’t we just pull it up with the tractor?"

And so it is that the John Deere 7810, with the harrow still attached and a chain with links as big as ham hocks attached to that, rumbles into the yard at Sandhill to pull up a bush. It takes less than three minutes. Total. And how many years have I wheezed and sighed?

Later, when the blue in the sky has faded to chambray and the shadows are falling from the west, I go back outside with my book and start to read. And continue reading. No wheezing.

I take a deep breath. Another one. How lovely to sit in the sunlight, feel the live stillness of the afternoon, absorb the silent tension of the earth about to be awakened. I close my book and consider the lesson of the ligustrum. Are there others that need to be pulled up? Not pruned, not trimmed back, not cut down to sprout again, but pulled completely out of the ground and dragged away to die. I wonder what attitudes or expectations have been cutting off my breath for years, what postures I’ve taken or defenses I’ve maintained in fruitless attempts to catch my breath, what fears have made me hold my breath.

I am reminded that the Hebrew Bible uses the same word ("ruach") for both breath and spirit. What have the ligustrums of doubt and anxiety done to my spirit? What have I missed? What have I lost? Why was it so easy to just get up and go inside?

For a moment I feel smothered with regret, suffocated by anger at myself and my failure. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

Something draws my attention to the spot where the ligustrum used to be. Its roots were wide, but not deep. The ground is barely disturbed, turned up just enough to welcome my trowel and some new growing thing. I raise my gaze from the hole and realize how different now is the view. The horizon has opened. I can see the road. I close my eyes, lift my chest, expand my lungs. And, in the calm, I feel my breath, my spirit rise.

Copyright 2011

Making Soup, Making Life

Making soup is therapeutic.

First, you gather the vegetables, potatoes dense and slightly rough, carrots gnarled and wrinkled, celery stringy and still carrying dirt in its pockets and onion slick beneath its papery skin. You peel the potatoes and carrots watching brown and orange curls of skin fall into the sink beneath the long strokes of the vegetable peeler. They pile onto each other like children wallowing in autumn leaves.

Then you chop. Cubes of potato and onion, discs of carrots, demi-lunes of celery. The solid sound of metal moving through organic matter. Chop. Chop. Chop. The knife gets stuck in the potato every now and then, its starch making glue on the blade. You stop, wipe it off and begin again. It moves through the celery with the rapidity of a sewing machine making a long seam. Little mountains grow on the cutting board, little mountains of effort.

Next you take a heavy pot, one it takes two hands to lift, one that reminds you how strong you are. You fill it about a third of the way full, maybe with water, maybe with broth or stock. It depends on what you want to have when you are done. You scoop the vegetables up with your hands and drop them into the pot smiling with each satisfying splash. They slide into the liquid and into each other. They look like jewels.

You might add some salt and pepper at this point. Maybe some bay leaves. It’s your soup. Season to taste.

You turn on the heat – medium low at this point –, cover the pot and leave it for a while. Fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. Maybe thirty. Just depends on how long it takes for the vegetables to become tender but still crisp. While you wait you clean up the mess.

Once the vegetables are ready you decide what kind of soup it will be. Does this soup want tomatoes? Does it want chicken and noodles? Does it want beans? Does it want the leftover corn and green beans in the Tupperware container that falls out of the refrigerator every time you open it?

Put it in, turn up the heat, cook a little longer. However long it takes. This is soup. It isn’t souffle.

When it’s ready, you get a bowl, a big bowl and fill it up. You watch the steam rise in silver wisps. You resist the almost irresistible urge to taste it right away. You will burn your tongue. You know you will. You lean down to smell it, to feel the steam hit your cheeks. You put your hands around the bowl. It is too hot to hold. You remember reading that the reason Japanese tea cups have no handles is that the Japanese know that if the cup is too hot to hold the tea is too hot to drink.

You distract yourself by finding a spoon, a napkin, maybe some crackers or a corn muffin, something to soak up what will be left at the bottom and unreachable by the spoon. Finally, just at the moment when you are sure you are going to die from anticipation, you venture a tiny sip from the edge of the spoon and, yes, yes, the soup is cool enough to eat. To eat, to slurp (if you are alone), to be drawn not just into your mouth and belly, but into your very veins, easing away not just hunger, but anger and loneliness and frustration and fatigue. Ah, soup.

Making soup is therapeutic. Because it’s a lot like making life. You gather the makings and trim them to fit your pot. You turn up the heat. You throw in a few surprises at the last minute. You wait while all the flavors meld. And then you fill yourself with it, with all of it.

And you remember – Please, please remember. – that it’s your soup, your life. There is no recipe. Only a matter of figuring out what it craves.

Copyright 2011

Cold Comfort

Ice hung off the eaves of the carport like jagged dragon teeth in a pre-schooler’s drawing of scary. Stiff and unresponsive to the wind that came rushing across the field and crying like a banshee, the ice-covered limbs of the sycamore tree could have been the dragon’s claws, sharp and pointed and crooked at awkward angles. Standing in the doorway, huddled inside my overcoat, I would have welcomed a quick puff of the dragon’s fire breath – just enough to break the chill until I could get into the car.

I nearly slipped going down the steps, muttered something unintelligible even to myself. I cranked the car, turned on the wipers, discovered that what I thought was water on the windshield was, in fact, ice. I turned on the defroster and waited. The glass got warmer; I didn’t. I tucked my gloved hands into my armpits. It didn’t help.

Once on the road, the tires crunched the ice and the frozen ground. The car seemed to move forward without traction, like a train skidding smoothly down a rail. The scenery was all white. I was in a lace bubble.

That was two weeks ago.

The deck was still wet with two days’ rain and the ground was soggy and slick. The wind was whipping around like a lariat in the hands of a rodeo cowboy and the sycamore tree limbs jerked back and forth in a St. Vitas dance of erratic jolts and twitches. Strands of my hair got caught in the free-for-all, snagged in my eyelashes, nearly inhaled as I gasped at the gust that rushed under the carport just as I opened the door.

When I turned on the windshield wipers they swiped easily across the cellophane-thin layer of water, leaving the glass completely clear, but for the thin squiggles sliding down the far sides like red wigglers out of a bait bucket. The road was muddy; the tires sank in the ooze of ruts already eight or ten inches deep. It made me think of the valley a four-year-old’s finger makes in still-warm cake icing.

That was this morning.

Winter. Not my favorite season. It is cold and dark. It is claustrophobic. It is too long. But it has its moments.

Like last Sunday afternoon. I could stand the incarceration no longer and went to get the dogs. They were as eager to get outside as was I and the three of us set out like kids at recess, eager and breathless. The breeze was a tad cool, but gentle, licking at my face and their fur. The few bird calls we heard came darting through the crisp air in irregular rhythms and the winter light, that angled laser that can transform frost directly into mist without becoming water, was so sharp that it made everything in the landscape look as though it were drawn by a pin-prick sharp No. 2 pencil.

