For Ophelia

So bright that I could make out the fluted edges of the leaves of the geraniums. So bright that the rocking chairs glowed in the shadows of the porch. So bright that across the way I could tell, even in the dark of midnight, where the field ends and the woods begin.  It was the first honey moon to fall on Friday, the 13th in almost a hundred years, an event that will not happen again, according to astronomers, until 2098, an appointment I will not be able to keep.

Bare feet planted on the top step, knees folded like a pocket knife to make a ledge for my elbows, palms splayed to make a ledge for my chin, I stared at the coin of the realm floating in the southern sky.  I stared and breathed a prayer of gratitude for summer.

It is not yet July and I have already planted basil, pinched its leaves, and tasted spring in homemade pesto.  I have made bouquets of sweet mint and peppermint picked from the plot at my back door, dropped their leaves into tall glasses of sweet tea, and sniffed with every sip the scent of green. I have cut bunches of hydrangea, filled Mason jars and Waterford crystal vases with their purple and lavender and pale blue puffs, and cared not at all that the tables got sprinkled with hydrangea dust.  I can hardly remember the ice on the ground and the frost in my breath.

Last weekend, a little drunk with the scent of honeysuckle and the sound of hummingbirds, I got out the saw and the clippers.  I started by trimming some low-hanging branches from the chinaberry and sycamore trees.  That was just enough to work up a good sweat, so I looked around for anything else that needed cutting back.  The rosemary at the corner of the deck had grown over the fall and winter into a huge mass of dark green spikes and whorls, escaping the row of concrete edging meant to contain it and threatening to choke out the verbena, the pennyroyal, and the mint with which it shared its plot.  A major pruning was in order.

I clipped and sawed and clipped and hacked.  Stepped back to check the shape, snipped a little more.  And all the while I was thinking about how much I like rosemary – its scent, its taste, its folklore.  It has been known to repel witches and to divine the future.  And it is, of course, for remembrance.

Which may be why, at some point when I paused to wipe my forehead, I remembered what my friend James had told me.  James is a gardener, a rather well-known one now, and when he came to Sandhill and saw my rosemary he smiled and said, “You know, rosemary grows where strong women live.” 

My next thought was, And sometimes it grows out of control.  I stopped short, clippers dangling from my wrist.  Is it possible that strength, too, can grow out of control?  That being the competent one, the capable, dependable,  reliable one can eventually, ultimately, finally become untenable? 

I could see it now.  The winter just past had not been only about cold and dark, but also about loss – consecutive, repetitive,  chronic loss.  And in the throes of competence and reliability, I had become like the rosemary, sprawling in all directions.    I had run awkwardly over the boundaries that were meant to shape me, had tried to take over adjacent acreage by solving problems that weren’t mine, offering assistance that wasn’t needed.  I did too much.  I was too much.  I was too strong.  

I stared down at the rosemary and the raw, blunt edges of the branches I had so brutally cut.  For a moment I wondered if I’d done the right thing. What had been full and lush was ragged and puny.  I bent down low and took a breath.  My lungs expanded with the scent of evergreen. Ever green. Always green.

It is hard to wield the saw on yourself.   Hard to step back and check the progress.  Hard to make the first pass. So you start by taking a deep breath. For remembrance.  And then you go sit on the porch and stare at the moon.

Copyright 2014

Traffic Signs

About halfway between the communties of Adabelle and Excelsior is a creek bridge.  On the Bulloch County side of the bridge, the county-maintained highway is known as Adabelle Road; on the Candler County side it is called Dutch Ford Road, though most of us who live nearby refer to it simply as the road to Excelsior.  The two-laned highway, called by whatever nomenclature one chooses, has long been an obstacle course of potholes, wash-out and loose gravel. The fact that the population of deer in the neighborhood vastly outnumbers the population of people adds to the overall perilous nature of travel on this short stretch of pavement. Its condition has been so bad for so long that there is, standing along the right-of way a tall metal flower, a diamond-shaped yellow highway sign, pockmarked from flying gravel, that reads “Rough Road.” As though it were not obvious.

Over the past few months in a rare act of county cooperation or, perhaps, serendipitious synchronicity, both ends of the road have been resurfaced. It is now possible to traverse from U.S. Highway 301, where Adabelle Road begins, well into Candler County on macadam smooth as ganache. A trip that used to strain the best shocks and struts, that could easily cause a blow-out, that left drivers in need of chiropractic adjustment now feels like a ride down a waterslide. The finished product more than makes up for the brief delay experienced on the days on which construction closed one lane or the other leaving tractors and pick up trucks and minivans transporting farm laborers backed up around curves trimmed with narrow aprons and deep ditches.

The resurfacing has made the drive so pleasant that I can now pay attention to the environs. The deck that has been added to the back of the house in Excelsior. How many legs there are to the center pivot irrigation system in the field to the right.  What is blooming in the yards of the farm houses along the road.

This morning I noticed something else:  the sign is still there. The rough road sign. 

With all the scraping and regrading and filling of holes, all the tarring and rolling of the new surface, all the careful and tedious repainting of yellow lines down the middle, nobody thought to take down the sign.  What was once a helpful warning to those who had not traveled that way before, what was once a gentle reminder to those who traveled that way often, what was once a useful part of the landscape has become a relic. 

Relics can be useful. They can teach us things about a time or place that we did not know. They can offer insight into the common characteristics between peoples of different times and places. They can remind us of progress made and progress still needed.

But a relic not recognized as such can be dangerous. We can spend so much time learning from the past that there is no time left to enjoy the present.  We can hold on to reminders so tightly as to be unable to grasp anything else. And if an official DOT road sign tells you that the road ahead is rough, chances are that you will believe  it and stiffen your entire body in preparation for being bounced and jostled and jerked.  It is likely that you will clutch your steering wheel tightly and set your face like flint against non-existent impediments.

I have no intention of violating Code Section 32-6-50 and taking down the sign between Adabelle and Excelsior, but I’m thinking of taking down a few others.  The ones that keep me stuck in the traffic jam of destructive thoughts.  The ones that force me onto detours that take me much too far from the path of my dreams.  The ones that say “Do Not Enter” and “Wrong Way” and “No U Turn.”   Especially the ones that proclaim “Rough Road” when all that lies ahead is possibility.  

