Melissa Caroline Ray Minichella was born August 5, 1967 in Baxley, Georgia. She died March 18, 2021 in a care facility in Pulaski, Ga., near Metter. She was my first cousin, the daughter of my Aunt Frances Carolyn and my Uncle Roy Gene Ray. They proudly brought their eldest child home to Barnes Street, the street that Uncle Gene had been raised on, and his mother Clyo (our grandmother) before him.
 
Melissa was beautiful, with large expressive eyes, peach-colored skin, and hair like honey. She had a sunny disposition, loved to dance and sing, and was always happy. She especially enjoyed birthday parties. My Aunt Caroline was smitten, but Melissa was the apple of my Uncle Gene’s eye. His love was so great for his little girl that he wanted to give her anything her heart desired.
 
She had two siblings, her sister Paula, and then her brother Walter. Melissa was ten years old by the time Walt was born. He told me it was kinda rough growing up with two big sisters. One night, for example, they talked their parents into going to the drive-in to see Nightmare on Elm Street, and taking Walt with them. They hadn’t been at the drive-in long when the girls found boys to hang with, and of course they left their little brother in the car. Walt has never forgotten that night.
 
Melissa entered a beauty pageant when she was thirteen – that’s how pretty she was – and she grew up to be a gorgeous woman. She was a good-hearted person. She had a heart that was full of love and she wanted to be loved. She was generous to a fault. And she was very smart, with a notably high IQ. In fact, she attended Kerr Business School at the same time as her mama and sister, and she loved the fact that she scored higher on her entrance exam than both of them.
 
Now the story of Melissa’s life takes a terrible turn. She got pregnant and married young – too young – and badly. In fact, the day she went into labor with her first child she had gone fishing with her husband. He had punched her in the belly when she wasn’t able to bait her hook. Eight months pregnant, she gave birth to Charlie Gene Wenner. A couple years later she found the strength to leave that relationship, only to fall into a more abusive one. Her second husband, insanely jealous, beat her almost daily. With him she gave birth to a second son, Mark Bryant, Jr., but it would be eight years before she could get away from that relationship. Finally she decided to leave him when he shot all four tires out of her car.
 
Melissa was married three times, after which her family joked “three strikes and you’re out.” She gave birth to two more children – Jimmy Minichella and finally a little girl, Maggie Alyssia Minichella. 
 
Beyond the violence and betrayal, and probably because of it, the story of Melissa’s life has a deeply sad thread running through it, a cross that many people in my family bear – she was touched by mental illness. My family is slowly conquering this disease, but it has taken a devastating toll on many of us. Melissa’s psychiatrists said that although she carried the genetic predisposition, the illness might have lain dormant in her had it not been for the daily trauma and pain she suffered as a young woman and a young mother. She struggled much of her adult life to overcome mental illness, and later she struggled with physical illness brought about in part by her battle for mental health. 
 
There is a theory that people we label as mentally ill are actually people with a huge amount of wisdom and authority, people willing to move between two worlds, from the rational into the irrational, willing to be themselves, willing to step out of boxes. I think about that a lot with Melissa, and some of it rings true. But the fact remains that Melissa suffered inordinately because of mental illness, and so did her family, all of us included, especially her children.
 
Galatians 6:2, “Bear ye one another’s burdens.”
 
My cousin Walt was heartbreakingly honest when he spoke with me about this. “Early on,” he said, “I really just saw Melissa struggle with domestic abuse from her husbands. I was frustrated and angry, watching the choices she made and what she put my mom through, and mainly that was because I didn’t understand her, that she was ill.” As time went by, his heart changed, and for the last 10-15 years he was relieved of his anger and frustration, and instead what he felt for his sister was empathy and then love until he was reconciled, and free, and at peace. 
 
In Matthew 25 Jesus is speaking on the Mount of Olives: “For I was a hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in. Naked and ye clothed me: I was sick and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me…Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
 
One of the affects that bipolar disorder had on Melissa was that she had a different sense of time than most of us. She wasn’t necessarily sleeping at 2 a.m. And she didn’t mind using the telephone to call people at any time of night. As her sister-in-law April Herron Ray said, “I will miss the 2 a.m. phone calls when she would call just to ask what I was doing. If you knew Melissa, you know that she had no concept of time, so if she thought about you at 2 a.m., she was going to call you at 2 a.m.” Our first cousin Sandra Ray Jones said the same thing, “She would call at all hours of the night. Sometimes she woke me out of a dead sleep. She would talk to me about whatever she was thinking about. Every time we were getting ready to hang up she would say, ‘Hey, Sandra, don’t hang up yet. I need to tell you something.” And every time she would say, “I love you, thank you for talking to me.” 
 
This is also what Sandra said – “Every time I saw her she hugged me and told me she loved me.” April said, “Melissa was full of personality and loved with all her heart. She would always give me the biggest hugs and tell me how much she loved me.” Walt said, “She would call at all times of the night and tell me she loved me.” It was that enormous love, and her willingness to express the profundity and vastness of it, that softened Walt’s heart. Now he misses those 2 a.m. calls when he was awakened, alarmed, to hear his big sister over and over and over expressing her gratitude and great love for him.
 
She loved us.
And we loved her back.
 
I think it was this love that others saw. There was one nurse, Millie, at her doctor’s office. Millie was kind and caring, and Melissa really liked her. Melissa would call Millie’s phone and leave messages. When she called, you never knew what she was going to say. Some of her messages were wildly imaginative and very funny. Millie told Aunt Carolyn that she saved the messages and when she was having a bad day, she listened to them. They made her feel better. She did the same kind of phoning to the Wal-Mart Pharmacy. “What are you doing?” she’d say. “We’re working,” they’d say. “But if we’re not busy we enjoy talking to you.” Her calls brightened their days because they were different, they were creative. She’d call the bank and tell them that she $100,000 was missing from her account. She’d call the pharmacy and say she had her doctor’s license. Once she called the Savannah River Nuclear Plant and asked where her retirement check was. 
 