I found a dead bird in the middle of the road and stopped to be amazed at the infinitesimal number of feathers, each one shaded in three different colors, that came together to make three broad horizontal bands. I found a scrub oak, no more than three feet high, growing in the sandy ditch and sprouting tiny acorns the size of a thimble. The dogs found an armadillo to chase into the branch, only to lose as it burrowed into perfectly round hole, and still came away with their tongues wagging in that gleeful, generous dog way.

It is four miles to the highway and back. (The dogs don’t go quite that far; they stop when they get in sight of the asphalt – something telling them that they don’t belong there – and wait for me to circle around.) It is a good distance for walking and, on this day, for finding things. I found beauty in death and promise in smallness. The dogs found joy in the unattainable. And we all found a vision of winter that was something more than cold.

Winter. Not my favorite season. But, like everything, it has its moments.

Copyright 2011

Around and Around

There’s a church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that used to be a shopping mall. I’ve never seen it, but I can imagine that its architecture isn’t exactly what one would call traditional. I understand, in fact, that the sanctuary – which they may not even call the sanctuary – is sort of, well, round. Not semi-circular with two or three aisles leading up to the pulpit like sun rays on an elementary school bulletin board, but round with chairs or pews placed all the way around the platform where the pastor stands. Interesting.

As I said, I’ve never seen this church, but I know a good bit about it because I subscribe to its podcast and listen to its pastors’ sermons on my iPod while running on the treadmill. I was listening just last week, in fact, when I realized that I’d downloaded not just an ordinary Sunday morning sermon, but the Christmas Eve sermon. I knew this because the pastor started by addressing the parents in the congregation who were obviously a little concerned about having their little ones in "big church."

"Don’t worry," he told them in his soothing voice, "if they’ve run off. We built this place in a circle for just that reason: eventually they will make it back around."

There was laughter, some of it forced, some of it relieved.

"And when they do make it back around," he continued, "they will be tired."

I cannot say that I remember anything he said for the next couple of minutes. I cannot say that I remember picking up my feet and running, though I am sure that I did because I did not fall. All I can remember is the feeling of being hit in the chest by a wave I didn’t see coming, the realization of just having heard something of the most profound importance.

I could see those children – dressed in warm Christmas outfits mailed to Michigan by their grandparents, cheeks the color of camellias, smiles open and breathy. They were laughing at the sheer joy of movement, pumping their chubby arms and looking around to make sure that everyone else was running, too.

Running is such a natural thing. We learn to crawl. We learn to walk. We learn to run. We learn that running is faster than walking. We learn that the best method for getting away from something we want to avoid is running.

What too many of us don’t learn is that life, like the church in Michigan, is built in a circle. We can run – from decision, from responsibility, from fear or pain –, but eventually we will make it back around. No matter how many times we make the loop, no matter how fast or slow we run, no matter how many water stops we make along the way, eventually (Two days? A month? A year? Ten years?) we will be back where we started and we’re going to come face to face with that from which we ran.

And we are going to be tired.

Which could be a bit disconcerting given the fact that the decision/responsibility/fear has just been sitting there waiting all this time.

Except for one thing: We’re all children. Every last one of us. And we know what to do when we’re tired. We know where to go when every last dream has died and every last ounce of hope has leached away. We know where to find arms big enough to hold us and all our fatigue and failures. And we know that it is in quietness and trust that we will regain our strength, the strength to stop running.

Sometime into the Christmas Eve sermon, sometime into my run I noticed that the background rumble had hushed and I could see the children again, this time curled into the laps of their parents, eyelids flickering, chests rising and falling, each and every one of them having made it back around.

Copyright 2011

Dancing With The Stars

I set the alarm for 3:15 a.m.. The lunar eclipse, I understood, would be most visible to those of us at approximately 32 degrees 22 minutes 2 seconds north latitude and 081 degrees, 53 minutes 2 seconds west longitude at exactly 3:17 a.m.. Two minutes would be just enough time to throw back the covers, throw on a bathrobe, throw open the door and dash into the front yard.

My calculations were excellent. I tip-toe-ran across the front porch and down the brick steps, made a hard right toward the southwest and threw my head back as far is it would go. At that exact moment the moon, a mottled yellow, pale as margarine, began to change color. From the lower lefthand curve the yellow yielded – slowly, slowly, slowly – to seashell pink and then to pale salmon and, finally, to deep rich coral. Translucent, like waxed paper or, better, like the glass blocks in bathroom windows. And so perfectly round it could have been drawn with the little metal compass I used in tenth grade geometry.

The sun, the earth, the moon in perfect alignment. On the winter solstice. The first time in 372 years. As the deeper color spread over the face of the moon, I realized that the constellations were brighter, that in the absence of the moon’s reflected light their own was suddenly more visible. I felt as though someone had handed me 3-D glasses and with just one step I could be walking among them, swimming in the Big Dipper, swinging from the North Star. I realized that I’d wrapped my arms around myself and I wasn’t sure whether it was from the cold or the sheer delight.

I do not know how long I stood there, acres of open field around me, light years of open sky above me. I know only that at some point my fleshly consciousness returned and I noticed that I was barefoot, that wet coldness was spreading through my feet into my legs as stealthily as the coral had bled into the yellow. I leaned my head back once more, twirled around once like a little girl in a petticoat and headed back inside.

The bed had not retained much of my warmth. I lay on my back, covers pulled up tight under my chin. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t calm my thoughts. I knew what had roused me from a warm bed on a cold night – the opportunity to bear witness to something that no one alive had ever seen before.

What I was trying to figure out was what had kept me there, alone, in the cold, in the dark, watching the moon change colors, staring at stars too distant to reach. Something familiar, but distant. Something I knew, but hadn’t experienced in a while. Something universal and, at the same time, intimate.

Eventually I slept, the image of the night sky cycling through my mind.

The next morning I sent a quick e-mail to a friend, sharing that I’d gotten up to see the eclipse. "The sky over Sandhill was as clear as I've ever seen it," I typed quickly, "and the constellations were so distinct, even without my glasses. I want to live in that awe. I want to exist in that state of reverence. I want everywhere I stand to be sacred ground."

Ah, yes, that was it. Awe. Reverence. That was what had wrapped me up, drawn me in. The acknowledgment of something, some thing beyond myself that is, at the same time, the essence of my self.

The next lunar eclipse will occur on June 15, 2011, and I plan to be watching. It will be beautiful and amazing and perhaps, depending on the circumstances, even particularly memorable. The next lunar eclipse on the winter solstice won’t happen until 2094. I doubt I’m around for that one, but somewhere on this green earth I am convinced there will be a woman standing in the darkness, staring at the stars, resisting the urge to dance. And the very thought of it makes me smile.