Copyright 2014

Remembering Moonlight

Sounding like Goethe on his deathbed, I handed the contractor the blueprints for what would become Sandhill and instructed, “Light.  That’s what I want.  As much as possible.”  So the windows were broadened and lengthened in order to not simply permit, but invite as much light as possible into the rooms.  With the serendipity of a southern orientation came sunrise through the bedroom windows and sunset through all the others. 

 

I soon discovered that it wasn’t only sunlight that welcomed itself into Sandhill through all those windows, but moonlight as well.  Each month, in the week the moon waxed toward full, I would go to bed each night under a slightly more silver glow and when the sphere of reflected light reached perfect roundness, the whole room shimmered.   It was as though the pillows, the sheets, the comforter had all been sprinkled with sequins.  As though a handful of stardust had slid down the moonbeams and scattered itself across the furniture. 

Sometimes the light was liquid and poured through the panes like water from a jug or over a sluice or through a funnel, puddling on the floor and the bed linens in wading pools of pale illumination.  I would lie there and listen to the silence, as full and content as the moon, and my next conscious thought would be morning.

For fifteen years there was not so much as a valance adorning any of the windows.  I loved the suns’s play of bright and brighter overlapping each other on the floors, the strangely angled shadows  projected onto the walls.  I was constantly amazed that Old Linen, the paint color I’d chosen for every room, could look so completely different from morning to afternoon,  from hallway to kitchen, from spring to fall.  

The nakedness of my windows was both frightening and embarrassing to Grannie who finally asked me one day, “Aren’t you afraid somebody might be able to see in?”  To which I responded, “If they come this far, they deserve to see something.”  She was not amused. 

About eight years ago, in the aftermath of three bumper car hurricanes that brought enough rain inland to require rather significant repairs, I put up blinds.  Wide slatted ones.  Easy to open so that I might maintain my this-is-freedom-not-vulnerability stance, but equally easy to close in order to seal off, block out, hide from view what I’d finally admitted in what passed for adulthood could be frightening, dangerous or, at least, uncomfortable.

The result has been plenty of nights, many nights, most nights, when I couldn’t have said whether the moon was waxing or waning or whether it was, in fact, outside my bedroom window, at all.

Last week – and I can’t say exactly why last week was different –, when the moon was full, when the sky was cloudless, when the memory of moonlight shining through my window sprang up like a craving, I turned off the lamp and opened the blinds.  I got into bed and lay very still, waiting to feel the shimmer, waiting to hear the silence. 

Across the room, on top of the chest of drawers, I could make out the silhouettes of photos, books, an hourglass.  People, words, time.   Their sharp edges were softened in the pale moon breath, dulled beyond any capacity to worry or wound.  I had forgotten what moonlight can do to edges.   I had forgotten what moonlight does to me.

Copyright 2014

Propagation of Fruit

For fourteen years I have walked the circle drive at the Screven County Courthouse.  At least once a month for fourteen years I have walked, heels clicking against the pavement, files tucked under my arm or stuffed into a rolling briefcase, toward the double glass doors and the wide tiled hallway that leads to the courtroom.  As often as not, in warmer weather, I have walked to the tune of a mower moving back and forth over the front lawn like a metronome, breathing in the shaved grass along with the scent of the roses Mrs. Pullen planted at the front door when she was clerk.

And in all that time, through all those springs and summers when the heat cushioned me like bubble wrap, on all the clear sunny days when the fire trucks at the station next door were sparkling in their just-washed shimmer, in all the early mornings when the puffy white clouds had not yet been burned away, in all that time in which I thought I was paying attention, I never once noticed what I noticed today.   And what I noticed today, out of the corner of my eye, was a blackberry.

Not even as large as the tip of my pinky, it was poking its head through the equally tiny leaves of the hedge that runs along the edge of the circle drive.  I stood the rolling briefcase upright and looked closer.  There were three or four more, all peeking out coquettishly from within the pencil-thin branches that grew like a vast web of veins four feet into the air before sprouting a five o’clock shadow’s worth of greenery. 

So I picked them.  And popped them into my mouth.  And tasted the hardness, the coldness, the bitterness of a not-yet-ripened fruit.

That bitterness, that sharpness that purses lips and leaves teeth tender, it is no accident.  There is a reason behind the deterrent to eating fruit that is green and immature.  The seeds inside ripe fruit, juicy and tasty, sweet-swelling and enticing, are mature, capable of reproducing.  Eaten by animals, the mature seeds are expelled and the cycle begins again. The seeds inside immature fruit are barren.  Eat that fruit, those berries and the cycle stops.  The circle is broken.

I’d had breakfast. I wasn’t hungry.  But who spies the first blackberries of the season and doesn’t pick them?  Doesn’t pop them into her mouth without a thought for the chemical nonpareils sprinkled on top?  Who in the world, after a winter that dragged on like a soap opera death scene,  sees this herald of nascence and renewal and walks on by?   Not this girl. 

Not this world.  We choose precocious over experienced, we honor youth over age, we trade-in and trade-up for whatever is newest and freshest, and ignore what history, personal and human, has taught us – that waiting is not the worst use of one’s time when the stakes are high.

I can’t say am actually sorry for picking the blackberries.  At least, not those blackberries.  But there are some fruits I have picked too soon, some bites that have left a sour taste in my mouth, some berries I should have left on the vine.  And who can forget them?  Not this girl.

Copyright 2014

Q and A

“Hey!”  Whoever it is isn’t talking to me.  “Hey!”  Then again, maybe she is.  I stop and turn to see a little girl, about three, I’d guess, sitting in a buggy, legs dangling through the square steel holes.  Her skin is the smooth brown of a Hershey bar and her eyes are round and dark.  

“Are you talking to me?”  I ask.  

She nods without smiling and then points to an empty buggy in the aisle ahead of her.  “Whose that?” she asks.

The young woman I presume to be her mother pauses in her examination of the 50-percent off Easter candy to figure out what the child is doing stopping and asking questions of a stranger.  I give the woman a quick glance, the glance that asks, “Is it all right for me to talk to you child?”  I receive in return the glance that says, “I can see you are not a kidnapper or child molester.  Yes, you may talk to my child.”

I take a step closer to the buggy.  “I don’t really know,” I offer.  “Now let me ask you a question.  Why did you ask me?”

She shrugs her shoulders and tilts her head, lifts her tiny little hands so that, for a moment, she looks like the Bird Girl in Bonaventure Cemetery.