In order to use the telephone in this way, Melissa had a great mind for numbers. As my brother Dell said, “If you told her a phone number – if she ever heard one – she wouldn’t forget it.” 
 
April told this story: “I’ll never forget the time she pulled $20 out of her wallet to give Nolan just because she loved him. I tried my best to get her to keep it, but she insisted on giving it to him. Not five minutes later, she asked me to borrow $5 for cigarettes! I will also never forget the time I thought I was going to end up in a fight with some young punk for making fun of her. I let him have it (totally out of character for me) and got her shoes and purse and told her to get in the car because I wasn’t leaving her. She got in the car and just cried. She said, ‘Thank you for loving me, April.’ Melissa was an easy target for some but she was a good soul and I’d defend her to anyone.” 
 
Living with this level of mental illness is difficult for a family, but if you think of it with accommodation and acceptance in mind, it can be hilarious. And a laugh is worth a lot. Laughing lifts you up. Laughing gets you through. Laughing heals.
 
Aunt Caroline told me a story about taking Melissa to church with her at Baxley United Pentecostal Church, which she attends. Taking Melissa in public was an iffy proposition because she would often say inappropriate things. On this evening she went up to the preacher and said she wanted him to marry her.
“You want to marry me?” he said. “I can’t do that. I’m already married.”
“No,” she said. “I mean to say that I want you to marry me. I mean perform the ceremony.”
“Who are you marrying?” the preacher said.
 “I want to marry that guy right there,” Melissa said and pointed to a man sitting on a pew, a guy named Curtis.
“Me?” Curtis said. “Oh no, I done been there and done that. No.” 
But the next time Melissa went into the church and sat right down by Curtis and scrunched up to him. Aunt Caroline kept telling her, low, “Come on, Melissa. We’re gonna sit over here. Get up and come sit with me.” But Melissa wouldn’t budge.
Curtis looked at Aunt Caroline. “Leave her alone,” he said. “Don’t you worry one minute about it.”
 
A couple of years ago Melissa’s physical difficulties got so advanced that she needed to go into a care facility. During this last period of her life, she was hospitalized a number of times for respiratory failure, COPD, congestive heart failure. Every time she pulled through. She got COVID, and even with all the co-morbidities, she survived. It was amazing. Every time the nurses called that Melissa was sick, Aunt Caroline started praying hard, harder than she usually prayed for her children. “She was a fighter,” her mom said. “She was tough. She was a survivor.”
 
The last time I saw Melissa was a month or two before the pandemic hit, a year ago. She had recently been hospitalized, when she again had come close to death. That day, she was still too weak to walk, but she wanted to be in the middle of things, so the nurses had rolled her hospital bed into the corridor in front of the nurse’s station. 
 
When she saw me, Melissa rubbed her eyes. She kept wanting to know if it was really me, and I kept telling her it was. She would say how happy she was I’d come to see her. Then she asked a strange question. “Am I dead?”
“No, you’re not.” But she wasn’t convinced. She had come so close that time.
“Are you sure I’m not dead?” she asked. 
“No, we’re still on earth,” I said. “We’re both right here, very alive. Feel this?” And I would take her hand.
Hebrews 4:16: “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.”
 
Last Thanksgiving all the family was able to visit her. As April wrote, “We were able to visit through a fence and with distance, but I am thankful for that time.” That day  Melissa was able to see the love her family has for her. She could see it on their faces. She could hear it in their voices. She could feel it, even though the fence.  
 
In this moment I want to express my honor to have known Melissa and my gratitude for her life. I am grateful for all the joy she brought to her friends and family, and to me. I acknowledge the tragedies that befell her and the lasting suffering wrought upon her. At last she is free of it, free at last. 
 
I want to acknowledge the loss of two of her children in the past two years, Charlie, who died in April 2019, and Maggie, who died in February 2020. They had their own heavy crosses to bear. We miss them.
 
We offer our deepest gratitude to Melissa’s nurses, doctors, social workers, and care givers over the years. Thanks to all the extended family and all the friends who treated Melissa with kindness, who helped bear her burdens. 
 
Thank you to Gene and Carolyn Ray for giving Melissa life. Thank you to all our ancestors who lived so that we might. Thank you to Melissa’s immediate family – Paula, Walt, Little Mark, Jimmy, April, Nolan, Hannah, Rachel, Cadence, Jared, Ava, and all the rest. Please remember this family as they heal from the loss of two grandchildren and now a daughter. 
 
Keep them in your thoughts.
Keep them in your prayers.
Keep them in your arms.

National Park Service
Denver Service Center 
Attn: Ocmulgee River Corridor SRS 
12795 West Alameda Parkway 
PO Box 25287 
Denver, CO 80225-0287
 
Feb. 21, 2021
 
Dear National Park Service,
 
Thank you for your meticulous and efficient study of the movement to create Ocmulgee National Park in central Georgia, with Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park at its heart. Thank you for allowing the public, including myself, the chance to comment.
 
I am a nature writer, the author of six books, mostly about Southern nature. I have been an environmentalist, naturalist, and environmental activist for 25 years, and I have been fortunate in my life to witness the major impact that public land and wild land can have on a region, a species, young people, disadvantaged communities, and other populations that you represent in your work. I am a native Georgian and know well this area of the Ocmulgee. I live about two hours south of Macon.
 
