A Mimosa In Time

What is this? A mimosa tree? Its slender branches are curved in an arc out over the ditch.  Its fingerling leaves are dangling over my head. Its barkless trunk is all but hidden among the grapevines and pine trees and scrub oaks. I have walked by this very spot hundreds of times, driven by it thousands of times. How could I have never noticed a mimosa tree?

Memory overcomes curiosity and I can suddenly see the mimosa tree growing in the backyard of the duplex apartment where we lived when I was a little girl. Its branches dip so far down that even my four-year-old arms can reach those tiny little leaves. I love that they fold in on themselves when I touch them, coquettishly resisting my attention and, moments later, reopening invitingly as though to say, “No, really, I was only teasing.”  

In the shed there is a pink frying pan on the pink stove I got for Christmas.  I break a branch off the mimosa tree, strip the leaves from the stem, wet them in a puddle by the back steps, and then dredge them in sand.  I put them in the pink frying pan on the pink stove.  I am playing house.  I am having a fish fry.  I would like to cut some of the flowers, put them in a Coca-Cola bottle as a centerpiece for my table, but I know better. The frothy filaments of mimosa blossoms wilt faster than morning glories.  

But they are so beautiful, the color of deep pink associated with Florida and Silver Springs and swimsuits with halter tops and sweetheart necklines, things I have never actually seen, things I can know only from postcards and the labels on the big bags of oranges that the cousins from Florida bring with them when they come to visit.  Once, Mama made a dance recital costume for a little girl that was just that color. It was made of satin, smooth and shiny like an evening gown, something else I had never seen.  She sewed on every single sequin by hand, attached the ruffle of net onto the little derrière with stitches so tiny and tight no one could see them, and when it was finished she let me try it on and have my picture taken underneath the mimosa tree holding an umbrella made of stiff tissue paper and balsa wood.

Who knew the word glamorous at the age of four, but that’s what I was. I knew it. I tilted my head and cocked my shoulder and smiled shyly at the Brownie camera, completely unaware that mine was not and never would be a dancer’s body, oblivious to the fact that the satin stretched and puckered across my round belly, incapable of comprehending that the world was anything beyond that single moment.   Itchy grass.  Sunshine.  Mimosa tree.  Mama.

I realize I have stopped.  I am standing in the middle of a dusty dirt road staring at a mimosa tree that is somehow the same mimosa tree that is growing in the backyard of my childhood.   I am fifty-seven and I am four.  I am wearing shorts and I am wearing a ballerina’s costume that are – Are you kidding me? – exactly the same color.   I am here and I am there.  It is now and it is then.

Is it possible?  

Madeleine L’Engle, she who taught me of time travel and tesseracts, once remarked, “Nothing important is completely explicable.”   This simultaneity, it is important.   It is inexplicable.  It is always and everywhere.

I will walk four miles before I return home.  I will pass the mimosa tree on my way back.  And in the evening breeze its leaves will quiver and send a wrinkle through time.

Copyright 2014

Bits and Scraps and the Making of Nests

Why do we call it nesting? Why not denning or lairing? Why was the home of a bird, as opposed to that of a lion or fox or bear, turned into a verb?

Home from a weekend at the beach I am scurrying to recover the equilibrium of my every day. The washing machine is swooshing with the first of many loads. What is left of snacks and drinks are scattered across the countertop, haphazardly emptied from totebags and coolers, awaiting some decision as to whether they are worth keeping. I am standing on a ladder in the shed hoisting the beach chairs and umbrella up into the rafters. The last remaining grains of sand are a dry baptism on my head. 

It rained while I was away, not much, but enough to leave the hydrangea surprisingly perky, the basil sprouting fresh green leaves, and the Russian sage, grown absolutely out of control at the corner of the perennial bed, drooping nearly to the ground. The rain was brought in by an eastern breeze; I can tell from the bits and scraps of botanical detritus littering the yard.  Carefully watching my steps to avoid the holes dug by armadilloes, I nearly trip over a nest.