“Do I just look like somebody who would know the answer to questions?”  I tease.  She nods shyly.  “Well, in fact, I do know the answer to every question in the world.  Except that one.  I do not know who that buggy belongs to.”

I take yet another step closer.  “What’s your name?”  She tells me.  “I’m Kathy,” I say, extending my hand.  “It was very nice to meet you.”  We shake hands and wave goodbye.  I walk off smiling.

Not long ago, I came across a news article that included a black-and-white photograph that grabbed not just my attention, but my gut as well.  It took my breath, it seized my heart, it possessed my conscious world for the few seconds that was required for my brain to absorb the story it told:

He stands, not at attention or even parade rest, but with one knee just barely bent.  A paunch, only a slight one, hangs over his belt.  It is warm weather, maybe even hot.  I can tell because the sleeves on his uniform shirt, the creases pressed into them by a hot iron, are short.  A patch in the shape of the state of Georgia is sewn on his left bicep; the state seal is embroidered on the patch, along with the words “Georgia State Patrol.”

He is wearing aviator sunglasses and a helmet, the kind with the hard plastic visor.  In front of him is a riot shield.   It is propped on the ground, held steady by two large hands.  He wears a watch and a wedding band.

Despite the helmet, the shield, and the heavy weaponry strapped around his waist and over his shoulders, he does  not appear to be on edge.  Whatever threat prompted his turnout, along with that of the other similarly outfitted men around him, is not great or imminent.

Standing in front of his shield is a small child, two or three years old.  The child – It is impossible to tell whether boy or girl. – is wearing tennis shoes, the kind with a thick, spongy tongue.  The shoestrings are long and hang in loose loops that touch the street.  The child is wearing a white robe tied at his waist, a white cape tied at his neck, and a tall white cap, the unmistakable tall white cap of the Ku Klux Klan. 

The child’s attention has been caught by a reflection in the riot shield, his own reflection, and the photographer freezes the exact moment when the chubby hand of the child meets the chubby hand of the reflection, the moment when the two hands touch.  The State Trooper is watching, looking down at the child in the Ku Klux Klan cap as he reaches for himself.

The State Trooper, in case I forgot to mention, is black.

I stare at the image and the only thought I can articulate is, “ What kind of person dresses a toddler in hatred and puts him in a parade?”

I love words, but images can be equally powerful.  I look at this one over and over and, on this night, I feel a compulsion, an instinctual impulse to go find the little girl who thought I could answer her question, to search as long and as far as it takes to be able to look into her sweet, sweet face and tell her that for some questions there are no answers.

Copyright 2014

Hut, One, Two!

I know exactly when I fell in love with sports.

The sky was gray; the air was chill.  I was sitting on the living room floor, not yet tall enough to block Daddy’s view of the sharp-edged console television on which the two of us were watching a grainy black-and-white telecast of his and, thus, my Baltimore Colts.  The players’ legs, moving up and down in unnaturally sharp angles like pistons, were skinny.   Their arms were even skinnier, protruding nakedly from the thick bottle cap of shoulder pads clamped down over each helmeted head.

I’d been engaging in this Sunday afternoon ritual long enough to know the basic rules, understand the most frequently called penalties, and anticipate the moments of high drama.  I knew when commentary was appropriate and when it was better to remain dejectedly silent.  The movements no longer appeared frantic or random.  

But I was still learning and Daddy was infinitely patient in answering whatever questions I posed.  On this particular Sunday, the question arose as the quarterback (I don’t remember if it was Johnny Unitas or the wannabe on the other team.) dropped back to pass and the entire defensive line charged toward him like mad bulls.  The entire play collapsed and the broadcaster’s voice, a scratchy baritone, floated over the room, “The blitz results in a loss of ten yards on the play.”

Blitz.  What a funny word.  It sounded like a nickname for one of Santa’s reindeer.  It rhymed with glitz.  And that malt liquor with the red bull on the can.  It required lips and teeth and tongue in a rapid sequence that resulted in only one syllable.  Blitz.  

“Daddy, what’s a blitz?”

“It’s when all the players on the other team come after the quarterback.  For that one play they don’t have any other job.”  

I rolled it around in my mouth.  It felt like something that would approach hard and fast.  It tasted like something powerful.  Blitz.  I had just fallen in love.

Not long ago I came across another word I didn’t know.  I was reading a book about a spiritual journey and, though the author explained its definition and usage, I had to do my own research.  

“Repechage” is used primarily in rowing.  It is the method by which a competitor which loses in an early round is given another opportunity –  a second chance – to compete later in the bracket.   It’s from the French word that means “fishing out” or “rescuing.”  It sounds a lot like grace.  Port and starboard grace.  Sculling grace.  Sweeping grace.  Grace in the middle of a cox and eight.  

And what of baseball and its sacrifice?  The runner’s ultimate goal of making it home?  There is grace, too, on a baseball diamond.  And an ice rink.  And a track.

I fell in love with sports in the moment of the blitz.  The moment in which physical exertion for competition and entertainment became inextricably meshed with words (not to mention my daddy).  Words that carry me far beyond the muscles and tendons that stretch and contract in extraordinary feats of physicality.  Words that themselves stretch and contract in meaning and metaphor.  Words that preserve and redeem and baptize all my days with grace.

Copyright 2014

A Parade and A Pyramid

Jackson is almost four.  That age at which he understands his separateness from other people, but does not yet understand the separateness of his emotions.  His will is clear and distinct, but his heart is still one with the world.  Whatever is happening to him, be it highest joy or deepest sorrow, is happening to the world.  That thing – the filter, the wall, the individuation of identity – that will eventually teach him that this is not so, that his feelings are uniquely his and that not everyone can be trusted with them –  has yet to take hold.  

I am sitting on the curb watching him and his cousins jockey for position along the edge of the road as the St. Patrick’s Day parade flows by.  As soon as a float-rider’s arm cocks back to toss a handful of Jolly Ranchers into the street, the three of them dash forward to scoop up the treasure.  Other children converge from different angles and the result of the looting and pillaging is not always an equitable division of loot.  As the youngest and smallest among the group camped on that section of sidewalk, Jackson does not always return triumphant.