The concern that I am going to address first is the need for more federal public land in the South. The South was already highly impacted by settlement and development when the national park idea manifested with the purchase of Yellowstone. Because all eyes were on the wild west and because the landscape painters were focused there, that’s where most of the land was protected. Yet, the most visited--indeed, overvisited—national park in the entire U.S. is the Great Smoky Mountains National Park; therefore this region of the country proves that its citizens are interested in, will support, and desperately need public lands. To accommodate the growing numbers of visitors at parks everywhere, we need more.
 
In addition, by the time Yellowstone was preserved, the South had battled against its own country and lost, in many ways becoming a colony itself. Southern lands, thus, have been valued for resource extraction and not for inherent beauty or ecological significance or cultural integrity. To have so few national parks in the South—especially Georgia—is to say that the South, or very little of it, is nationally significant. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
 
As an environmentalist, the heft of my comments must deal with the reasons we people of the United States need desperately to save central Georgia’s wild land: 

• habitat for wild populations, especially the black bear
• endangered species like the fringed campion
• forests that store carbon (as the climate crisis breaks over our heads)
• rare ecosystems like blackland prairies
• lowland systems that will regulate floods and droughts
• signature forests such as cypress sloughs
• hiking, biking, horse, and canoe trails for outdoorspeople like myself to recreate.

Because of the unique, wild, and undeveloped qualities of the area, and because it encompasses a vast archaeological landscape containing over 900 historic sites representing 17,000 years of human habitation, Ocmulgee National Park is nationally significant.
 
Lastly, I would like to speak on behalf of the Muscogee Creek Nation. I am not Muscogee. In fact, my European ancestors were those who pushed to remove the Creeks from these lands. What happened to our native brothers and sisters in the Southeastern U.S. were acts of violence, apartheid, and holocaust. I do not use those terms lightly. Employing such tactics as violence and threat of violence, imprisonment, trickery, broken treaties, and division of the Nation—resulting in forced removal of people from their homes and land—white settlers wrongly and unfairly took this region. The details are easily traceable via historical documents, and the impacts are easily traceable in the intergenerational traumas, struggling economics, and compromised health of many native peoples. 
 
In order for our country to move forward into the collaborations that will be required of us, it is important to acknowledge our transgressions and our oppressions, and to proceed with the restitutions that we can accomplish. Ocmulgee National Park is an easy one. The land is there (yes, it will require multi-agency management), the support is there, the political will is there, the need is there, the feasibility is there, the national significance is there.
 
The “national park” brand is important—an act of forgiveness and of restitution, of truth and reconciliation—to prove our nation’s determination to acknowledge the past wrongdoings and move forward into a new and inclusive future. 
 
Thank you for recognizing that this initiative enjoys widespread and enthusiastic support not only from the Muscogee Creek Nation, but also from business owners, downtown development officials, area newspapers, local politicians, numerous college communities in the area, residents of nearby low-income neighborhoods, and outdoor enthusiasts, environmentalists, and naturalists not only from central Georgia but from across the world.  Economic feasibility studies have shown how Ocmulgee National Park will be a major economic driver for the entire region.
 
Please throw your wholehearted support behind Ocmulgee National Park. 
 
Thank you for your time and attention.
 
Sincerely,
Janisse Ray

B below is the link for you to send in your own thoughts & comments. And thank you.
If you only have 5 minutes, you can go to this site and enter your comments online. 
https://parkplanning.nps.gov/document.cfm?parkID=415&projectID=91276&documentID=107649
 
They’ll give you the option of printing out what you wrote & mailing it. Do that if you have time.
 
If you want to see how the NPS is packaging this, here’s their Story Maps link:
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/5e55f35b8e344bf2a104ec7ffa42a81e
 
(It has a button also for Submit Comments.)

​I’m going to be honest and admit that I started a number of books that I decided not to finish, and one of these was The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. I really tried to read this book. I gave it a good shot. But I am not capable of reading trauma without activation of some old post-traumatic stress. I am almost recovered and I don’t dare test that. I read the majority of Renegade Beauty, a very interesting look at health and beauty, and I read most of Daniel Foor’s Ancestral Medicine. By the end of 2021 I may finish these. 
 
Instead of being a serial monogamist, I’m a polygamist (strictly as a reader), and I’m currently engaged with:

• Ann Petry’s novel The Street
• Barry Lopez’s last book Horizon
• George Singleton’s stories, You Want More
• John Lane’s Whose Woods These Are
• Shapes of Native Nonfiction, edited by Washuta & Warburton​

~*~
Before I leave you, I want to name which book was my favorite. This is going to surprise you, and please don’t take this as a recommendation, because you’re probably not going to like what I like. I’ve bought the book for two close friends, neither of whom have ever mentioned a word about it, so I take their silence as a message. 
 
Drum roll. 
 
The book was Ensouling Language by Stephen Harrod Buhner. I’m not even going to explain what the book is about. I’ll just say that reading it transformed my opinion on so many things. I did add my review of it to Goodreads, so you can read that there. I think two things will prove how much I liked this book:
            
First, when I finished I immediately turned back to the first page and started reading it again. I’m not sure that has ever happened in my entire life.
 
Second, I wrote the author. I get lots of fan-style letters, and although I love receiving them, I am twisted by guilt when I don’t have time to respond, or when I take time away from my own writing to pen a reply. I believe that we should be able to enjoy an artist’s work without having to enjoy the artist herself or himself or themselves. So I almost never write these letters. In this case, I did, immediately. I received a reply (!), and that was a wonderful gift. Mr. Buhner and I have not continued our correspondence (or if we have, it’s a slow one) but I have that letter. I’ve spoken with two other friends who also loved this book, so if you do decide to read it and you have the same reaction, let me know. If you don’t like it, don’t let me know. 
 
