Her voice was soft and low and thick with all the charm of a South Carolina accent as she whispered the words in my ear:  “It just doesn’t pay to act ugly in Aiken.”  And I was glad it was being said to me and not about me.  

It was back within the first few months after I had moved to Aiken – more than 20 years ago now.  Back when Aiken was more small town culture and close-knit living.  Back when its manners were carefully groomed and dutifully passed from one generation to the next and kept its feet wiped on every front door mat.

“Not acting ugly in Aiken” meant not honking our car horns – except to say “hey” as we drove past a friend; it meant not raising our voices in anger – except maybe during a football game.  It meant holding open doors and giving up places in line, and asking after the welfare of “your mama and them” at home, and saying ma’am and sir regardless of age or social standing.

“It just doesn’t pay to act ugly in Aiken” also meant that if you did so, it was surely going to come back to haunt you at some point in time, and you would get your comeuppance in some form or manner – most likely sitting next to you in church or wherever you got your hair cut or perhaps in the checkout line at the grocery store.

This particular whispered observation that day had to do with a misstep that had been made by some folks in a rather prominent relationship, and it had all come out in public in a particularly “ugly” way.  And my confidante was pointing out the folly of it all in this most colorful expression – perhaps meant to be a cautionary tale to newly transplanted northerners.  I believed her.

But I wish I had remembered those wise words just a few weeks ago.  I had perceived myself to be kinder than that.  I thought I had incorporated the best of southern good manners into my own daily practices and precepts.  I didn’t think of myself or my behavior as being “ugly.”  Until it was. more “It just doesn’t pay to act ugly.” …

Young dog Daphne was nosing around the base of a large old maple tree.  She pressed her muzzle snugly to the ground and took something into her mouth.  It crunched.  She kept crunching and swallowing as fast as she could, as she watched me scurry over to her, impotently telling her to “drop it, drop it” (knowing full well she was not going to drop it; she was, after all, being young Daphne, doing young Daphne things).  

I had missed seeing what it was that was now well inside her tummy.  But then a thin, transparent wing floated down from the edge of her lips.  A cicada wing.  It could have been worse.  But I scolded her a bit all the same.  Perhaps for disobeying me.  Perhaps for the act itself – eating a fellow living being, a harmless beauty.  Or perhaps it was for taking away one of the singular signs of summer just as it is closing up for the season.
more “The blessings and balance of August.” …

I heard her before I saw her.  It was a slow, rhythmic, metallic, squeak coming up behind me.  I was stumping along with my cane last Sunday morning (same old nagging hip and knee), making my way from a street parking space to my church door.  It wasn’t far, but I’m slow.

The squeak got closer, so I thumped over to the side of the walkway, and she pulled up beside me.

The squeak was a wonky wheel on a shopping cart that had obviously seen better days.  It was being pushed along by a rather tall, perhaps middle-aged, woman – who had probably enjoyed better days herself.

After we had exchanged greetings and observations about the weather (hot and a bit more humid, we agreed), and after her obligatory request about what spare change I might have taking up space in my pockets or lying loose in my purse, and after I had found some and had pressed it into her hand as discreetly as I could, I noticed what was piled into the basket of her cart.  Plants.  A bunch of them.  All dead or dying or looking just pitiful.   more “Shopping carts, dead plants, and Good Samaritans.” …

The babies fittingly broke through their shells on Mother’s Day morning.  At least that’s when I first heard the tiny cheeps that sounded terribly new and fresh, the first day I also noticed the parent birds making regular food runs.

The nest is tucked up in a far corner of my “veranda” (a converted carport), a good 15 feet from the ground, so I won’t be peeking inside it as ladders are still out of the question for me and my gimpy leg.  But I can hear them asserting their presence, practicing their voices.  And I’ve started to catch glimpses of tiny round heads breaching the edge of the nest.  And I talk softly to the parents as they swoop past, or as they sometimes stop to perch hesitantly on the back of a chair to get a closer look at me and judge my character. more “Listen for the safety of birdsong.” …

One was on the far left.  One was equally far right.  One was on the fence, while one went into the house.  Happily, they have nothing to do with politics.  They were trees.  Sadly, they both fell – toes up and roots waving – during the tornado winds of Helene last September.