When he does, the plastic-wrapped corn syrup confection clutched in his little fist, he is ecstatic.  When he does not, his hands empty, his shoulders drooping surprisingly low for a four-year-old, he is morose.  The speed with which he moves from one expression to the other corresponds exactly to the speed at which the next float or tractor or pamphlet-distributing politician appears.  

Driving home at the end of the day, my arms still holding the heat of the sunshine and my head the image of my sweet boy waving his arms to get the attention of the candy-throwers, the parade turns into parable.  I realize that, for Jackson, the candy had not really been the object.  Each time he had been successful in gathering up a piece or two, he’d quickly brought it to the curb and handed it over to either me or his mother.  Once or twice he’d actually opened the package only to stick his tongue to whatever was inside and decide against it.  But he kept going back, kept hurrying hard into the scrum of children.  His prize, though he couldn’t know it yet, was the participation.

People whose business it is to know these things – teachers and preachers, psychologists and seers – tell us that the need to belong is a fundamental human motivation and it influences a wide range of behavioral and emotional responses.  On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs it is right there near the top.  It is the impulse behind every dare ever accepted and the impetus for many a Las Vegas wedding and ill-advised tattoo.  And Jackson has just reminded me that that craving, that insatiable hunger to be a part of something, doesn’t suddenly appear in middle school.  It is there from the very beginning.

It is also there to the very end.  

My fingers are curved around the steering wheel and my eyes are fixed on the flat straight road before me.  Miles ahead the white lines on either side converge into a single point and the road disappears.  The vanishing point.  I am headed toward the vanishing point.  For a moment I am acutely aware of Jackson’s youth and my age, painfully alert to the fact that I may not be around to see his tattoos or hear the stories of the dares he takes or – please, God! – doesn’t.  

I take a breath.  And with the breath the realization comes: This is what it means to be family.  Belonging from the very beginning.  Belonging to the very end.  By blood or by happy accident.  Without having to earn your way in.  Without concern that you’ll spend your way out.  With the freedom to run into the street to grab whatever you can and the absolute assurance that there’s a place to return even with empty hands.

Copyright 2014

Marks of Punctuation, Signs of Life

I like punctuation marks.  I like to know when something ends, when it’s over.  

Which is why this winter has just about driven me to the point of madness.  It’s been a sentence in a William Faulkner novel, winding capriciously from one place to another, picking up subject after subject with tentacle-like conjunctions and prepositions, offering jolts of unexpected discomfort with exclamations and interjections, creating confusion with unpronounceable words and unusual syntax.  

It’s been an Emily Dickinson poem.  Lovely.  At times.  But more often difficult.  To withstand.  Or understand. Or even stand.  On the ice.

In an ordinary winter I know that on New Year’s Day I can clench my jaws and hunch my shoulders against the coming cold and simply soldier through until the first daffodil appears along the ditch at the old house at the crossroads.  This, however, was no ordinary winter.  The dully cold days of January gave way to a foreign February, days of rain and ice followed by something impersonating spring which fled quickly in the wake of more rain and ice and wind.   

And it wasn’t just the weather.  Three Friday afternoons in a row, I stood in a line at a funeral home visitation.  On the Sunday after one of those Fridays, I stood to give the eulogy for one of my dearest friends.  

When March arrived all sunny and balmy, it was clearly in disguise, but I was so eager, so desperate, really, for winter – outside and in – to disappear that I embraced it crazily, only to be betrayed once again as its true intentions were revealed as soon as enough windows had been opened, enough arms had been bared, enough shoes had been shed.  Winter wasn’t over.

I stood at the window looking at the first ruffly sprouts of leaves on the saw-tooth oaks laughing just a little sarcastically at their audacity.  Nature can be so naive.

Then I noticed something I’d not seen when I got home the night before.  The narrow strip of land between what passes for the yard at Sandhill and the branch that borders the pond, the little slip of woods where scrub oaks and bay trees, grapevines and Queen Anne’s lace, kudzu and honeysuckle grow and meld into a particular ecosystem, had been burned off.  The dead undergrowth that, over the winter, had created something like a choke collar on the trunks and stems was gone and in its place was a flat black layer of soot and the faint smell of sulfur.

I suspect it was Keith who struck the match that started the burn – leaned over in the wind, cupped his hand around the tiny little flame, and held it close to the tinder that would ignite all the debris.  He stood there (I know this without having seen it.) for a few minutes to make sure that the line of orange was moving steadily with the breeze and then left the fire to do its work.

It’s what you do in spring.  You ready the land for something new to grow by eliminating the last vestiges of the crop that was there before.  It doesn’t lessen the value of that previous crop, it just brings it to an end.  It just adds a punctuation mark.

I stared for a moment at the black line.  I thought I heard it say, “One cannot always depend on nature to signal the turn of seasons.  Sometimes one must mark the change oneself.  Sometimes one must decide and take action.  Sometimes one must light a match, start a fire, and whisper to oneself, ‘This is where it ends.’” 

Copyright 2014

Chaos and Comfort

The ice storm was upon us.  The rain had been falling since the night before and, in the cold cold air, the water had chosen not to drip from but cling to the branches and freeze.   The power lines were drooping like the fluttering eyelids of a baby fighting sleep.  It was time to get home.

But just in case there is no power when I get there, I thought, I should probably grab a bite to eat.  So it was that I was sitting at the window at Zaxby’s, debit card in hand, when the lights went out. With no way to take my money and nothing else to do with my blackened blue salad with light vinaigrette dressing, the manager handed it over with a resigned smile.  “I’ll come back and pay,” I promised.  

“No need,” he smiled.  “Just fill out a comment card the next time you come in.”

I carefully pulled out on to Fair Road, to which I refer as the Georgia Southern Autobahn, noticing immediately that the traffic light, like those at Zaxby’s, was out.  Cars coming from all four directions were inching slowly toward the center of the intersection trying to figure out who had the right-of-way, when it was safe to accelerate.  I quickly started counting in my mind the number of traffic lights between me and home.  I caught my breath when I thought of the one at 301South and Veterans Parkway.  We were on the verge of chaos.

The verge of chaos.  That narrow sliver of time during which one recognizes the impending loss of control and still resists it.  That place within oneself where the way things are supposed to be is still visible, but fading.  That physical sensation that masquerades as frustration, but is nothing more than fear.