Besides all the sheer pleasure I get from stories and words, another amazing thing happened in 2020. As a reader I got faster and faster. I realized that being “a slow reader” is not a personality trait or a biological given. It’s a variable. The way you vary it is by (guess what?) reading. To become a better writer, write; to become a better reader, read. I am proof. 
 
~*~

​This is the last thing I want to say. I am not promoting Goodreads, but of all the social media, it’s the one I enjoy most because I nerd out bigtime on books. Goodreads is an easy way to keep track of what you read. Therefore, I am encouraging you to set yourself a goal for 2021. Keep it low so you can bust it open. Now’s the time to do it. 
 
Let me know what happens.

An entire wall at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery is lined with jars of soil -- earth collected from beneath trees, bridges, and platforms where lynchings snuffed out human lives without justice, without warning, without heart. On a recent visit I stood before this wall, overwhelmed.  

Soil is so beautiful in all its colors. Soil is so full of life. Here it represented death, tragedy, genocide.
 
At the memorial, I hoped not to find Tattnall County, Georgia, the county in which I have purchased a farm and where I have lived for a decade.  I hoped this county had not participated.

**
Five years ago I began to volunteer at my county’s Archives. There is a strange air about the Archives. There are stories trying to get free – stories of deeds and misdeeds, understandings and misunderstandings.

The Archives is located in the old jail downtown, built sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. In the northwest corner of the downstairs, set in the ceiling, is a trap door made of metal, three feet square. The door opens at the center with a lever, as if to pour the contents of the upstairs into the cool air of the downstairs. Upstairs there is no sign of a trap door because the floor has been covered in particle board painted gray.

When you first look at that strange contraption set in the ceiling, within sight of the downstairs cells, you don't understand what it is. Then the horror begins to dawn on you. Your mind is flooded with questions -- how many people died here? Who were they? Were they allowed trials, testimonies, juries, appeals, truth? Were other inmates watching?

No records that we have found show definitely that the trap door was used. But sometimes, working late at the records, one begins to hear noises in the repository, low voices and small bangs. Once a university intern heard the sound of chains. I did not disbelieve her, although I know how easy it is to hear people standing outside talking or for passing cars to throw rocks against the brick walls. 

**
At the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, there is a block for Tattnall County. I hated to find it. On the face of Tattnall's block are five names. Four of them are from one date, May 21, 1907, with the same surname: Dosia Padgett, Sam Padgett, Sula Padgett, and Willard Padgett. I want to find out what happened. I want to find where. I want to go there and and gather soil.

I always thought I was a slow reader until the pandemic hit. 

When I was a child I read ravenously, in any spare minute that I could shrug off my duties and slip away from my father's watch. If I wasn't working, I was reading. As the years passed and I had to support a family and run a home and manage a career, I could find less and less time for it. Reading had become a luxury I couldn't afford.

My reading time has been those precious minutes between bedtime and sleep. On most days I was only able to read a page or two before I couldn't keep my eyes open. That is one reason I took three years to read Mary Chestnut's Civil War diary.

In January 2020 I took the Goodreads' challenge and set myself a goal of reading 12 books during the year. That seemed a low figure, but I wanted to make sure I met the goal, with home-schooling & farm-work & everything else there is to do. 

I have surprised myself. 

The more I read this spring and summer, the more I could read. That's because I the more I read, the faster I was reading. I was getting faster and faster. I was shocked to see myself speeding through books. That had not seemed possible to me in years. 

I have been able to move through a lot of books that I've wanted to read for a long time. Some of them I've purchased from ABE Books or independent bookstores, and now that the libraries have reopened, some I've obtained there. (My small provincial library owns very few books that interest me, so interlibrary loan has been incredibly beneficial.) 

This morning I finished A COUNTRY DOCTOR by Sarah Orne Jewett. First published in 1884, it tells the story of a young New England woman, Nan Prince, who wanted to be a doctor and who made the decision not to marry in order to devote herself to her calling. In the book, her mentor Dr. Leslie sits thinking about Nan. "He tried to assure himself that while a man's life is strengthened by his domestic happiness, a woman's must either surrender itself wholly, or relinquish entirely the claims of such duties, if she would achieve distinction or satisfaction elsewhere. The two cannot be taken together in a woman's life as in a man's."

Think how much things have changed, that I have been able to marry and have children, yet still follow my calling and enjoy a career. My husband is as much in charge of our "domestic happiness" as I am our economics.

Jewett herself was the daughter of a country doctor; she never married; and she made the decision to become a writer when this was a profession (or service) mostly closed to women. In fact, the novel is a feminist treatise on the need for women to express their God-given talents. "The simple fact that there is a majority of women in any centre of civilization means that some are set apart by nature for other uses and conditions than marriage," Jewett writes on p. 250 of the edition of the book I read.

I read the book because it was highly recommended by Willa Cather, whose work I have been intensely studying. Cather, if you don't remember, wrote MY ANTONIA, which is a glorious work of American literature, and although it will always be classified as a novel, is really a work of nature-writing. It was pivotal in my decision to become a person who writes about nature. Cather's life itself fascinates me to no end because early on she sometimes dressed as a man, took a man's name (Willem, I believe it was), and chose a man's career. She also never married. She went into remote parts of the country, such as the Desert Southwest, where she camped and explored. She was an inspiration.

I am appalled when I think of the cultural discrepancies between men and women, when so many things have been closed to or made difficult for women.  

All of this is to say that I feel young again in my reading. I am finding time to lose myself in books. I am studying the words and images other writers have set on paper, and I am being transformed by their ideas. In that regard, this has been a potent and fiery time. 