Copyright 2011

A Man's Reach

The blinds cut the winter sunshine into thick slices and they fall across my shoulder in long broad stripes. The movement of the rocking chair, forward and back, turns them into waves – reaching out and pulling back, a tide of light. Jackson is tilted in the crook of my arm, the rays making a halo of the soft fuzz on the top of his head.

He is, of course, an extraordinary child (as they all are to those to whom they belong). At six months old his coos float from the front of his mouth in long multi-syllabic strings and every so often he expels a deep breath from the top of his throat that sounds exactly like, "Hey!" When he does that while looking at me, I can’t help laughing out loud. Right now, though, he is quiet, mesmerized by the blinking links on the Christmas tree his great-grandmother hasn’t quite finished decorating. He stretches his fleshy pink hands toward them so slowly that the movement itself can’t be detected. What makes him reach? What makes him flex muscles he does not know he has, extend an arm which he can’t possibly understand is himself?

There is so much he has to learn. Walking will not be easy; there’s the whole balance thing to master. Talking, too, despite his adeptness at cooing, will take time; the voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative (the "th" sound) that he will have to master to say his great-aunt’s name is a real booger. Someone will have to teach him the multiplication tables, state capitals and the difference between amphibians and reptiles. Using the toilet, using a straw, using chopsticks. How to drive a tractor, cast a fishing line, throw a change-up.

But, somehow, before he can sit up alone, the child knows how to reach.

It is Christmas and so thoughts of my baby, our baby lead me to thoughts of the other baby, the one we visualize with wisps of straw sprayed around his mostly-naked little body, the one completely nonplussed by the large animal nostrils hovering over his face or the brilliant angel-light shining into his just-opened eyes, the one with the stamp of otherworldliness all over him.
For what did he reach? The flash of the jewels on the robes of the Magi? The softness of his mother’s breast?

The better question, I suspect, the question whose answer could and should make a difference in the way we live our lives is this one: For what did he reach when he grew to be a man? When the reach was no longer instinctual or involuntary, toward what did Jesus stretch out his hands? The leprous, the lame, the blind, the dead. The unloved, the disenfranchised, the condemned. The fearful, the hungry, the tired. He stretched them out as far as they would go and then left us with instructions to follow his example.

Jackson is sitting on his great-grandmother’s knees. She bounces him up and down. They both laugh. He reaches for her glasses.He will not be a baby forever. He will grow up, become a man, redirect his reaching. And in the light of this December afternoon I can only watch him sparkle like the Christmas tree lights and pray that his reaching will not be toward things, but always toward others.

Copyright 2010

Expectations Knotted and Tied

The laid-out field on the other side of the pond dam is unrolled like a bolt of ecru lace, knotted and tied into a landscape of bumps and nubs. That which was left to sprout and grow on its own over the spring and summer has died, stems and leaves that once stretched toward the sky now bent into creamy curves back toward the earth. The whole world is the color of toast.

To the left I can follow the property line toward the creek and then into the woods. To the right I can follow the rear edge of the pond and circle back toward the house. I am suddenly feeling contrary; I don’t want to follow anything. I walk straight into the overgrowth.

It feels as though I am walking on a quilt. The grass and clover and volunteer corn give quietly to my footfall and cushion each step. My shoes disappear and then reappear like a threaded needle. I know exactly where I am, but it feels as though I have discovered some new territory, am standing on some spot of earth where no one has stood for a long, long time.

Tractors pulling harrows and plows, combines churning and chewing stalks and vines, these are the treads to which these acres have grown accustomed, these are the footprints that men leave behind these days. I wonder how long it has been since a human being, even my father, has planted a foot here, exactly here.

I look down and realize that I have come upon a deer trail, a crease in the soil leading up to the rise that separates this field from the adjacent cultivated one. Heart-shaped prints overlap each other and never deviate more than three or four inches from the path. I cannot tell where it started and, following it now, I cannot tell where it leads.

But I follow it anyway. Up the slope toward the field road, up through taller grass that now grasps at my pants legs with burrs. Up and up even after the tracks themselves become hidden in the grass and I move ahead on memory and instinct alone.

Yesterday afternoon Lee Lee arrived for a brief visit. As old friends do, we spent the first of our few hours together catching up – bragging on children who are longer children, wondering whatever had happened to people with whom we had shared our college days. Eventually, though, as the day waned and our voices softened, we spoke of ourselves.

The longevity of our relationship is both a balm and a goad. She knows who I was and who I have become. I know the same of her. In each other’s presence we cannot be anyone other than who we are. With each other we cannot pretend. From each other we cannot hide.

In half-sentences, in phrases that trailed off into the lamp-lit night we wondered and supposed and queried. We solved no problems, we unraveled no mysteries, we reconciled no dilemmas. We asked a lot of questions, told a few stories and came to one single conclusion: This – this world, this life, the circumstances in which we now find ourselves – is not what we had expected.

I think of that now as I walk. The unexpected warmth and golden light of this late November Sunday. The unexpected deer trail. The unexpected softness of the dead foliage under my feet. Is anything ever what we expect?

Not long ago, Lee Lee made some hard decisions and changed the direction of her life. The paint that was always under her fingernails as an artist has been replaced by dirt. The sustainable farming that piqued her interest as a hobby has become her passion and her work. The near-constant sunshine of Florida has given way to the distinct seasons of Appalachia. She seemed to me, as we spoke of the inevitability of change, incredibly brave.

A few years ago I created a guest book for Sandhill. A blank book with a creamy silk cover. A Christmas gift from another friend, one I’ve known even longer than I’ve known Lee Lee. I’ve asked everyone who has spent the night under my quiet country roof to write a few words, just a remembrance for me of the time we spent together in my corner of the world.

Before she left I asked Lee Lee if she had remembered to write in the book. "Just a brief note," she said and smiled impishly, looking for the moment exactly like the innocent and unscarred 18-year-old I first knew.

Later, gathering up the bed linens in the guest room, I saw the book on the night stand and stopped to read what she’d had to say. "Okay, Kathy," she had written at the top of the page. "It's your turn. Make it what you want."

I felt the tears well up in my eyes. That was not what I expected.

Copyright 2010

Where Is Thy Sting?

One by one – purse, briefcase, gym bag – I toss into the car the tangible burdens with which I begin each day. I pause just long enough to watch wide brown sycamore leaves, curled like arthritic hands, scuttle nervously across the yard in response to an asthmatic breeze. Somewhere down the road a diesel engine grinds up a hill and its sound vibrates over empty fields and against my cheeks. It is dawn. It is autumn. It is still.

I back the car out of the carport and pull into the thin gray fog that has unfurled itself over the field, skimming the tops of big round bales of peanut hay and disappearing into the woods. My hands are cold; my shoulders shiver once and send a jolt down my arms into my fingers. It is daybreak. It is November. It is chill.