Sitting perfectly upright, as though laid gently on the ground by soft hands, it is still balanced within the arms of a Y-shaped branch.  I wish I had been there to see the branch, snapped brusquely from the chinaberry tree in the rain, fall? dive? float? down to the soft bed of grass on which it now rests.

It is hot. The shed has left me damp all over. My hair clings to my neck in wet curls and my shirt is stuck to my sunburned chest.  I am honed in on the air-conditioned inside just a few yards away, craving the taste of just-made sweet tea in a glass sweating as much as I am.  But I stop.  I cannot resist the nest. 

I bend down to peer into its perfect cup. Spun round and round each other like skeins of cotton candy, thin pine needles the warm brown color of melted caramel make a perfect inverted dome. Beyond its edge, larger pieces of brown grass, threads the color a tweed jacket I once had, form the exterior wall of the little house.  Beyond that, twigs and sticks thicker than spaghetti, not as thick as a pencil, lie across each other at odd angles like a game of pickup sticks.

There is no sign of its former occupants and, having lost its place in the tree, the nest is not fit for avian habitation any longer. I can, without guilt, requisition it for myself –  a found treasure, a serendipitous gift.  I stoop to gather it carefully into my open palms. 

Why do we call it nesting, the instinctual need to adapt an ample and appropriate living space into a unique expression of self?  What is it about the delicate configuration of stems and string and stray slips of paper, where eggs are laid and hatched, where raucous wars are fought to protect the hatched, where fledglings are set forth, that makes it a better metaphor for creating a home than the warren of the rabbit or the lodge of the beaver or the sett of the badger?  

I carry the nest inside and place it on the kitchen counter.  There is a basket of pears grown on Mama’s tree and a hand-painted ceramic bowl I bought at the Club Mud sale at Georgia Southern.  On an opposite wall is the framed blue ribbon Grannie won at the fair and a cross-stitched map of Georgia on which I added an extra X for Register.  On every wall, on every tabletop, on every bookcase there is a bit or scrap of my life and those scraps have been spun and threaded together into a home.  Into a nest.  And it is mine. 

The lair, the lodge, the sett.  The burrow, the den, the warren.  Each is a digging out, an excavation, an emptying.  Only the nest is a building up, a construction, a filling.  Only the nest takes bits and scraps, pieces and flecks, leftovers and remainders and turns them into a seamless whole.  That is why we call it nesting.

Copyright 2014

One Wild and Precious

I cannot say for certain what it was about the milk bottle that convinced me that it was mine.  It could have been the textured glass that felt like sandpaper.  Or the way the sharp light from the windows at the storefront spread into a soft pool of translucence around its edges.  Or the cool curves that  conjured up memories of the mornings when my father left home early early early to make deliveries to the front porches of people I didn’t know.  Whatever it was, it took only moments for me to pay the exorbitant ransom and hurry away down King Street.  

For the last fifteen years or so, the milk bottle has sat quietly on a shelf at Sandhill, the receptacle for quarters I will not spend, a conservatory for the flat silver discs that clink their way into a mound of delayed gratification.  When the bottle is full, I treat myself to something frivolous or, if not frivolous, at least a bit more extravagant than I would usually allow.  Sitting on the floor, tilting the bottle just so, watching the quarters tumble through the mouth of the bottle, feeling it grow lighter and lighter as it empties, I remember the little girl thrill of emptying a piggy bank.  Stacking the quarters in towers of four, counting out the dollars, I am taken back to childhood Saturdays and McConnell’s Dime Store and the Whitman Books display – a spinning rack where the Timber Trail Riders and Donna Parker and Trixie Belden waited for me and my insatiable appetite for words.

One morning while mindlessly brushing my teeth, I saw the bottle from the corner of my eye.  And for the first time in ages noticed the word etched in thick block letters up one side: WORTHWHILE.  

It was, as I recalled, the name of the store from which I’d purchased the bottle, but in all this time I’d never really thought about it as being anything other than that – the name of the store.  In a single glimpse, a sideways glance, though, I now saw with the clarity of a stare, a glare, a studied focus that it was more than a label.  