The epiphany here is that I have learned that, like most activities, the more one reads, the better one gets at it. And because I'm getting better at it, I'm able to do more and more. So I report to you a happy cycle: reading books leads to more reading of books.

Hurricane Kate, 1985
I rode out Hurricane Kate in a one-room tarpaper shack my friend and I nailed together in northern Florida, near Quincy. We weren't engineers, much less carpenters, and the house was constructed of heart-pine planks and two-by-fours recycled from old tobacco barns. We were kids scoffing at a capitalist society, living our back-to-the-land dreams.
 
First came rain and then wind and after nightfall the roaring; outside, trees moaned and thrashed and trembled. Even 70 miles inland, there was little reprieve that long night, only more dumping rain and howling wind.
 
When morning came, we wandered the dripping woods, examining trees -- grown oaks and hickories -- that had crashed to the ground, roots and all. When they fell they left craters in the ground. There's nothing about Florida, Carl Hiassen said, that a good hurricane won't fix. Except its beautiful old trees.
 
Hurricane Hugo, 1989
When Hugo slammed through South Carolina in 1989, it ripped through the extensive longleaf pine forests of Francis Marion National Forest like a mighty weed-whacker. In one night it felled a billion board feet of timber and destroyed three-fourths of the endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers there. They went from 477 colonies to 100.
 
With wind-gusts up to 147 miles per hour, Hugo affected a larger area and destroyed more trees than any natural catastrophe in the United States, including the Yellowstone fires of 1988 and the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens.
 
Fifteen years later scientists learned that ecosystems heal more rapidly from natural disasters than human-caused ones. In the openings created by Hugo, seeds sprouted. Some got 30 feet tall in fifteen years. Artificial nesting cavities for the woodpeckers raised populations to pre-Hugo levels. 
 
Hurricane Andrew, 1992
I wasn’t in this hurricane. I had recently returned from six months in South America. I took a job speaking Spanish for the Florida Department of Insurance, working the Andrew hotline. Thousands of houses were destroyed and insurance companies were folding. All day long, every day, I spoke to frantic people whose homes had been damaged or destroyed. Many were homeless. I tried to calm them, to help them, let them know the government would bail out insurance companies. I used the words I understand and I’m sorry a lot.
 
Hurricane Ivan, 2004
In September of 2004, while hurricane lilies popped up like frilly red flags in yards all over the South, Hurricane Ivan growled northwest through the Carribean with sobering wind speeds. On September 16 it made landfall on the Gulf Coast near Mobile. Winds had subsided to 125 miles an hour, driving a storm surge 16 feet deep. 
 
The hurricane would pass over the only tract of old-growth longleaf pine remaining in the coastal plains of Alabama, near Flomaton, a 50-acre forest surrounded by cotton fields and planted pines, in which trees had been youngsters when the Declaration of Independence was signed. 
 
Hours later, sixty percent of that forest was on the ground. "To lose any part of it is significant," said John Kush, ecologist on the Flomaton. "If we'd lost it all, I'd be seeking help mentally to deal with it.” 
 
I am a forest activist. I have been especially vocal about the loss of the longleaf pine flatwoods, an ecosystem in which 99 percent of natural stands are gone. Less than one percent of old-growth remains. To oppose clearcutting is one thing; to protest a hurricane is to shake a fist at the sky. “Ivan reminds us that more and more we need to save what little wild lands we have left and make them functional," Kush said.
 
2004
Four major storms pummeled Florida. The hurricanes threw buckets of water on my home in south Georgia, inches and inches. A big water oak at our farm, which held up one end of the clothesline, went down, unable with its sodden roots to withstand the forces of wind. Across the South, trees bore evidence of fury in their twisted crowns and broken limbs. Many were dead, boles snapped or rooted up. Old trees are where cavity-dwellers nest, where woodpeckers and nuthatches feed, where migrants rested. Out the window I see a hole.

Hurricane Michael, 2018
 In the first hours after Hurricane Michael cannonballed Mexico Beach, Florida, video footage of residents riding it out shocked the whole country. Two weeks later, deep into cleanup, Michael's aftermath was even more sobering. I saw it for myself.
 
Along what tourism dubbed Florida's "Forgotten Coast," two-lane Highway 98 hugs Apalachicola Bay, offering wide vistas of mud flats, spartina marshes, and beaches. Driving from Tallahassee, I found the highway hurriedly patched with fill dirt and rough asphalt where hurricane surge swept aside rock abutments and undermined the pavement, then retreated, leaving the road in pieces. In some places both lanes were compromised.
 
Along 98 facing the bay are one-story family homes built in the 1960s and 70s, alongside newer, mammoth vacation homes on concrete stilts. Debris was scrambled along the roadside in piles of ruined appliances, furniture, soggy mattresses, wet carpets, sections of dock, broken boardwalk. Trunks and limbs of trees were piled here too, lots of trees. Everything was a mess. Sometimes the road was a tunnel passing through mountains of detritus.
 
I've seen many hurricanes. But by the time I reached the sawmill town of Port St. Joe, I knew that Michael was something different. A giant monster, something like Frankenstein, had gotten loose. Michael blew through dwellings as if they were made of paper. Every door and window was gone. The houses were emptied, cleaned out by swirling waters.
 
For all its malice, Michael was a compact storm. A tight little knot at its center wreaked wholesale damage, a new Category-5 kind of damage. The fireball of Michael's eye didn't cool once it devoured Mexico Beach and Port St. Joe but punched north up the Panhandle, remaining Category 3 into southwest Georgia. It was a bowling ball, a mighty razor, a fist.
 