I do not turn on the radio. I do not plug my ears with the buds from my iPod. I do not need any additional voices in my head. There are too many already. Too much conversation going on. Too many questions demanding answers that I will never have.

Twice in eleven days I have stood in line to greet a new widow. Twice I have taken hands between my own, pressed them gently and said, "I am so sorry." Twice I have wrapped my arms around shoulders that felt as though they might simply fold in on themselves and disappear into my chest.

One of the widows was old enough to be my mother. One of them was old enough to be me. One had been married over 50 years, the other nearly 30. The younger of the two said, "In a world where marriages don’t seem to last very long any more, I thought we’d been together a long time." Pausing, she looked down at the crumpled Kleenex in her hand and then back at me. "I was wrong."

Minister and chaplain Kate Braestrup wrote about going over vows with a soon-to-be-wed couple. The bride-to-be was a little unsure about "‘til death do us part." The reverend, herself a widow, pointed out the obvious but often overlooked fact that all marriages end, not just the ones that are terminated by the signature of a judge. "Being parted by death is actually your best-case scenario," she wrote. "Being parted by death is what happens if a marriage works."

Hmmm.

One of the voices in my head reminds me that both of the women, both of the widows, nursed their husbands through lingering illnesses and that they must be experiencing, along with paralyzing grief, at least some semblance of relief. Another voice, a staunchly Protestant voice, offers that the women would be feeling joy at the knowledge that their husbands had made the journey to "a better place." But there is a third voice, a soft female voice that starts as a tender trembling in the center of my chest, crescendoes into gasping sobs and contorts itself into words: "But I love him!"

The space inside my head gets very quiet. The other voices hush. How does reason or religion respond to that? How does logic counter love?

The sun emerges over the horizon, a dull yellow disk with blurred edges. The fog has risen like candle smoke and dissipated into the almost-blue sky. I park the car, go into the office, turn on the computer. A bell rings and the screen produces a birthday reminder for a friend. A friend who died two (or was it three?) years ago.

I feel the sadness of his death all over again and, then, unexpectedly, the sadness gives way to something stronger, something purer, something indestructible. The sadness gives way to love. As must everything.

Anger is destructive, but it cannot stand before love. Betrayal is painful, but it cannot stand before love. And the widows whose hands I held will tell you that Death is bitter. But even Death cannot stand before love.

Copyright 2010

By Water and Words

A few Sundays ago, on a luminous October morning, my great-nephew was baptized. Sunshine slanted through the stained glass windows like a sword’s swath, stippled the curves of the dark wooden pews with shards of golden light and afforded dust motes a spotlight within which to dance.

While his parents met with the minister before the service began, I sat holding him, dressed in crisp white (a tiny shirt and pants, not a gown), and watched his eyelids, thin and blue-veined, slowly close. How lucky I was that he would fall asleep while I held him. No one, not even a grandmother, would disturb a sleeping baby in church.

I willed myself to absorb it all – the warm weight cradled against my chest, the soft fuzz on his head beneath my cheek, the tiny up-and-down breath movements of his back. One never forgets how to hold a baby, how to still all the voices in one’s head and concentrate on what matters.

The sanctuary filled. The organist began playing. The round-cheeked acolytes nervously lit the candles. Item by item the order of worship played out. Offertory prayer. Creed. Gloria Patri.

Then we were all standing at the altar, so many of us that the baptismal font was completely hidden from the congregation. Grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. The minister took our baby into his hands, held him out like the sacrament that he is and asked, "What name do you give this child?"

"Jackson Carl," his father offered, in a voice softer than I’ve ever heard him use.

More words, old words, repetitive words. And then the minister poured water on Jackson’s head and welcomed him into the community of faith. It was, of course, simply a ritual. The faith espoused by those who stood at that altar will not be Jackson’s until, unless he chooses to make it so. But, the thing is, ritual matters. Whether it be in church or at table, pre-game or post-election, ritual generates a collective memory which, in turn, produces the "belongingness" that sits smack dab in the middle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Jackson will not remember his baptism day. He will not remember that the congregation sang "Be Thou My Vision," that the Gospel reading was from Luke or that the Epistle was from 2 Timothy. He will not remember that he shrieked (and continued shrieking) loudly in response to the dousing with cold water or that the minister carried him down the aisle of the church laughing and proclaiming that he would, obviously, make a good choir member some day. He will not remember the jockeying of his various relatives for the opportunity to be photographed holding him. He doesn’t have to. That is the job of those of us to whom he belongs.

The writer Elizabeth Gilbert says that we engage in ritual "to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma." She is right, I think. Words are my way of processing emotions, but I had no words to hold the emotions I was experiencing standing at that altar, my parents at my shoulders, loving this child. This child who will delight and disturb, entertain and exasperate, please and perplex me just as his father has done. As he continues to do.

I had no words. Neither did any of the other Bradleys or Bedingfields gathered there. But someone had. So we spoke them. Exactly as they have been spoken by countless others before us. And as we spoke them, they floated up into the sunlight and joined the dust motes in a dance of inimitable joy.

Copyright 2010

How Sweet The Sound

Bobby Cox sits in the home dugout at Turner Field, arms folded across his belly like a slightly discontented Buddha. It is the bottom of the ninth and the good guys, as Skip Caray used to say, are down 3 – 2.

The coach checks his scorecard, looks down the bench and calls for a pinch hitter. It isn’t a surprise call. At least it wouldn’t have been, say, 48 hours before. Brooks Conrad, a 30-year-old career minor leaguer who finally made the big league roster in the spring, a scrapper that team captain Chipper Jones nicknamed Raw Dog, hit two pinch hit grand slam homeruns in the regular season, heroics that made any number of highlight reels. Everybody knows what he can do in a pinch.

But everybody also knows what he did just last night. Pressed into service as a starting infielder near the end of the season after injuries claimed both Chipper and Martin Prado, Conrad has been defensively inconsistent and twenty-four hours earlier he committed three errors at second base, the third a tailor-made double play ball that would have ended the inning and preserved a Braves lead. The ball bounced between his legs into the outfield and thousands of Braves fans, myself included, sprang from their sofas, throwing our arms into the air and screaming, "I could have made that play!"

The Braves lost the game.

The next day, with sports writers from one end of the country to the other comparing Conrad to goats of championship series past, Bobby Cox made the decision to take Conrad out of the lineup for that night’s game. But not as punishment, not as discipline, not as a show of authority.

"I talked to Brooksy at length this morning, and he needs a day off," Cox told reporters. "He needs to get away from it for a day. ... This shouldn't happen to anybody in the game of baseball. But it's happened to [him]. I told him to hold his head high, and maybe pinch-hit and win a game for us." So there we are, all of us, biting our nails, sitting on the edges of our seats, watching Number 26 walk toward the plate, wondering if Number 6 had pulled just one more bit of magic out of his baseball cap.