The magnolia tree on the far right (northeast corner) of my property was the one that came down on the roof of my house.  Actually, rather gently, very southern-lady-like, she only poked a few holes through the shingles – not enough to even allow the rain to come in.  In fact, less damage was done in her graceful fall than during her subsequent removal – which ripped and tore and scraped down all manner of bushes and plants and fencing along the entire east side of my house and property.  And still, left behind was a good long length of her trunk and massive roots, upended and heavy on the ground, her skirts lifted and splayed as if she were a naughty can-can dancer flashing her knickers at her onetime neighbor, the tiny guest cottage behind her, surrounding herself with root-strewn bricks like red confetti.

A similar scenario played out on the far left (northwest corner) of my property with a large lovely flowering tree that I had never been able to really identify.  She, however, was tossed about in different directions and took out fences to both the west and north – plus one neighbor’s storage shed and another neighbor’s palm tree.  She was very undecided and awkward about it all, rather like someone arriving late to the theater and stumbling down a row of established audience members trying to find her own resting place.  Like the magnolia, her ultimate removal also resulted in a similar aftermath, with a tangle of upturned roots at the end of a heavy fallen trunk, torn from the ground, her skirts flying – all quite sassy yet terribly sad.

But what seemed like tragic left-behinds to me, apparently appeared as compelling new opportunities to the dogs – short dog Daphne in particular.  

While I was searching for someone who had the wherewithal to come and remove the excruciatingly heavy and cumbersome trunks and unruly root systems, the dogs were busy evaluating and excavating.  Beneath both tree remains of root drapes and soft dirt, they had found and expanded upon the most exquisite dens … the most delightful hideouts … a unique twist on the tradition of “tree houses.”  

The passage of time over the winter months and the coming spring has also allowed for bright strands of ivy and soft moss and tiny flowers to creep across and around the massive trunks and decorate the doggy playhouses as if they were deep in a woods.  This also gives the dogs great footing for climbing and cushy beds for standing on like giant wild wolves of self-image.  Now, they can crouch in shadow secrecy at the sides of the trunks, or lie in coolness and be protected from rain and wind and all manner of scary things within the root-hole dens, as well as stand tall and majestic, peeking over fences from the top sides of the trunks themselves.

Of course, now the tree remains can not be removed.  Of course, now they’ve even been incorporated into an odd sort of new landscape.  They’ve actually become the basic elements around which I’ve been trimming and reshaping.  The nice man doing the removal of all the rest of the dead and dying bushes and fences and vines and ground cover has been graciously a part of the whole scheme.  He cautiously cuts around and respects the doggy playhouses as he works, while dogs Daphne and Liam watch like concerned project managers.

I suspect there could not have been a more pointed or poignant life lesson taking place in my own backyard these past few months.  Perhaps I will try to look at other crushing blows and frightening changes with an eye for new possibilities.  Perhaps, too, I’ll learn the importance of never missing an opportunity to play.  Perhaps I will forever see downed trees as dog forts.

I’ve been painting again.  Not beautiful landscapes and inspired portraits of Aiken in Spring.  Unlike so many of my talented friends, I have absolutely no ability for that kind of artistic expression.  I’ve been painting rooms.  To be truthful, a delightful handyman named Paul has been painting them for me – what with my still-gimpy leg and better discretion about not climbing ladders.

The rooms are in my guest cottage.  A small bit of a place not more than a few yards behind my house, tucked into the far northeast corner of the property.  For years it was lived in and loved by a dear family friend.  But then it was time for her to move on.  And just as I was beginning to rethink the cottage’s purpose and possibilities, and refresh its walls and floors and furnishings, the dogs and I collided and I got badly broken.  And so I just turned the key on the little cottage door, and turned away.  It stood alone for almost a year.  