On Sunday morning in Port St. Joe, with the Baptist Church roofless, its steeple folded and canted like a pointing finger, services were being held under a large white canopy in the parking lot. I parked. A woman and a small boy were pacing nearby. The woman smiled and waved as if she knew. She came over to say hello. Her grandson had grown weary of sitting in church, she explained. When I asked, she said her house was fine. It had a blue tarp on the roof too but it was liveable. It was good.
 
Across 98 under another white tent aid workers were starting to serve lunch. Two men and a woman picked up to-go boxes and walked away. Everybody seemed to be slowly getting used to a new reality. The word for that reality was "displacement." So many things were out of place. 
 
People were not where they should be. Church was not. Boats were not at the marina but dashed on to high ground, some at the grocery as if parked there, one blocking the entrance to a realty. A ballcap hung from the broken limb of a tree. A pelican's wing hung useless. Dunes were in the ocean. The ocean was in the houses. A bathhouse was sideways in the dunes. Sand was on the boat ramp. Trees crushed houses they shaded. One house had come to rest on a tree. Road signs pointed in weird directions.
 
With climate destruction's twenty-year lag, this demolition was scheduled two decades ago. Even if we lower heat-trapping gas emissions today, twenty years from now we will be suffering. I can only imagine.
 
2020
Hurricane season is upon us again. Soon the hurricane lilies will be popping up their red, spidery blooms. The storms are rising from the South, one by one, working their way through the alphabet of names. Some stay small. Some turn horrible. They are getting worse. They are coming.

We have one visitor to the farm who comes once or twice a week. Each visit is a thrill. When we hear him coming, Skye and I run outside or, if we're outside, we dash out from under trees. He doesn’t hang around. If we don’t get out quickly we will miss him entirely.

We’ve never met the guy. 

He comes by air, flying very low in a red-and-white plane with a tiny motor that drones in a particular and promising way. Skye can hear him miles away, and when she does, she starts yelling. “He’s coming! He’s coming!” We know to instantly drop shovel or trowel, book or mixing bowl, and head out to a place where there’s open space. 
 
We want him to see us waving. If he sees us, he’ll wave back, wiggling the little plane’s wings, and sometimes he’ll do more.
 
The first time, Skye and I were on our back deck. We waved our arms as a small airplane passed overhead. He must have seen us because he doubled back. He came flying at the farm from the north, where there's a pasture about 20 acres in size, bordered by trees. When the pilot passed the treeline he dipped low to the ground and rushed toward us. He couldn’t have been more than 25 feet off the ground. Just before he crashed into our house, and into us, he yanked the plane into a climb and sailed above the roof.
 
Raven was not so happy about that. He thought only a suicidal person would fly so crazily, endangering our lives and our home.
 
A few days later the pilot returned. It was almost as if he’d received Raven’s message, telepathically. Over the pasture he climbed to a thousand feet, then dove for the ground, bringing the plane level at the last minute. Raven was okay with this, since the pilot wasn’t aiming at our house. If the crazy guy wanted to kill himself, fine. But Raven wished we didn’t have to watch him do it.

​When he visits now, he will circle us. We can see his face he’s so close, and we can see him waving. Most visits he does something to the controls where he wags the wings, one then the other dipping in a lovely salute. Sometimes he rises high and dives. It’s usually almost sunset when he comes, as if we’re on his route back to the Vidalia, Georgia airport and he can take a minute to say hello before he rushes on.
 
From Facebook posts it’s apparent that the pilot’s fly-bys bring a lot of joy to people. He is clear that he wants to bring people joy. Especially children. In one post he says, "It's all about enjoying the limited time we have." He calls it a spiritual experience.

He calls himself a backwoods pilot. That’s probably what brought him over our farm in the first place -- we live in the woods very close to the confluence of two rivers, the Ohoopee with the Altamaha. The scenery must be amazing from up there. 
 
And he is a daredevil. In one FB video he is skimming up a small blackwater river, probably the Ohoopee, his tires throwing up spray. 
 
I’ve written a lot about the loneliness in most people’s lives and the particular loneliness of rural living. So I thought it would be important for me to acknowledge how much boundless & roaring happiness that our visitor, pilot and stranger, brings us.

Thanks for that, sir. Thanks for brightening our quiet days. Thanks for pushing the limits. 

Last Sunday late evening we heard the plane coming. I ran for a pile of wood chips that the electric company dumped near the butterfly garden and climbed to the peak. Skye balanced on the railing of the back deck. We waved both our arms like clocks gone wild. The pilot was coming from the south, the direction of the confluence, going northwest toward Lyons. He was looking for us. Over the pecan orchard he tipped his wings, back and forth, then back and forth again. 

He gunned the little engine and circled to the far side of the north pasture. Then he dove close to the ground and aimed his machine right at me. I was still atop the wood chips. He came skimming over the pasture. (I hope Raven doesn't read this because it was a little dangerous.) A couple hundred feet away he pulled some lever & the plane rose. As he passed overhead, close, he looked down, smiling.

I admit that I'm embarrassed to talk this way about a total stranger. We don't know him. We don't know his politics. We wouldn't be able to recognize him on the street. But we love the man. Our hearts fill with a gigantic happiness when we hear the drone of his engine, and his dives and twirls are cherished gifts to us, in the quiet, beautiful, and lonely rural.

PHOTO ABOVE: Julia Yearout & Sarah Clark gathered the bat data for 2019. They loved the Anatolian & she loved them.