He didn’t. Instead Conrad hit a fly ball to centerfield. And, two outs later, the season ended for the good guys.

I’ve been a fan for a long time. I remember a lot of big moments. Most of those moments play out in my memory to a soundtrack of loud cheers and enthusiastic broadcast calls. But none of them, not even Sid Bream sliding under the tag at home, will stay with me longer than that one quiet moment in Game 4 of the 2010 National League Division Series, a play that is recorded in the scorebook as simply F8.

It was, it dawned on me as I sat on the sofa and watched Conrad turn and trot slowly back toward the dugout, a moment of pure grace.

We Protestants talk a lot about grace. We’ve talked about it so much that we don’t even have to define it anymore, we just use its tag line: unmerited favor. We’ve requisitioned it for use as a get-out-of-jail-free card. We call ourselves Christians and then sanitize what it means to be one since, as we so kindly explain to those who are less biblically literate, we no longer "live under the law."

I have to wonder, though, how many of us who claim to have experienced that grace are as quick to offer it as the was the man in the dugout? How often have we given an opportunity to someone who didn’t deserve it? How often have we offered a second chance to someone who bungled the first one? How often have we given more than has been asked?

In his post-game, actually post-career, interviews Bobby Cox said he hadn’t really thought about it being his last game. That it wasn’t until the game was over, until the final out was made, until everybody started heading toward the locker room and the cheers of the fans called him out on the field for one final round of applause and a tipping of the hat by the opposing team that he realized he’d put on the uniform for the last time.

Poignant. Bittersweet. And, dusted with grace, amazing.

Copyright 2010

Friday Night Frights

My godson the football coach isn’t having a very good year. Actually, he personally is having a very good year (He got married in January to a wonderful young woman he takes every opportunity to introduce as "my smokin’ hot wife."); it’s his football team that can’t seem to get it together.

There’s not a lot of depth, regardless of how you define the word, on the team and by last week they had lost so many players to injury that they didn’t practice in pads lest they lose one more person and not have enough healthy bodies to put eleven men on the field. It was so bad that, at one point Friday night, they had to put in the ninth-grade quarterback.

It had all the makings of a great inspirational story – the scrawny inexperienced guy would come in and somehow, inexplicably, miraculously lead the team if not to victory, at least to a touchdown. Except, I’m sorry to say, that’s not what happened:

The freshman goes in, takes the snap, back pedals from the line. The rag-tag, patchwork, supremely cliche’-worthy offensive line somehow holds. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. The weary fans hold their collective breath waiting for the skinny little kid to throw the ball. But he doesn’t. And eventually a defensive lineman breaks through for a tackle.

Second down. The freshman takes the snap. Moves backward, this time a little quicker. The line, unbelievably, rises above itself again, holding the defenders in their places. Receivers run back and forth across the field waiting, waiting, waiting for the ball to be released. But it isn’t. And eventually, again, the quarterback goes down.

My godson – he whose DNA is made of X’s and O’s, he whose family folklore is rife with tales of last-second victories and come-from-behind charges, he who can offer up halftime inspiration like most good southern boys can say grace, that is, on a moment’s notice and with passion that will bring tears to your eyes – calls the ninth grader to the sidelines. He puts his hands on the boy’s shoulders and gets in his face, eyeball to eyeball. "Son, your receivers are open. The line is holding back the defenders. Why aren’t you throwing the ball?"

In a voice trembling somewhere between a scream and a sob, the boy looks back at his coach and says, "They’re everywhere! They’re everywhere!"

He was referring, of course, to the linebackers, the cornerbacks, the safetys. The players who are big and fast and mean, whose only job is to make sure that the thrown football doesn’t reach its intended target and, if it does, that the target is punished so severely that the football cannot possibly be held. They are trained to detect the slightest mistake – a brief delay in the release, a negligible turn in direction – to exploit that mistake and to intercept the football.

They are, as the poor little quarterback said, everywhere.

For most of history, we humans could easily identify the linebackers and cornerbacks and safetys. They were wild animals and disease and despots. Not so now. The 21st century versions of Dick Butkus and Lawrence Taylor and Charles Woodson are terrorism and recession and environmental collapse. They are invisible, intangible, inscrutable. And they are everywhere.

So what will prevent them from also being paralyzing? What will keep us from becoming like the freshman quarterback, afraid to even try hoisting our dreams into the air?

I talked to my godson the football coach this morning. We chatted about the season in general, how the losses were growing pains and how his job was to invest in his kids and give them somebody to look up to. And we talked about the freshman quarterback, the one who couldn’t let go of the ball. "What did you say to him" I asked, "when he said, ‘They’re everywhere!’?"

"I told him, ‘No, they’re not.’"

No. They’re not.

Sometimes, when every face is the face of a stranger, when every promise lies in pieces at your feet, when the rope that has held the anchor of your faith has frayed in two, it is easy to think they’re everywhere. And that they are going to win.

It is in those moments that each of us is a ninth grade quarterback needing someone look us in the eyes and say, "Things are not as they appear. All hope is not lost. Now, haul back and throw."

Copyright 2010

Needing Rain

My mother is a seamstress. I grew up sitting on the floor at her feet playing with cards of buttons and seam binding, arranging dozens of spools of thread in prism arcs, studiously examining pictures and descriptions on pattern envelopes. It should come as no surprise, then, that images of the natural world often come to me in dressmaker’s terms.

Barely visible quail tracks across the road look like hem-stitching. Green corn husks feel like dupioni silk. The incessant knocking of a woodpecker way down in the branch clatters just like the zipper foot on a Singer.

This morning I looked out over the deck at the peanut field that pushes up as far as the chinaberry tree at the corner of the yard and I saw a silver-gray cardigan embellished with row upon row of dark green soutache trim. Classic and elegant.

A couple of nights ago I sat outside with Mama and Daddy while they picked off peanuts for boiling and asked him when he would start plowing them up. "I’d be doing it now," he said, "if the ground weren’t so dry. We need rain."

We need rain.

Three words. A simple declarative statement. He didn’t even look up when he said it, just kept plucking the white-skinned eights from their vines and dropping them into a bowl.

We need rain. It is the summer’s chant, cheer, plea and prayer.

In the spring, when it is time to plant, we watch the skies closely, measure the water that falls from the sky in tenths of inches, count the days between showers like children count M&M’s. In summer, when the seeds have graciously responded to the rain and our entreaties by breaking themselves open and bursting into the air, thin ribbons of stiff green velvet, we watch and measure and count some more and add to those ministrations the magic of irrigation, great arcs of rhinestones glittering in the dazzling sunlight and splashing flatly onto vines that have sprouted hundreds of tiny leaves.

By now, by fall, should not the watching, measuring, counting be done? I know the answer to that question. I don’t ask why – when the peanuts are fully mature, when there is no more growing left to do, when they are ready to be plowed up and left in the sun to dry – we need rain. The answer is release.