A friend of mine had surgery over the holidays.  It forced her to cancel travel plans and miss seeing family.  When she got back to work she couldn’t find her rhythm.  A few days after the ice storm she wrote to me, “I can't seem to catch up ...  Is it me?  Is it life?  Everything feels so chaotic lately.”

I wrote back, “Is it just awful of me to say that it's a comfort to hear you use the word ‘chaotic’?”

I am uncomfortable with chaos.  As a small child I was dismayed to see a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup shelved with the Chicken and Stars at the old Piggly Wiggly on South Main and wouldn’t leave the aisle until I’d made sure that all the varieties were in their proper orders.  I am unsettled by everything from an unmade bed or a crooked picture to loud arguments between people I love.  I am compelled to make the bed, to get out my level and straighten the picture, to mediate the disagreement. 

The past couple of months, punctuated by unusual weather events and too many funeral home visitations and a round of antibiotics, have felt like nothing less than one interminable fit of chaos.  Unmade beds and uneven pictures have floated at the periphery of my vision with nary a notice.  So, awful or not, it was, in fact, a comfort to know that my friend was living through something at least a little similar.

My fingers paused over the keyboard for a moment.  I took a deep breath, noticed the sunshine coming through the window.  “But, then again,” I typed, “I am reminded that in all the creation stories, chaos is what existed BEFORE ... before the word is spoken, before the light separates from the darkness, before life arises.  Perhaps there is hope in it.”

I wasn’t at all sure I believed it even as I hit “send.”

That night when I got home I noticed the hydrangea between the deck and the carport.  The hydrangea whose unpruned canes had condemned me every time I had walked outside since summer.  The hydrangea whose shape had gone from full to skeletal.  The hydrangea that, like everything else, had been coated with ice.

Sprouting from those ugly unpruned canes were buds.  Chartreuse green, sharp-tipped buds.  Living, hopeful buds.  Pushing through the darkness, dispelling the chaos with the promise of beauty yet to come. 

Southern Living says those buds will be blooms in late spring.  I’m not certain when that is, but I think I can hang on ‘til then.

Copyright 2014

Archery at the Seam

The lines on the sailboats in the boatyard keen in the wind, cats meowing mournfully at some imagined wrong. The tide is low, the water nearly flat.  In the not-too-distance a shrimp boat’s silhouette cuts the gray landscape with edges as sharp as a knife blade.  It is not exactly too cold for a long walk, but I am ill-prepared; the coat is warm enough, the shoes sturdy enough, but without gloves or a scarf, my hands, my face, my ears will be gnawed raw in minutes.

I walk toward the water, the movement unconscious as a long-rehearsed stage direction. I stop at the just-edge, the rim where foam and salt lick the sand, where it is neither wet or dry, where the waves sigh, give up, and move away in retreat.  

I am here because there are things – events and words and feelings conjured by both –  that, up to this moment, I have not taken the time to contemplate appropriately.  I have held them like a bow string, so long, so taut that my body trembles.   Here, at the seam of my world, the place where earth and sea are stitched together, I hope to be able to let them go.

“What does it mean?” I begin, speaking aloud without any self-consciousness.  “What does it mean?” I ask of God or anyone else who might, serendipitously or divinely, suddenly appear and have some thoughts on the matter.  “What does it mean?” and I throw into the winter wind all the facts that I hold, but can’t seem to put together into a reasonable hypothesis.

I pause and take a deep breath.  And another one.  And another one.  I hear the voice inside my head whisper, “There is a difference between the person who does not know how to love and the one who does, but chooses not to.”   

I gasp.   The whisper has released the bow string and the vibration fills me.

At my feet there is an oyster shell.  I pick it up, turn it over, am greeted by a tiny crab, no larger than a nickel. Nearly translucent, with just a hint of veiny blue showing up near his tiny claws, he clings to the edge of the shell with his swimming feet, staring and daring me.  I slide a fingernail between one of the little claws to see if he will grasp.  It is what we do with newborn humans, offer them a finger and watch them circle it with their own. 

I want this shell.  I want to take it with me as a memorial, a reminder of the moment when the fingers of my weary heart loosed the bowstring and let it go, the moment when, standing here –  at the place where nothing is unraveled, where everything is whole – everything I need to know became clear. 

But, of course, I can’t take it.  Someone has a prior claim.  Not necessarily better, just prior.  And in such matters respect must be paid to the one who got there first.  “I will not take your shell,” I tell the crab as I place it carefully back on the spot from which I’d drawn it.  I do not deem it necessary to point out that my greater power would have made it incredibly easy to do so.

My ears are beginning to burn.  The movement of my cheeks feels disconnected from the rest of my face.  It is time to go.  I pick up half a sand dollar, its broken edge as even as the perforation on a postage stamp.  It, too, is from this place.  It, too, is from this moment.   And no one else has a prior  claim.  This one can be mine.

Copyright 2014

Fields of Gold

Leaving Darien, up and over the bridge that minds the shrimp boats, I ease my foot off the accelerator and let gravity pull me down toward sea level. The marsh spreads out on either side, at once embracing the river and wooing the ocean. What had been, not many weeks earlier, a rolling lawn, an endless swath of greenest green, has gone gold. Wispy grain heads waving in the winter wind, it is now a field unto harvest.

I note to myself that, despite heartstrings that need the tuning fork of ocean song to set their pitch, I am a country girl and it is images of sowing and reaping that come most easily to mind. I also remind myself that it is said that the ability to use and recognize metaphor is what makes us uniquely human. I am glad to be human.

On Monday I notice that the fields around home are filling up with bales of hay, huge barrels pushed over on their sides. The whole world has gone gold. I notice and then I forget. On Thursday the telephone call comes. And the whole world goes the color of nothing. The light goes out, the prism breaks.

My friend has died. Died. I feel an explosion inside my chest. A real one. There is heat and pressure spreading from the place where my heart is cradled, where my friend has been cradled for 19 years. Words are coming out of my mouth. I hear them, but I don’t know who is saying them.

They, his family, want me to speak of him. They want me to stand up – on my own two feet, no doubt – and remember him. I say yes, even though I have no idea that I actually can. Later, when I am alone, I sit staring at the computer screen, the cursor flashing rhythmically, inviting me to begin. Where?

I glance around the room and my eyes fall on my faded and tattered copy of The Little Prince. Jim didn’t know The Little Prince when I met him, but it didn’t take long for me to share. And over the years most of our conversations included some reference to or quotation from that story. I put my thumbs to the page edges and the book falls open to the conversation between the fox and the little prince.