Total # of bat calls:  465
 
Calls identified to species: 100
 
At least one bat of the following species were identified with a 95% or more “confidence interval” (determined by the overall number of calls collected at the site):
 

1. evening bat (Nycticeius humeralis)
2. tri-colored bat (Perimyotis subflavus) – This is a Georgia species of concern currently under consideration for listing as an Endangered Species, so we’re particularly happy about this one.
3. Brazilian free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis)
4. northern yellow bat (Lasiurus intermedius)*

 
Other sound files not identified as bats: 2,774
 
The biologists thought these were most likely insect calls. The guineas make weird noises at night, and there are lots of owls. Mockingbirds are sometimes night-birds. As I write this it’s night and I’m hearing crickets, frogs of many species, and some deep eerie whale-like ringing that is probably the universe singing to itself.
 
*Trina Morris, wildlife biologist with Nongame, wrote to us that “This detection of a northern yellow bat so far away from the coast is unusual. We have historic records of this species in the upper coastal plain but haven’t captured any in this area recently. It is certainly possible that this species could be found on your property, but we cannot consider it a true record until it is verified by a hand capture.”
 
That could be exciting.

​(PHOTO CREDIT: Tri-Colored Bat, Al Hicks, NYSDEC, nynhp.org, with thanks)

 Total # of bat calls:  312
 
Calls identified to species: 129
 

1. eastern red/Seminole bat (Lasiurus borealis, Lasiurus seminolus) – Apparently these two species can’t be differentiated by their calls, only by sight. Because of its geographical distribution it’s expected to be a Seminole. 
2. northern yellow bat (Lasiurus intermedius)
3. tri-colored bat (Perimyotis subflavus)
4. hoary bat (Lasiurus cinereus) 

 
Other sound files not identified as bats:  1,967
 
That is six species of bats recorded here. Some were here one year but not the next. All this is so strange and wonderful.

​This year the unit comes down on Juneteenth.

​I have always thought holidays a little ludicrous. They become so monetized. Even Anna Jarvis, the woman credited with the idea of a Mother’s Day, was later arrested for disrupting a Mother’s Day celebration. She told a reporter she wished she had never started the holiday because it had become so commercialized.
 
After the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, the holiday began to lose its outrage and its muscle. 
 
The holiday was the brainchild of Gaylord Nelson, senator from Wisconsin who helped ban the use of DDT and Agent Orange. Nelson had become increasingly concerned that the state of the environment was "simply a non-issue in the politics of the country."  Emulating Vietnam protests, he set about to organize a massive grassroots teach-in against environmental destruction. Twenty million people, mostly university students, took up the banner.
 
I didn't hear about Earth Day until I was in college at Florida State in 1982, and by then the holiday was becoming a pop-culture event, a Keep-America-Beautiful love-fest with polluters as corporate sponsors. Throwaway coffee cups in hand, driving their SUVs from starter castles built on the vestiges of wild land, people would show up for pet blessings, surfing competitions, fireworks displays, canoe runs, poster contests, recycling drives, alternative-fuel-vehicle fairs, plant giveaways, street festivals, field trips, lectures, and beach cleanups. 
 
I always thought we should really celebrate Earth Day.
 
We'd have a paid national holiday. Nobody would go to work. We wouldn't climb into our cars, not at all. We wouldn't buy anything – no planet-shaped chocolates, no strands of green lights, no big blow-up replicas of Earth to tether in our front yards. We wouldn't buy so much as a newspaper. We'd start our gardens. 
 
We would force ourselves to be still long enough to think about what our actions and our inactions were doing to the earth. All day we’d listen to disappearing songbirds among disappearing spring wildflowers.
 
This year, 2020, the 50th anniversary of Gaylord's splendid idea, we got a chance to do that, celebrate my way -- to do nothing, to be quiet, to listen, to notice a blue sky, to hear birds again, to watch goats and bears move into towns, to quit driving, to stay home, to take a hike, to garden. 
 
Nothing good has come out of the coronavirus pandemic except maybe this – we have gotten a chance to hear the earth itself breathe. 
 
That is truly a celebration. 

So that's it, my garden. Today I scoured my seed bucket and started some very interesting things, old friends I haven't grown in awhile -- hyacinth bean, Jack bean, Sadie's horse bean from Donnamarie Emmert and the Abingdon Seed Library, four kinds of sunflowers (including mammoth), running butterbean. I started the gold-striped cushaw, having been unable to get the gold-striped, which I lost.

Gardening is not work to me, the same as writing is not work. (Well, maybe a little.)

When I was sitting at the edge of the aisle full of nutgrass, I felt 25 again, working in my garden at Sycamore, listening to "The Prairie Home Companion" on a radio plugged into an extension cord. I felt more free than I've felt in years, and younger, and happier. I felt myself coming back. 

Jack Hill was a big believer in community. He believed that our duty is to act in ways that improve our lives and the lives of others around us.
 
Lucky for me, Jack Hill befriended me a decade ago when his birth hometown became my adopted one. An idea would come to me of a way to enliven the community, and I would go to Sen. Hill. Every time, without fail, he was enthusiastic. Scrolling back through emails, I see so clearly how much he loved his place and how sincerely he wanted it to thrive.
 
"Put me down as a member," he would say. "I’m sending a check and an offer to help in any way I can. Can I rent the building for your conference?"
 
When he wasn’t in Atlanta he’d show up to meetings or fundraisers or talks at the library. He could be counted on to support any endeavor that brought economic, cultural, or spiritual gain to his town and county.
 
Hometown folks loved Jack, but to most, I think, he was a neighbor who happened to be a senator. Because he was so down-to-earth and approachable, most didn’t realize how famous he was in Atlanta and how much power he could wield under the Gold Dome. 
 
I am bereft at the death of Sen. Hill. I admired many things about him. One was how he dropped everything when a hometown person showed up at his office in the Capitol or at his office in Reidsville, and how welcome he made you feel. One was his courtesy, his good manners, his quiet demeanor – he never failed to stop and talk. One was his generosity. I especially loved how he took exquisite, compassionate, daily care of Mrs. Hill.
 