There is a reason we call it Mother Earth. She nurtures. She protects. She also clings. She holds tightly. She does not let go without a fight. The rain must come to loosen her grip on that which she believes is hers.

We all, men and women, mothers and non, understand that. Each of us knows what it is to conceive and bear a dream, an idea, a relationship. We tend it (Isn’t it interesting that "tend" and "tender" are almost the same word?) and nourish it, often to our own detriment. We chant and cheer and plead and pray. We coax it out of the ground and delight in its appearance.

But we tend (There’s that word again.) to forget that the cycle of growth is never complete until there is a harvest. Until that which has been grown is picked, plucked, shucked or, sometimes, slaughtered. And because we are not capable of letting go on our own, the rain comes. Gently, softly, tenderly loosening the soil, loosening our grip.

Eventually, within days I hope, the clouds will empty over Adabelle and the peanut plows will roll over my silver-gray cardigan removing its soutache trim. The stitches will unravel smoothly and evenly and the fabric will not be torn.

Copyright 2010　

Summer Evenin'

Henry James wrote that the two most beautiful words in the English language are "summer afternoon." Henry James did not live in south Georgia. If he had, his opinion, in my opinion, would have been somewhat different.

Had Henry known the sensation of spontaneous perspiration, if he had contended with the puddling of said perspiration in the crooks of his arms, the folds of his eyelids, and every stitch of his undergarments, Henry may very well have said that summer evening or, more appropriately, the two-syllabled evenin’ are the two most beautiful words in the English language. And had he done so, I would have heartily agreed.

Once the convection oven sun eases her way past the horizon, leaving behind nothing but soft blue-gray light of summer dusk, it is possible to see and hear the voluptuousness of the season – the color wheel of green that spans every shade from chartreuse to hunter, the soprano crickets and baritone toads. The streaks of color just above the horizon that look like chalk drawings on a sidewalk. The low and steady insect buzz that moves in waves across a newly-mown yard, its smell tart and clean. The chill of new dew on bare feet.

There is a special kind of languidness imposed by summer evening. It is neither lethargy nor laziness, but, rather, a welcome inaction, a permissible stillness in which few over the age of twelve ever indulge. And, so, when the first signs of autumn emerge from the edges of the day – a chill breeze or a singular red leaf – the words "summer evening" change key, move from major to minor chord and make a person wistful for the season that will soon be gone.

It wasn’t a particularly busy summer, this one nearly past. Not like last summer where it seemed there was an out-of-town wedding every other weekend, too many weeds to pull and flowers to dead-head, no opportunity to take well-earned vacation days. No, this summer spent itself in small incalculable increments, like pennies falling from a pocket hole, and as the earth spins us toward fall, I wonder where went all the days.

There is a moment, though, that I will remember for a long long time. One night an old friend and I took some beach chairs down to the very edge of the surf on St. Simons. The waves swept up thick and dark like curls of chocolate just before they flattened out into silver leaf under the light of the full moon. Up the beach the silence and the darkness were broken by a group of rowdy teenagers with flashlights and my friend and I expressed, simultaneously, the wish that they would just go away. Anyone, we agreed, who could not appreciate the serenity, the near-sacredness of such a moment just needed to go inside.

We spoke in low voices, my friend and I, voices just loud enough to be heard over the shoosh shoosh of the waves. We spoke, as people who have known each other a long time do, of the passage of time – its speed and its consequences. We spoke of the people we are and the people we had thought we’d be. Bittersweet is too strong a word to use to describe our words and the tones in which they were delivered. No bitterness for two people whose lives have been relatively easy, no saccharine sweetness for two people whose vision is clear.

Soon the words trailed off into the night and we sat, still and thoughtful and facing the moon.

The summer is done now and the perennial garden is going brittle and brown. The summer is done and the porch light is coming on sooner. The summer is done and there are no photographs of exotic places to post on Facebook, but I will remember it for this: There are worse ways to spend a summer evening than sitting on the beach. There are harder things to do than be silent in the presence of a good friend, one whose history overlaps yours at angles no compass could measure. There are heavier burdens to carry than a beach chair and a pair of shoes.

I know this and I am grateful. And because there are worse and harder and heavier, the gift of that moment under the moon is nothing less than grace.

Copyright 2010

Treasure Mountain

It is about a mile to the top of the mountain. The trail is rocky and narrow, so narrow that two people cannot walk side-by-side. In late summer the thick canopy of trees offers little in the way of shelter from the fleece-like heat, but a few of the trees have already started dropping leaves, most of them red, like paper napkins blown off a picnic table.

I’m climbing this mountain not because it’s beautiful and not because it’s wonderful exercise, though it is both of those things. I’m climbing this mountain because Katherine asked me to climb it with her.

It was 35 years ago this month that Katherine and I met – she a naive freshman, I an experienced sophomore. Only it wasn’t really anything like that. Katherine was then, and still is, the daredevil, the risk-taker. I was, and still am, the planner, the caution light, the holder of the safety net. It was an unlikely friendship, but all these years later very easy to explain – Katherine has always made sure that I didn’t take life too seriously while my job was to make sure that she took it seriously enough. Two sides of the scale perfectly balanced.

Like most people who have maintained a close relationship for that long, we bear scars – some self-inflicted, some inflicted by other people, and, the hardest to admit, some inflicted by each other. Both of us have lines at the corners of our eyes that were not there when we faced off against each other on the soccer field. Both of us have hearts marked by disappointment and discontent. Our stories are, simultaneously, different and the same as the years have overlapped at odd and interesting angles.

Where they have overlapped on this particular Sunday morning is the mountain just down the road from where Katherine has recently moved to take a new job. We’ve undertaken more than one physical adventure together (including the white water rafting trip in which three of us – Katherine, myself and our girlfriend Robbie – navigated an eight-person raft through a hydraulic in Class 3 rapids to our guide’s cries of "Textbook! Simply textbook!"), but it’s been a while. Still, it is easy to fall into a rhythm of walking and talking that I have experienced with few others.

"Keep your eyes on the ground," Katherine warns me as we cross the short bridge that lies near the bottom of the trail. She’s been doing the mountain every day for several weeks now and knows the terrain. "It’s rocky and it will be easy to turn an ankle if you’re not careful." I don’t like this idea; I want to see the trees and whatever birds might be around. And it feels odd to have Katherine be the cautious one – she who climbed the water tower at Wesleyan in the dark, she who stopped her car in the rain and pulled a bleeding truck driver from his vehicle and stayed with him until the ambulance came, she who knows no fear except that of a mother.

At the summit we rest for a few minutes, make friends with the dogs – a boxer and a golden retriever – of a couple of other hikers and then start back down. Katherine reminds me to keep my eyes on my feet and I squelch the protest that rises in my throat. She is, after all, only trying to protect me and it’s not as though I’ve never seen a tree.