As I read the words I can almost quote, words I’ve been reading since I was 16 and discovered that truth isn’t necessarily factual, my breath begins to slow. My fingers begin to move over the keys. I can do this.

It is Sunday. I am standing up, on my own two feet. I open the book and I read.

“[I]f you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world …[I]f you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat …”

It is Tuesday. It is Wednesday. The world is white. Snow, infrequent and puzzling, makes an appearance and we are gawking and fumbling and behaving in unseemly ways as though she were a movie star showing up unexpectedly at a family reunion or tailgate party. I am embarrassed a little until I am reminded that in the white are all the other colors. Somewhere in there is gold. The gold of wheat fields.

It will be a while – not Thursday or Friday or even next week – but the color will return. Gold will reappear. The winter sunrise, the spring daffodils, the summer corn, the autumn leaves will bring me back the thought of my friend. And, having been tamed, I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat.

Copyright 2014

You Say You Want A Revolution

Once a year I find myself thrown into the crucible of one the great debates of Protestantism.  Getting the Christmas tree down out of the attic is easy, but getting it back up is something like one of the labors of Hercules.  The steep stairs, the narrow opening, the weight and irregular shape of the tree itself, and the law of gravity create the laboratory in which I test the doctrine of eternal security.  When at long last both the tree and I are lying sprawled in our particular states of disarray and exhaustion on the attic floor and I have not lost my religion, the annual experiment is concluded and I can proclaim, in a voice weakened but not vanquished, that God does exist and he is gracious.

 This year, however, I decided that once the Christmas tree came down it was not going back up.  My days of testing both myself and God, at least in that particular way, were over.  The tree would, I asserted loudly and often, sit downstairs, its pieces in a pile, until I could obtain a storage shed.  Sandhill is not a large house and I knew that it would not take long before the presence of a bristly green heap of faux evergreen became too irritating to endure. Last week, after only four days of stepping over said bristly green heap in the dining room, I watched as a very large truck delivered a 10 x 12- foot prefabricated barn to Sandhill.  The gentleman driving the truck asked me where I’d like the barn deposited.  Having carefully scouted the location beforehand and having ascertained the spot of optimum levelness within reasonable distance of the back door, I walked briskly across the yard and, like Captain Kidd showing the pirates where to dig, declared, “There!”

He’d been gone about 15 minutes when I realized that I really would have preferred to have the doors of the barn facing the road rather than the driveway, a 90-degree difference in orientation.

I mentioned the changing of my mind to Daddy and, within a couple of days and not in the least to my surprise, he and Keith had a tractor hooked to the barn and were rotating it so that the double front doors with the big wooden x’s on them and the two little windows on either side of those doors could be seen from the road.  I wasn’t there to observe the operation, but Daddy says that it really wasn’t all that hard.  It was just a small turn.  And it made all the difference.

January is the month for resolutions, but, after seeing how significant that small turn was, it occurs to me that we might all be better served if we, like the little boy on the AT&T “It’s Not Complicated” commercial who got his words confused, made New Year’s revolutions instead.  What if, instead of resolving, that is re-solving, solving over and over and over again, we choose revolving?  You know, like the planets.  What if we finally get over ourselves and figure out that orbiting is something you do around the center of the universe and that the center ain’t us?

And what if we figure out that when you revolve, that is, when you turn, even slightly, it gives you an entirely different perspective?  Turn the corner.  Turn the page.  Turn the tide.  Turning turns things, inside out and upside down.

Turn around and the shadow in which I’ve been walking becomes invisible.  Turn loose and my hands are free to catch hold of something new.  Turn my attention away from the driveway that leads always to me and I can see the road that leads to everywhere else.  A small turn.  It will make all the difference.

Copyright 2014

For Want of a Fire

The wreath is still on the back door.  The jingle bells tied to its branches reflect just enough of the floodlights at the corner of the house to make tiny blue and green starbursts.  The ends of the big peacock-colored bow move only slightly in the night breeze.  Christmas is over and I really should have taken it down.

My arms are full.  I am struggling to find the key on the ring that holds too many.  Once found, I am trying to fit it into the keyhole without dropping my purse, my briefcase, the box with the leftover lunch pizza.  It slides in with some reluctance and I feel all my weight, physical and psychic, push against the door.  Just get me inside.  

I lean forward to let gravity pull the leather straps of purse and briefcase over my shoulder and down my arm to the floor.  As I do, I feel something brush past my face, sweep lightly across my eyelashes.  Too soft to have been the wreath or the wire-rimmed bow, too substantial to have been an errant curl.  I reach for the light switch.

On the smooth white floor lies a tiny sphere of dark feathers.  A baby bird.  I gasp, knowing immediately that the tiny thing has been either hiding or sleeping inside the wreath and that I have rousted him from his haven.  “Please!”  I entreat the creature, crazily trying to loose myself of my coat and find someplace to deposit the pizza box before figuring out how I will get the visitor outside again.  “Fly away!”

And he does.  He obediently and politely flies away.  Out into the December darkness.

I catch my breath and think, That was too easy.  It did not follow the pattern of my history with birds.  And I do have a history with birds.  Birds have made nests in my mailbox and my dryer vent; they have flown into and not been able to find their way out of my car and my house, the latter infesting my couch with a theretofore unknown insect, the bird mite, an unfortunate parting gift that cost me an exterminator’s visit. 

What I have learned about birds, lovely and melodious though they are, is that they can be troublesome.  Challenging.  Problematic. Gathering up the discarded burdens at my feet I am relieved that this bird, this singular member of the avian community, has deigned to leave me alone this night before New Year’s Eve, this evening when all that is left of Christmas is cardboard to be hauled to the recycling station and leftovers to be dumped into the garbage and remnants of ribbon to be swept from the corners of the living room.

But he has not left me alone.  He will not leave me alone.  I keep feeling the light touch of the feathers across my cheek.  I keep seeing his little body swell like a yeast roll rising in a warm kitchen, wings lifting him just high enough to get over the threshold.  