One of the last times I saw Sen. Hill was some months ago, before the 2020 Legislature started. We were both at an NAACP banquet. He had his beautiful wife with him. All we did that evening was smile and wave across the room. I was reminded then and now that Sen. Hill was a person who knew the right thing to do and didn’t mind doing it.
  
Sen. Hill brought many gifts to Tattnall County, assets that would not be possible without him, including the timber-frame lodge at the state park and the designation of historic landmark for the Alexander Hotel, to name only two. He did not have an inflated ego, and he did a great many things for all of us without desiring or receiving credit. We are going to miss his advocacy and his support, and we are going to miss how he made us proud. We are going to miss our friend.

​About this time of year my friend Albert Culbreath will hear a strange bugling in the Tifton sky.
 
Actually, he feels it more than hears it, he says. Gazing upward, Albert will witness a flock of sandhill cranes, flying northward, calling back and forth to each other their magnificent ga-roo-roo-roos. 
 
Before Albert lost count one year, he had tallied over 100 cranes.
 
Sandhill cranes stand four to five feet tall, with a gray body and a red forehead. They court with enthusiastic, leaping dances. They mate for life and nest in marshes and other open, treeless places.
 
Florida naturalist Archie Carr once wrote that only three great animal voices remain in the southeastern United States -- "the jovial lunacy of the barred owl... the roar of the alligator...the ethereal bugling of the sandhill crane.”
 
The birds never fail to put me in mind of my great friend Milton Hopkins, a passionate observer of wildlife on his Osierfield, Georgia farm until his death last year. Milton always dropped me notes to say that the cranes were passing in their flyway. Sometimes they descended to feed or spend the night. Once Milton was standing in a field when a flock of over 300 cranes landed. Milton always reported the cranes migrating between March 1 and 19.
 
After Milton died, right in the middle of his funeral a long vee of sandhill cranes passed overhead, sounding their ancient music, their rattling trumpets. Maybe Milton heard the cranes, Albert wrote me, and decided to fly off with them.
 
I don't live in the crane flyway. When I hear reports of sandhill cranes, I know that spring is on its way. I start looking for purple martins to come flying in from South America, and the dogtooth violets to bloom in the woods. Frogs will be breeding, and soon we’ll see our first swallow-tail kites.
 
This study of plant and animal life cycles is called phenology, or in other words, a natural calendar. 
 
I too am a phenologist. On March 3, 2015 I first noticed purple martin scouts. On Feb. 2, 2020 I saw the first Carolina jessamine bloom. Right now Carolina jessamine is in full craziness, cascades of yellow in the tops of leafless trees. Red maples are putting out their samaras. Redbuds are starting to bloom. (March 7, by the way, is the birthday of writer and environmental activist Rick Bass.)
 
The climate crisis has disrupted many evolutionary adaptations of many species. People say the cranes are moving earlier in the spring and later in the fall. Some plants are blooming earlier than ever or later than ever, and some are leafing out at crazy times. Often fruit trees bloom early, only to get their blossoms zapped by late frosts. South Florida birds are moving into Georgia. Some birds are not migrating as they once did.
 
When things change so often and so chaotically, a person can feel shaky. As a human, we want to be able to depend on patterns and schedules. A psyche can't take too much chaos and crisis and remain healthy, not without a lot of self-care and interventions.
 
Now, it seems, there is very little on which we can depend. There's too much rain. School gets cancelled and houses get flooded and roads get closed. Then there's too much wind and trees fall. Then there's not enough rain, and we're deep in a sucking drought. Then there's a tornado where tornadoes did not traditionally occur and at a time they did not occur. Then comes another fortnight of torrential downpours.
 
The migration of sandhill cranes, going and coming, has been something we could depend on. Now it’s almost spring, the time to watch and listen for them. I'm hoping they come when they're supposed to come, not too early and not too late. I'm hoping we get serious about making the adaptations we humans need to initiate, and soon, to mitigate these climate disruptions and more. 

This week a friend said to me, “I thought when the children went off to college that our lives would slow down. Instead, they seem to be speeding up.”
 
Many of us feel as if we’re running constantly, and that we can’t stop. Even I, who work at home and often never leave the farm for days at a time, find myself sprinting to meet deadlines, do the chores, finish projects. Sometimes I am literally running, dashing back and forth from my office.
 
I find myself racing the clock, the weather, seasons, the calendar, age, colleagues, and my own goals. The more we dash, the more of the earth’s resources we consume. The more stressful, the more unhealthy.
 
However, I believe that we can make conscious decisions to decelerate. Some people call it voluntary simplicity, which means improving the quality of your life although perhaps not your bank account.
 
Here are a few ideas for slowing down.

1. Once a week (or more often) refuse to climb into your vehicle at all.
2. Literally decelerate. Keep your speedometer below 55.
3. Take the time to walk instead of drive whenever you can.
4. Fly half as much this year as you did last year.
5. Stay home.
6. Try slow food, not fast food. Put Mississippi John Hurt on the turntable and whip up a good, home-cooked meal. Relish it with your family.
7. The more possessions I own, the more responsibilities I have. Therefore, buy less. Shop less. Get by with what you have. Sometimes our family keeps a daily log to track how we spend money. Even the simple act of recording expenses makes us think twice about making a purchase. Do I really need this? I ask myself. Can I make it myself or make do with something I already have?
8. Learn to say no to those tasks that aren’t worth the effort. Focus on the essential.
9. Get out of debt and stop paying interest and fees.
10. Do what you love and spend time with those you love.