About halfway down the mountain Katherine stops to point out something at her feet. A handful of nuts, dark and shaped like tiny figs, lie atop a cushion of fallen leaves. Nearby are a scattering of chartreuse-colored acorns, longer and bigger than any we’ve ever seen. A careful examination of my Audubon book will later reveal that the acorns come from a chinkapin oak and that the nuts are chestnuts. Only when my visit is over, when I am driving myself down the interstate toward home does it occur to me that we never would have found the treasures had we not been looking down. Had we not been moving slowly. Had we not been being careful. What an unexpected lesson for me to learn from Katherine.

Thirty-five years is a long time, but not nearly long enough. I get the distinct feeling that there are more mountains to climb, more treasures to find and more lessons to learn.

Copyright 2010

"We'll Cross That Bridge ... "

Start across the Sidney Lanier Bridge from either direction and, just before you reach the crest, you will become convinced that you are going to drive straight into the sky. On a hot July day – when white puffy clouds approach like meringues, seductive with soporific sweetness, clouds that look like the blow-up slides used to rescue passengers from airplanes – that’s exactly what you want to do.

But you don’t. Because at just the moment that you would let go of the steering wheel and be drawn into the ether like the black-and-white in "Car 54, Where Are You?", gravity and engineering overrule the temptation and you are towed back to earth. Saved and safe.

One of the first books I ever bought through the TAB Book Club was "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" by Thornton Wilder. The plot is simple and made perfectly clear by its first sentence: "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." Father Juniper, a Franciscan missionary, witnesses the collapse and it becomes his quest to discover why these five people should have been the ones to die, whether their deaths were "God’s will" or just bad luck. Toward that end, he spends six years compiling a book of interviews of everyone who knew the victims. In the end, his quest, as is so often the case, costs him his life.

It is hard not to think of the Marquesa and Esteban and the others as the car I am driving rushes down the incline, hard not to think of them and be grateful that bridge-building is so much better 400 hundred years later. Hard not to lose myself for a moment in wondering, like Father Juniper, how much of what happens to each of us is God’s will or luck or, hardest to accept, the unavoidable result of our own often-poor choices.

At the bottom of the bridge the broad blue vista gives way to rusty metal buildings on one side of the road, mid-summer marsh on the other. I can’t decide if it is the air-conditioning or the thought of driving off into the sky that makes me shiver.

I cross bridges all the time. The Ogeechee River separates Bulloch County from each of the other three counties in this judicial circuit, so at least five or six times a month I find myself balanced for a few seconds on a span of concrete and iron stretching over its dark brown water. There is a short bridge over a creek about four miles from home and I cross that one twice a day.

Those bridges are different from the 480-foot high "cable-stayed" version that stretches across the South Brunswick River, the one on which the imp of the perverse arrived unbidden to suggest to me that driving off the bridge into the clouds was not only possible, but pleasurable. Crossing those bridges is like playing connect-the-dots: With a distance so short, it is easy to draw a straight line. Crossing the Sidney Lanier Bridge is like learning plane geometry.

It reminds me that the in-between is a place of its own and not to be hurried through. It demonstrates that the longer the distance between two points, the greater the likelihood that something exists between them. It teaches me that connecting two of anything, be it pieces of land or PVC pipe or people, requires great attention to detail.

A couple of days later I am home from my brief trip to the beach. In one of those unexplainable moments of synchronicity, my eyes light on my copy of "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," over 40 years old, pages faded to the color of weak tea, the glue in the paperback spine grown brittle as dead leaves. I think that maybe I will read it again. Perhaps Father Juniper’s search for answers might help me with my own.

Days pass. I finish the book I am reading. I pick up another one. Not "The Bridge of San Luis Rey."

More days pass. I am looking at the notes I made about the Sidney Lanier Bridge, thinking about Father Juniper. I start, with the amazing assistance of Google Search, looking things up. I learn that "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" has been made into a movie on three separate occasions and that it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1928. I also learn that Tony Blair, at a memorial service for the British victims of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, read the novel’s last sentence: "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

I suppose it’s no wonder that both Father Juniper and his book were burned.

Copyright 2010

Continuing Education

The table is large and round. The food is good. The conversation is warm and inclusive. We laugh a lot. Some of the laughter is directed at each other. Some of it is directed toward the unspeakable matters with which we deal every day and which we can’t share with the people we love, the unavoidable dark humor of those who see the worst in humanity and manage, somehow, not to fall into the abyss themselves.

It’s just dinner, but after a long day of cerebral exertion on matters as weighty as the death penalty in Georgia, it is more than that. It is a safety net, a pressure valve, a decompression chamber. It is a couple of hours in which to forget the darkness.

A couple of days later, on the final morning of the conference at which we receive the continuing education training that the State Bar mandates, the speaker concludes his presentation by showing a clip from "To Kill A Mockingbird." It’s not the first time any of us have seen it. It is a staple in such presentations, but it is particularly appropriate this year, the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book by Harper Lee.

The jury comes in and delivers the unavoidable and unexpected verdict. The judge, not quite as stone-faced as he might like, offers not a word of thanks for their service, but simply says, "This jury is dismissed." The defendant is taken off, silent, in handcuffs while his lawyer – Atticus Finch, the only man in town brave enough to take the case – says something to the defendant about talking to his wife, making an appeal, receiving no response save a blank stare.

The courtroom is empty now and Atticus carefully places his papers inside a battered briefcase. Every person in the balcony stands in respect for the man as he walks out without looking at them. And I, of course, cry. It is what I do every time I see Tom Robinson convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. Every time I see Atticus Finch walk out of that courtroom alone. Every time I take long enough to reflect on why I, why we do what we do.

Many of the juveniles that I prosecute have mental evaluations performed to ensure that they are legally competent to address the charges against them. The standard form of those evaluations includes inquiry into the role of the various players and I always read these evaluations with some trepidation. The juveniles are generally pretty good at relaying the role of the judge ("Decide if I did it or not.") and their attorneys ("Help me tell my side of the story."), but not one, not one in the ten years I’ve been doing this work, has ever gotten it right when it comes to what I am there to do. They say things like "She there to send me off." Or "She want to make the judge believe I’m lying."

My job and the job of every prosecutor at every level of the judiciary system is the same. We are charged with one thing and one thing only – to find the truth. And if the truth is that the man or woman, boy or girl charged with a violating the law did not, in fact, violate the law, then we are delighted to see that person walk out of that courtroom. If he or she did violate the law, then we are there to make sure that the appropriate consequences are meted out.

I look around the conference room at the hundreds of men and women from across the state who do what I do every day, who read those same evaluations and know that we are often misunderstood and not always appreciated and I see that I am not the only one with tears in my eyes. Despite the evil and violence and destruction to which we bear witness every day, we are still touchable. It makes me sigh with relief.