And now I am thinking of the legend of the Christmas robin, the bird in the stable on the night the Christ child was born.  I am thinking of how it is said that the wind blew hard and cold and the fire was about to go out when Mary began calling to the animals for help.  The ox was asleep, the donkey was lazy, the sheep with all its wool was warm enough without a fire.  Just as the fire was about to die, Mary heard the flapping of wings.  A robin, it is said, heard the young mother’s cries and flew to the stable to offer help.  He flapped his wings at the dying embers until the fire was rekindled. To make sure the fire stayed alive, the bird used his beak to gather some twigs for the fire which rose abruptly and burned his breast.  The fire did not go out that night and the breast of the robin remained red forever as a sign of his valor and selflessness.

I catch my breath again.  This time I let it go slowly.  My visitor has come in response to my call for help, the call that falls from every person who has ever woken up on December 26 tired or disappointed or just a little uncertain as to why she went to all the trouble or why he can’t maintain the feeling of joyfulness all year long.  The little bird has come to remind me that it is in giving that we receive, that it is in the presence of courage and sacrifice that love is born, and that the story will never end for want of a fire.

Copyright 2014

O, Come, All Ye Not Ready

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 said.  “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

Bringing The Band

On the other side of the state, my mobile phone produced the bell chime that sounds like an elevator reaching its destination.  A friend had sent me a message that read, “Y'all might want to call in reinforcements, there's gonna be some property destroyed in the Boro tonight!”  I knew what it had to mean, but the reality was so improbable as to deserve the descriptions it would get in the coming hours: unprecedented, unbelievable, miraculous.

26 - 20.  Eagles over Gators.  David over Goliath.  The No Smoking sign in heaven turned off just long enough for one victory cigar.

Words began flowing out of The Swamp, words strung together into news stories and columns and blogs from the singular vocabulary and distinctive rhythm of sportswriters, words that, in any other context, would be trite and sentimental.  And I read as many of them as I could find.  After a while, because sportswriters are, first of all, good writers, it didn’t really matter that I had not watched or listened to the game myself.  

But I kept reading.  The Facebook posts and the comments on the Facebook posts and the comments on the comments on the Facebook posts.  It was all so much, I don’t know, fun.

And then sometime around Tuesday afternoon, I think, I came across a blog post on the website Gator Country which identifies itself as “the insider authority on Gator sports.”  Written by Nick de la Torre, the post offered five things that stood out about the football game.  Numbers one through four sounded familiar, simply recaps of all the other analyses I’d read.  Number five, though, caught my attention.  Number five was “Georgia Southern’s joy after winning.”  

De la Torre described how, after the clock expired, the team in blue and white stormed the field.  “A normal reaction,” he wrote, “for a team that just pulled off an upset.  That wasn’t the picture that stood out.  The team circled around their band – yes, Georgia Southern brought their band (something even Vanderbilt didn’t do)  – and they sang their alma mater.”

They brought the band.  A team that most of the world expected to lose, a team that was out-manned and out-moneyed, a team that would be disappointed, but not devastated to get on a bus and ride home having done its best but having lost.  That team brought its band.  They brought the trumpets that heralded them as heroes and the drums that beat out the cadence of history.  They brought music, that strange mixture of sounds that musters and rallies and holds together all manner of disparate souls.  They brought the band because, while winning was what they came to do, it wasn’t the only reason to be there.

That’s where I stopped reading.  That’s when it stopped being about just football and started being about life. About having dreams and pursuing them to the end.  About making commitments and never walking away. About always bringing the band.  No matter what. 

In 1910, after leaving the White House, Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech at the Sorbonne that contained what has become arguably his most famous words.  “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better,” he offered.  “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

If Theodore Roosevelt had been a football coach, I think he would have taken the band. To every game.  No matter how far away.  No matter how long the odds.   ‘Cause if you bring the band, there’s always a reason to sing.

Copyright 2013

Crossing Against The Light

In the navy blue of just dark, the headlights illuminate only a few feet in front of the car. The high beams give shadows to the rocks on the road directly in front of the tires in outlandish proportion to their size, but the hundred-foot pines on the other side of the ditch remain invisible.  Behind me the full moon is but a promise, not even a tease of her liquid silver light yet spilling over the horizon.

Just as I feel myself begin to lean into the bad curve, the arc of road where the beavers dam the creek every winter and the big aluminum culvert may or may not forestall the washing out of the road, a pair of yellow eyes appear at the lip where hard-packed dirt falls away to soft ditch.  The eyes are too low to be deer, too high to be possum or armadillo.  They have to be raccoon or fox and it is too late, too dark for a fox to be out.  Raccoon it must be.

I take my foot off the accelerator and feel the car slow as the lights pans the bend.  The raccoon is standing on his haunches, tiny paws drawn up to his chest as though in supplication.  He is young.   I can tell by his leanness and the fact that his mask isn’t very dark.  

The number of  raccoons, deer, possums, armadillos, foxes, and bobcats I have encountered on this dark stretch of road over the years is not one I can begin to compute, but I do know that every single one of them has behaved in exactly the same way: They have darted into the light.  This one will, too.

So I wait.

He twitches.  He jerks his head back and forth a couple of times.  He makes a quarter-turn toward the ditch and, just as I am about to believe that this raccoon, this one creature out of all the creatures, will behave in a manner contrary to instinct and move back into the darkness, he bolts out into the center of the road where the two yellow cones of light coming from the front of the car frame him like an escaping prisoner caught against the razor wire.  

Another infinitesimal hesitation and he is gone.  Into the blackness that is the ditch on the other side of the road, into the night where just moments before he had been moving safely and leisurely.

The idea that light is safety is a generally accepted axiom of life.   Most of what we fear is that which we cannot see.  With light comes vision, with light comes a banishing of fear.  And, yet, at least sometimes, as with the raccoon, the urge to rush into light – to know everything, to be blind to nothing – does little more than invite danger and expose vulnerability.

This is what I am thinking as I accelerate once more and head toward home.  It makes me shudder.  I am a light-seeker.  I navigate by looking for the sun to rise in the east and set in the west, by watching the stars.  Feeling my way in the dark is not my way.   

And now the raccoon is making me wonder: Is this the choice we must make?  Do we choose to remain safe and in the dark, stumbling around over roots and rocks, chairs and coffee tables, ill-fitting jobs and passionless relationships?  Or do we choose to become vulnerable and step in the light, exposed for all the world to see as small and fragile creatures, willing to challenge large and frightening beasts because life in the dark is not enough?