But now, I’ve very slowly gone back to poking around in it again.  I decided to start where I had left off – with painting.  And for weeks it had splotches of test colors dotting the kitchen cabinets, bedroom walls, bathroom backdrops and closets, even the floors.  Only the main living area walls escaped the color experiments.  Because only the main living area still sports its original 1950s-era wood panelling on all four walls.  In there, it’s all warm and glowing and retro-cozy, as if it were still listening to 45s on the hi-fi.  But there are cabinets at the kitchen end of the area, and they got painted first – a soft grey-green color – part library, part garden.  Very cottage-y.

I liked the color result so much I thought I’d try a version of it in the bedroom and bathroom as well.  I tried other colors, too – mixtures, blends, varying hues.  And, after weeks of wavering uncertainty, I told Paul, “just go for it” – using a version of the same color as on the kitchen cabinets in both rooms – with a very soft white on both ceilings. 

It rather breaks my DIY heart to have someone else get all up close and personal with my little cottage.  There is something about painting the rooms of a house that lets you truly claim it for your own.  Like putting a big sloppy kiss on its forehead, leaving lipstick marks behind.  So I didn’t watch.  I just kept checking in.

I trust handyman Paul completely.  He is a wonderful painter.  But when I saw the mostly finished walls in both rooms, I actually questioned the paint he had used.  (When you stand in the middle of the house, you can literally see into its three rooms at once.)  And we both started checking the paint cans again.  The colors on the walls looked not just different, they looked as if they weren’t even in the same color family.  They weren’t just variations on a theme, they were whistling entirely different tunes.  One room to the next, cabinets vs. walls, south vs. north, the colors looked like everything from green to grey to almost shadow blue.  Even the ceilings weren’t the same color as they were in the single can – one ceiling looked a grayish-white, one almost pure yellow (in the can, it was cream).  

I know what light can do to the appearance of paint colors, but this was beyond anything I’d seen before.  And it was indeed all about the light.  One room is filled with morning sun, while the other has only artificial light within it.  One is all corners and cubbyholes, the other is long and narrow and open one end to the next.

I suspect that much of life is like that, after all.  Part of it is twists and turns and corners, while other parts are long views.  And how we perceive it is all about the light.  Whether it’s a single color or a single event or a single situation, the light that we shine on it can make all the difference – the natural light we allow in, or the light we bring to it ourselves – as well as the darkness in which we may choose to keep it.  Even where we are standing as we look at it gives us a different perspective, a different perception, a different color.

I love my little time-worn, freshly kissed cottage, now wearing its new coat of many colors.  I suspect it’s because nothing is quite the same in every place and every time I look at it – one wall to the next, one room to the next, one hour to the next.  It’s about the joy of variations and shifting moods and interesting personalities and changing clothes and hats – and the almost infinite diversity and possibilities of it all.  

I can’t wait to paint the floors. 

“Whenever I look down at my hands, I see my grandmother’s rings.”  It was one of those random bits of overheard conversation among strangers that caught me off guard and played with my imagination.  I didn’t know the woman who said it.  I didn’t really see her.  I just heard the words with the edge of my mind as we passed.

I wondered if she wore her grandmother’s jewelry.  Or perhaps her own hands reminded her of her grandmother’s and she saw the rings in her mind’s eye from childhood memories.

I was never very fond of my own hands.  Too pudgy, short-fingered, sun-freckled, with nails that are never fashionable (just sort of places where the fingers suddenly stop).  Until one day, my sister said my hands reminded her of our mother’s hands – and I began to see them that way, too.  And I was glad for all their stubbiness, the plain-speaking appearance of them, their homeliness with a suggestion of strength.

On a recent PBS special, a woman forensic specialist was describing to the show’s host how the backs of our hands are as distinctive as our fingerprints.  In particular, she was observing the sun spots, the crisscrossing of veins, the minute scars and worn patches on them.  I found it particularly compelling that our “age spots” are one of the most significant ways our hands are unique – as if we don’t come into the fullness of our individuality until we are old enough to handle it.  The woman described how an entire branch of study was being developed that was devoted to this way of identifying us as individuals.  Because no two hands are ever alike.  Never.