Worthwhile, worth the while, worthy of the wait.  It was a question.  From its perch on the shelf next to the crystal clock and the ceramic angel, the bottle was asking me, “Is the container into which you are dropping your currency worthwhile?  Are the things and people in which you are investing worth the while?  Are the dreams you are dreaming worthy of the wait?”

I finished getting ready and headed out into the morning.  The questions stayed with me like chaperones.

Sometime around lunch I heard another question join them when the voice of the poet Mary Oliver whispered in my ear:  “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” 

Wild?  Not an adjective generally associated with me.  Precious?  I’ll accept it, but point out its substantial subjectivity.  One?  Ah, there’s the rub.  No argument available against it, no plausible dispute possible.  One life.  One milk bottle into which the coins of minutes and hours, days and weeks, months and years go dropping one by one.  And as I tilt the bottle, as I watch the days and years tumble out at what feels like equal speed, on what will I spend them?  

I spent the weekend on Signal Mountain with some friends.  On Saturday afternoon we found ourselves in a shop with a spinning rack that held greeting cards, not books.  The five of us stood shoulder to shoulder reaching in and pulling out, reading to ourselves and each other the poignant, the clever, the down-right funny sentiments.  

I already had my hands full of selections to purchase when one of my friends said, “Here.  This is you.”  She handed me a card on which I read another quote from Mary Oliver: “Instructions for life: Pay attention.  Be amazed.  Tell about it.”  

What do I plan to do with my one wild and precious life?  I plan to pay attention and be amazed.  And with every moment that tumbles out of the bottle and into my hand, I plan to tell about it.  

Copyright 2014

Imagine That!

I am lying on my back.  The darkness outside the window has a green tinge to it, as though the night has mildewed.  If there is a moon or any stars, they are blocked by the limp branches of the mimosa trees and the shed in the backyard, neither of which I can see, both of which I know are there.  Also there is the clothesline where my mother hangs the wet sheets and towels that flap and flap and flap and come back inside dry.

I am in the top bunk, my face not far from the ceiling of the room I share with my little brother.  He is asleep, curled into a comma in his cowboy pajamas on the lower bunk.  Not far from his face are the red and green linoleum tiles that make the floor of the entire duplex a giant checkerboard.  Sometimes I walk through the rooms stepping only on one color or the other.  The tiles are big and it is not easy on four-year-old legs.

I am not usually awake in dark this dark.  I am usually, like my brother, asleep, lost in Schopenhauer’s “little death.”  But tonight is not usual.  Tonight I am lost in what lies beyond the window, what lies beyond my street and the street behind it and the summer night heavy with humidity and the sounds of crickets and frogs and distant traffic.  I am lost in something for which I do not yet have words.

It is the strange sensation of being in two places at once, of rubbing my arms and legs across the sun-dried sheets, of reaching out to touch the cool wall with my hand, of hearing the bunk bed creak when I roll over onto my side, while simultaneously drifting through the window and up and over the backyard, pulled by something strong and irresistible toward someplace.  It is as though I am both myself and Wendy, for whom Peter Pan has flown all the way from Neverland to take back to the Lost Boys.  How is that possible?

How could someone possibly sleep?

I can not tell my father, who tiptoes in and peers into each of our faces in turn, who leans in close to hear our breathing, who touches our arms to assure himself that we are really there, I can not tell my father that I am here and also somewhere else, that I have discovered, accidentally and haphazardly, imagination.   I can not tell him or anyone else –  because I don’t know it yet myself –  that I will never be the same.

It is years later.  A lifetime later.  I am lying on my back.  The darkness outside the window has a blue tinge to it, as though the night has frozen.  There is a moon, but it is blocked for the moment by the languid flow of thick clouds.  There is another shed in another backyard.  The sheets against which I rub my arms and legs have never dried in sunlight. 

I am often awake in dark this dark.  Often gazing at a ceiling that hovers far enough above my face that I am reminded of my near-sightedness.  Often carried away to a place that has grown as familiar to me as my hometown, though I don’t always call it by its real name.  I am more comfortable, in some circles, with saying that I am reflecting, daydreaming, or – God, forgive me! – brainstorming, but no euphemism, no circumlocution, no periphrasis changes the fact that what I am doing is imagining.  And every last thing that I imagine is real.