There are a lot of reasons I became a lawyer. One of them was a real young man named Sam Brannen who came to Career Day at Statesboro High School, leaned against the teacher’s desk and, as he talked, made me think, "I could do that." And one of them was a fictional young man named Atticus Finch who, brought to life by Gregory Peck, made me think, "I have to do that."

So I did. And 29 years later, I am reminded that there are a lot worse ways to spend one’s days than looking for the truth.

Copyright 2010

Vantage Point

It was about eight o’clock when I sat down on the front steps, binoculars perched on my nose to study the herd of deer that had crept from the green at the far edge of the field to eat supper. There were about ten of them, including a yearling who, like all toddlers, couldn’t slow down enough to eat.

A large male had heard the front door open and close and had his gaze, steady like that of a sniper, trained in my direction, alert to the slightest movement that might portend danger for his family. In the magnification of the binoculars I could see his broad white chest shaped like a shield. His caramel-colored coat was tight and smooth, stretched over muscles that bulged and curved like waves frozen mid-crest.

Deer are lovely creatures. Delicate lips that part just enough for the tender peanut leaves to be grasped by hidden teeth. Limbs that stretch into a horizontal parenthesis as they spring into the heavy summer air. Eyes that stare with curiosity and suspicion and something akin to humanness.

I sat there for a long time, elbows on my knees, watching the deer, smelling the grass, listening to the insect buzz swelling from the branch.

A few days before I’d bought a couple of gardenia bushes. Grandmama Anderson had gardenias in her yard. Mama has a huge one out back near the grapevines. The scent of gardenias is the essence of deep summer and I wanted that scent within smelling distant of my own back door.

Every afternoon I poured a little water into the black plastic pots, following the very clear instructions to keep them moist "before and after planting." I kept waiting for rain, any rain at all, to soften the dirt enough for a shovel. After a couple of weeks of my daily baptisms, we got an afternoon shower and the gardenias went into the ground.

Drenched in sweat even at dusk, I stood back from the gardenias, gauged how they would look mature and covered in cream-colored flowers and how they would make my bedroom smell when I opened the windows. I was pleased. Hot and dirty, but pleased.

The next day we got another shower so I didn’t have to pull the hose from the other side of the house to water the gardenias and the coreopsis and the Russian sage. On the third day, we didn’t and I did. I rounded the corner of the deck. "Oh, no!" I heard myself gasp.

One of the gardenia plants had been dug out and thrown over on its side, several of its branches eaten down to nubs. The other was still standing, but had been clearly nibbled. Suddenly the loveliness of the deer with whom I share these woods evaporated. They became trespassers, interlopers, unwelcome visitors who’d audaciously come within 15 feet of where I was unsuspectingly sleeping the night away to graze on a buffet to which they’d not been invited. They had broken our usually easy detente and I felt betrayed.

I went to get the shovel and, as I went, I remembered the afternoon on the front steps when I’d been happy to watch the deer munching on Daddy’s peanuts. They didn’t seem so voracious or brazen then. Funny how a change in perspective results in, well, a change in perspective.

I thrust the end of the shovel into the same dirt I’d excavated just a couple of days earlier, tossed it to the side, repeated the motion again and then again. I grasped the gardenia at the base of its thin trunk and dropped it into back into the hole. I replaced the dirt and patted it down with my foot. I backed away to make sure that the plant was standing straight and realized that I’d not removed the tag, the one that instructed me to keep the plant moist before and after planting. The tag, I now noticed, that also proclaimed in big white letters "Deer Resistant."

How could you not laugh at that?

Copyright 2010

Eyesight and Vision

I leaned into the last loop of the S-curve on the road that leads me home. On the edge of the road about 25 yards ahead I saw a black squirrel, sitting on his haunches, tiny little rodent hands up to his mouth.

Except that it wasn’t a squirrel.

The eyes and the brain, co-perpetrators of fraud, tend to create objects that aren’t really there. The rods and cones and that magical lens that turns images upside down toss neurological impulses onto the brain which chooses to interpret the impulses as something familiar, something it knows. So a dark object on the side of a dirt road, about 10 inches high and 4 inches wide, exhibiting just the slightest amount of movement would be, in the less-than-a-second processing time of the brain, a squirrel.

Except that, as previously pointed out, it wasn’t.It was a corner of a dark plastic trash bag, one thrown or having flown out of the bed of a pick-up truck and having been buried under the dirt by the tires of a couple of weeks’ worth of cars and trucks and tractors. And since the throwing/flying of such bags has become, unfortunately, an increasingly more frequent event on my road, it took only another half-second for my brain to adjust and send the slightly less familiar, but more accurate message.

It is amazing to me the speed with which we see, interpret and react. In the unmeasurable length of time between seeing the squirrel and seeing the trash bag, I thought, "Gee, a squirrel. He’s black. I haven’t seen a black squirrel in a long time. Aren’t they usually around in winter? How cool is that, a black squirrel in summer! I hope he doesn’t run out in front of me. But it’s really not a squirrel. No, it’s a trash bag. That makes me so mad. Why do people throw trash on the road?" All within the time it took me to blink my eyes once.

One of our Juvenile Court judges is fond of explaining to young speeders that it takes an average of 1.5 seconds for a driver to respond to a visual stimulus by braking. "If you’re driving 70 miles an hour," he tells them, "you will have already traveled 160 feet before you can get your foot on the brake."

I was driving considerably less than 70 miles an hour that afternoon, so I’d probably gone only 50 feet or so when I lifted my foot toward the brake, another 25 when I realized the squirrel was not a squirrel.And – This is where I got really confused. – another 25 when my brain recalibrated again to determine that the squirrel that was a trash bag was, in fact, a squirrel.

A black squirrel sitting on his haunches, tiny little rodent hands up to his mouth.

Expectancy trumped by cynicism surprised by reality.

A few months ago I cut a cartoon out of the Sunday paper. A brother is looking for his little sister and finally finds her sitting at the base of a tree in which there is a tiny red door. "What are you doing?" he asks.

"Waiting to see the elf."

"There’s no elf," the exasperated brother explains. "The crazy old cartoonist who used to live here put that fake door on the tree to fool his kids."

Totally nonplused, the little sister insists that she has seen the elf herself. Big brother, obviously worldly wise and impatient, says, "I’ll believe it when I see it," and walks away.

Little sister retakes her seat at the base of the tree, props her elbows on her knees and says, "Sometimes things have to be believed to be seen."

I drove slowly past the black squirrel who, at the last moment, darted into the ditch. It bothered me that my brain had been so quick to adjust its perception, so eager to change delight to disgust, so ready to see what wasn’t really there. When did I start seeing a trash bag in every squirrel? When did it become not just easy, but automatic to choose the ordinary over the magical? When, I want to know, did I become the big brother instead of the little sister?

Copyright 2010