Beyond just our fingerprints, the backs of our hands are apparently a proprietary blend of inheritance from birth and experience through life, genetics and life choices (our fingerprints are formed while we’re still in the womb, but all the rest has to come later).  Our hands are forever recording who we are and where we’ve been, what we’ve done and how we’ve done it.

Musicians and bread-bakers, nurses and artists, horse riders and race car drivers, athletes, dog trainers, bricklayers, tillers of the ground – all of us have hands that are shaped and informed by our talents and livelihoods.

Perhaps this humanity of our hands is why we instinctively hold each other by them at first breath and last.  Why we use them when we say hello and goodbye, crossing streets, giving comfort, expressing love.  We know each other in dark places by our hands and touch.  We pull each other to safety with them.  Perhaps that was one of the parts of being human we inherently missed most during the long separation of the pandemic – that hand-to-hand connection.  

I suspect there is no parent on earth who does not know their own child’s tiny handprints, brought home from school on a rumpled piece of colored paper; sometimes commemorated in cement near the backdoor.  Even our animals know us by just the scent and feel of our hands.

Apparently our hands are as unique to each of us as a zebra’s stripes and a leopard’s spots.  And only a few other creatures have such distinctions.  The individuality of our hands is the key to unlocking things like laptops and car doors and hidden rooms.  And for hundreds and hundreds of years before us, that individuality was used for sealing documents and signing contracts; with just the marks of our thumbs we kept secrets and promises to each other.  

And yet, I suspect with all the amazingly unique physical character of our hands themselves, the design of them doesn’t matter nearly so much as the awesome responsibility they hold within them – how we take care of one another with them, how we bless or curse the earth with them, what we choose to lift up or hold down with them, how open or closed they are when we share our stuff, how they record the past and shape the future.

Leonardo daVinci told us:  “When you put your hand into a flowing stream, you touch the last of what has gone before and the first of what is still to come.”

I suspect that when we consider the uniqueness of our own hands we are meant to always feel the touch of a child, and see our grandmother’s rings.

My friend James is a brilliant actor.  When asked in a recent interview about his career preferences, he said he loved Shakespeare best.  He said it was all about the words and how they feel in his mouth.  I’ve also come to believe that when you hear Shakespeare’s words spoken, it’s all about how the words feel in your ears, too – and your heart and mind, how they resonate through your whole body and being.

Of course, Shakespeare wrote his words to be spoken aloud – to be heard from the mouths of skilled actors.  But perhaps its a phenomenon of most well-written works – they take on new depth and connection when we read them aloud to each other.

I suspect most of us were read to as children – by mothers and fathers, babysitters and teachers, perhaps older siblings.  If we were lucky, they read to us from classic childhood novels and sometimes serialized stories printed in magazines.  Most were without pictures; the stories were created solely by the magic of the words themselves – words that became like shadows on the wall, animated and brought to life by the readers’ voices and our own personal imaginations.

Being read to out loud is one of the lasting pleasures of childhood we never seem to outgrow.  I suspect it’s the reason for the ongoing attraction of audio books and author book readings, poetry nights at the library and Shakespeare in the park.  I know couples who read aloud to each other on car trips and in bed at night and by firelight on cold afternoons and by flashlight in camping tents.

I think most authors would be pleased with the idea of their words being read aloud.  There’s no skipping ahead or speed-reading without meaning or tone, no jumping to the last page first.  The story unfolds the way it was meant to, the way it was put down on paper (usually with pencil or pen in hand scratching softly along the page), slowly, deliberately, with great thought and care, from beginning to end.  And then it receives the added voice and texture of the reader – colored as well by the sensitivity and curiosity and personal experience of the listener.  And the possibilities of it grow beyond the author, beyond the printed page.