As I near home I notice that I can now make out the road yards and yards ahead, far beyond the reach of the headlights.  The moon, round and ripe, is clearing the horizon.  Through the brushy limbs of distant pines I see her clear face and feel her long slender fingers stroke my shoulder.  Perhaps the choice is not what I had thought.  Perhaps it is not light or dark.  Perhaps it is not a choice at all, but simply a learning that there is light within the darkness, a place where courage is respected, where fearlessness can be safe, where vulnerability is protected.

I go inside to bed and leave the blinds open.  The moonlight puddles on the floor.

Copyright 2013

What Be Here

Not long ago I was driving down a long flat stretch of highway listening on my iPod to an interview of Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, he of such soul-ripping lines as “You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.” In the interview he kept saying things I wanted to remember, bits and pieces of sentences that I wanted to scratch out on tiny slips of paper and stuff into a phylactery and feel bouncing on my forehead as I walked through the day, phrases I wanted to tattoo on the underside of my eyelids so that I might fall asleep staring into their mystery and contemplating their magic.  Single words I wanted to turn into tropical fruit Life-Savers and dissolve on my tongue in all their artificial color sweetness.

I’ve been trying to cut down on writing while I drive, though, so instead of reaching for the pen and pad I keep in the console, I opened this relatively new app on my phone.  It’s called Evernote.  I heard about it from my preacher in a sermon he delivered back in the spring.  (My church is cool like that.  We talk about apps and stuff.)  With Evernote I can speak what I want to remember into the telephone and its amazing technology translates my voice into words and saves them in a computer file.   

So Billy Collins was saying that most writers talk about “writing what you know,” but that poets are different.  “We write what we hear,” he said.  It was a succinctly beautiful line.  I did not want to lose it.  I picked up the phone, tapped the icon to begin recording, and spoke slowly and loud enough to overcome the road noise.  “We write what we hear.”

I discovered later, when I got the opportunity to go back and review my dictation, that Evernote had some difficulty in understanding my South Georgia drawl.  “We write what we hear” had morphed into “we write what be here.”  I started laughing and then realized that, improper grammatical structure aside, there was equal truth in the scrambled version of the poet’s declaration.

The breath of a buck blowing hard in the blackness at the edge of the deck.  My own heart beating in rhythm to the pulse of one small star penetrating that same blackness.  A voice, long silenced, reciting words long remembered.  The breath, the heartbeat, the voice overlaid like tracks of music - brass over percussion over strings.  Those sounds, those distinct vibrations moving through the air as waves that get caught by the curve of my ear and pushed through narrow fissures of tissue to a brain that then declares, “Remember that other night when ...?” We write what we hear. 

But at the same time, in the same words, writing acknowledges the existence of “what be here” and, in so doing, makes it real to both writer and reader.  When words are stitched, strung, woven, or pasted together the invisible becomes visible, the intangible concrete, the ephemeral lasting.  It is why we excavate ruins for clay tablets and papyrus scrolls, present diplomas and proclamations, issue marriage licenses and birth certificates.   We need to make a record to make our existence real.

Billy Collins wasn’t speaking just for poets and Evernote wasn’t mistranscribing just for me.  With each thought and smile and sigh offered up into the world we are writing what we hear.  And writing what be here in this challenging, astonishing, mysterious world.

Copyright 2013

Micro, Macro and Penne Pasta

The usually mindless twenty–five minute commute to the office has required a little more attention the past few mornings.  Crews of men in hard hats and florescent-trimmed vests have been supervising the cutting down of some rather large pine trees along the apron of 301 South and a little farther down another group has been digging troughs for, I assume, the long line of pale aqua pipe pieces that have been littering the ditch like massive tubes of penne.   I suspect all of this is in preparation for the extension of utilities to property that borders the interstate. 

           

It’s probably about nine miles from the city limits of Statesboro to the interstate.  Nine miles is a long way to send water or electricity or the digital signals that enable us to buy merchandise with the swipe of a plastic card.  So now I’m thinking about how far we are willing to go for something we want, how far I’m willing to go for something I want.  How far is too far.

           

It is suggested that we reach for the stars and that a man’s – or a woman’s – reach should exceed his grasp.  The motto for the Olympic Games is “Citius, Altius, Fortius,” Latin for "Faster, Higher, Stronger," a declaration that the athlete and, therefore, mankind for whom the athlete is the idealized symbol, must be incessantly stretching and straining the limits of what is possible, never content with what is.

           

At the same time, though, we are admonished to live simply and modestly.  There is a pair of ruby slippers in the Smithsonian, our national repository of culture, that reminds us that the means to obtaining our hearts’ desires lie, not in some far away land, but within ourselves and that there is no place like home. 

           

Can the dichotomy of the two positions be reconciled?  Can both be true?

           

I confess to not remembering much from the two semesters of economics I took in college.  Adam Smith.  Opportunity cost.  Guns and butter.   What I do remember clearly, probably because it had immediate applicability to my life in answering the question of whether I should keep studying or get some sleep, is the concept of the point of diminishing return, the idea that at some specific moment, location, or cost the benefit of continuing in the same direction will be reduced.   The problem back then, with the study or sleep conundrum, and now is always determining where, exactly, is that point?

           

I suspect that the men in the suits who hired the men in the hard hats have reams of data, stacks of printouts with colorful pie charts and lots of decimal points, confirming that their point is somewhere beyond nine miles, that the cost of installing all that giant pasta under the edge of a four-lane highway will be less than the eventual benefit of having jobs and a tax base that far from town. 

           

I’m not that lucky.  I don’t have models and projections and pie charts available each time I’m trying to decide whether nine miles is the point at which I stop reaching and start grasping.  There is no way to label the pros and cons of the various choices as constants, coefficients, and variables and then solve for x. 

           

Most of the big decisions of my life have already been made.  Some of them turned out to be excellent choices, some not so good.   What they all have in common is this: Each one involved both reaching and grasping, not one or the other.  Using my eyes to look as far ahead as I possibly could and using my heart to hold on to everything I knew to be good and true.  Having vision and trusting experience.  Not exactly a reconciliation of the dichotomy.  Maybe something more like detente – an acceptance of difference and an easing of tensions followed by an acknowledgment of the equal possibility of both contentment and regret.

           

Perhaps that is the best one can hope for, along with the worst that one should expect, which is the reality that, continuing to reach or pausing to grasp, one can never ever ever be absolutely sure.

Copyright 2013