I do not need a stocking-shaped shadow folded up inside a bureau drawer or a box of Turkish delight or a passport stamped Minas Tirith as evidence that I have been to Neverland and Narnia and Middle Earth.  I do not need geological specimens from the thousand other places I created in order to establish their existence.  And I have all the momentoes I want locked away in the warm summer night of my imagination.

Copyright 2014

"Why Did It Have To Be Snakes?"

The snake was five feet long.  Exactly five feet long.  I know this because I measured the skin he left in the hosta bed right outside my back door.  The skin he left in a soft pile like dirty clothes he expected his mother to pick up and toss in the laundry.  The skin I picked up with a broom handle and stretched across the cool concrete carport, careful not to touch it because, well, you just never know.  

I stood there and stared at it for a couple of minutes, thought about the snake wriggling and writhing and slipping out completely dressed in brand new skin, wondered where exactly he’d gotten to after his costume change, and congratulated myself on having waited two days since the discovery before venturing close enough, with the broom handle, to examine what he had left behind.  It was highly unlikely, I reasoned, that he would have hung around under the hydrangeas for two days, cool and damp though it would have been.  

I was pretty sure it was a rat snake.  Not because I am particularly adept at identifying reptiles, but because every time I’ve engaged Daddy to expedite the departure of a snake from the immediate environs of Sandhill, his swift and sure work has been accompanied by the remark, “Well, Doll, ain’t nothing but a rat snake” and they have all looked like this one. But pretty sure was not good enough because, well, this snake was still alive. Somewhere.

So that is why I measured it.  Went inside and pulled from the drawer by the telephone my Stanley 25-ft Locking SAE Tape Measure, chrome-plated and outfitted with a wide clip on the back to fit on a tool belt, an instrument one can trust when exactness is important.  I stretched it out the length of the snake skin, feeling the metal flex and flatten against the concrete, and locked it down where the skin splayed out in a ruffle where the snake’s head had once been.  Five feet.  Exactly.  I measured again just to make sure.  Five feet.

My various Audubon guides are lined up on a chest by the front door, propped between sandhill crane bookends. I pulled out “Field Guide to the Southeastern States” and flipped to the reptiles sections.  On page 271 there it was: eastern rat snake, elaphe obsoleta.  “Gray race of se GA west to MS valley is gray, with diamondback-like white-edged dark blotches.”  I peered through the thick plastic of the gallon Ziploc bag into which I had gingerly dropped the snakeskin upon bringing it into the house.   The tiny overlapping scales, laid out like bathroom tiles, were the color of a summer thundercloud trimmed in unginned cotton.  He certainly seemed to fit the description. But it wasn’t enough.

Number.  I wanted a number.  And there it was: 5'.  The National Audubon Society had declared that rat snakes were 5 feet long.  My snake was 5 feet long.  Ergo, my snake was a rat snake.  Held breath expelled.

There is some part of our humanness that makes us want to measure.  To define with numbers.  To identify in SAE terms.  Not a bad thing when one is building a house or designing a rocket or even identifying a snake.  It occurred to me, however, as I reshelved the Audubon guide and dropped the tape measure back into the drawer, that the ease of using numbers to distinguish one thing – or one person – from another can easily rob us of the other parts of our humanness.

Test scores that admit some students and leave out others without regard for abilities and characteristics other than test-taking aptitude, ticket sales that determine what is deemed to be art, descriptions like “age-appropriate” that can not possibly be defined – they all ignore kindness and compassion and curiosity and courage and all the other numinous and luminous qualities that ultimately make those houses and rockets, that produce schools and churches and families, that result in creatures a little lower than the angels, crowned in glory and honor.

I will leave my tape measure in the drawer by the door.  I will keep the scale in the bathroom.  I will maintain my checkbook register and watch my cholesterol and keep track of the time.  But I will not be defined or limited or made afraid by numbers.  Not even the ones attached to a snake.

Copyright 2014

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