There is a saying that I greatly appreciate (thoughts about the origin of this saying are rather mixed – variously attributed to a small child, a contemporary author, an ancient culture, even some Biblical texts).  But the saying is this:  “You can tell when a person loves you by they way they say your name; your name feels safe in their mouth.”

Perhaps there is something of this same sensibility when we read a story we love out loud – to another or just to ourselves.  How the words feel in our mouths, how they resonate in our ears, how they walk around in our heads and dance with our hearts, is a blending of the author’s words and our own souls.  And so the words become filled with new context, new understanding, a sort of recognition, a relationship.  Rather like holding hands.

I hope reading aloud never becomes a lost art.  I hope there are always words to read that feel good in our mouths.  Words that feel intriguing and experiential, complex and original, perhaps a bit heartbreaking as well as comforting.  Like Shakespeare.  But most of all, I hope the words in our mouths feel safe, like love.  And that we keep sharing them out loud with each other.

I have been watching her now for the past several minutes.  My short dog, Daphne, has the “zoomies” – running as fast as she can all round the front yard.  She is watching me watching her.  She likes an audience.  But since last June when she and the tall dog, Liam, took me down during a flat-out zoomies run, and left me in their wake as a pile of broken bits and pieces, she is not allowed to run like this too close to me.  Liam tries to make sure of it by standing guard in front of me.  I remind her with words of caution.  And she respects the restrictions.  But still, she likes an audience.

Today, as I stand watching her appreciatively, I’ve noticed a distinct pattern:  she runs all around the property at the edges.  She runs in circles, in figure-eights, leaping over rocks, dodging behind bushes, zig-zagging around trees.  She races like the wind.  But she runs almost exclusively along the edges.

Long before our collision, I noticed her running patterns in the backyard.  But the backyard is almost completely paved over (a former owner’s preference, not my own).  So I assumed this was why she ran the perimeter back there, keeping to the only grass and soft ground available.  But the front yard is almost entirely soft plant beds and lawn.  And still, she runs the edges.

I first came across the term of “edge walkers” in an essay about formal religion and the natural world and about living in the thresholds between them.  The author observed that edge walkers occupy a thin space, and called it a lonely place.  She further wrote that the majority of people inhabit the vast spaces on either side of the edges.  And that edge walking is as much a calling as it is a choice. 

In nature, these edges or thresholds between biosystems are called “ecotones,” which contain the greatest biodiversity and are the most resilient as a result.  It has always been a tradition of native cultures to “leave the edges wild.”  No matter how cultivated a field or manicured a lawn, it is good to leave the edges wild for the bugs and birds, butterflies and bunnies, and all manner of other creatures and seedlings.  And, most especially, for the sake of diversity itself.  

Perhaps Daphne can feel this wildness under her feet as she runs the edges of the property.  Perhaps the ground there is cushioned with hidden moss beds, moist with mud, cooler in summer, warmer in winter, leaf-thick, twig-crunchy.  I would suspect that the scents behind and beneath the bushes and trees at the edges are wonderfully compelling, that the shadows and sun dapples are perfectly intriguing.

But I suspect, too, that it isn’t only in nature that the most exhilarating and informative diversity exists at the edges.  Cultural, political, social, religious – perhaps all of these environments offer edges to walk.  Rather than getting swept along into manicured expanses of sameness, or trapped in cultivated rows of autocracy, the edges may be much preferred spaces in which to walk through all of life.

Edge walking may be, indeed, a lonely thing.  Daphne is terribly introverted.  But it must be a wonderfully liberating thing as well.  To be open to such otherwise hidden delights and possibilities … to be released from formats and fences … to be freeform and resilient in thought and step.  

Two millennia ago, a child was born who would spend his life walking the edges, bringing love and light and possibilities into dark places.  Ever since then, his followers have been tasked with carrying that invitation of Peace on Earth forward.  And if we don’t drop it, it may light the way for edge walkers through another 2000 years.

Perhaps Daphne is watching me watching her, not so much because she wants an audience, but because I am meant to have this Christmas reminder to always be an edge walker myself.