when I am gone

Someday in the future,I will have to leave my woods.Be it a trip to a health care facility,a hospital or an unwanted move,my bags will be by the front door near where the wren sleeps.

The squirrels will be too busy burying the small acorns in the soft earth near my garden to see my wave.I will stand in the back and memorize the contour of the beeches and the iron wood.My bench will be greyer than when we first put it out there facing the floodplain.Acorns will bounce off the slats and perhaps the new owners will move it or burn it.Poems have poured from my pen on that bench in the wooded solitude.

A few years ago, I took our canoe and dragging it to the river,set sail across and around the islands in the water.It was a shining fall day and being alone on this adventure filled me with joy.Hours spent just drifting,hearing the slap of the beaver's tail,the hawks over head.Wilderness and I.

The offspring of today's deer will come for forgotten corn and the feeder will no longer spill seed for the raucous turkeys.The hummers will go across the street to that grand red feeder and the earth will have forgotten my step.

As I leave,I will have one small colored photo in my hand.Just a glance will bring forth the scents,the sounds,and all of the blessings of this place.All shall be well.

Bard,the owl

The first time I heard a barred owl was on the day we moved into his neighborhood by the Flint River.The floodplain behind our new house is thick with trees and it darkens earlier than does our back yard.That night...hoot...hoot..hoot came from the dark and it was more than a little frightening.What was that?

Today, I hear the owls calling to each other in the woods in mid-afternoon and they have become one of the many voices that sing to me of Georgia.The Cornell University Bird site notes that their numbers are increasing and I am glad to know that.This information would have been of little comfort on that sad spring day when my youngest son came back from canoeing to tell that in the woods he found a dead barred owl on its back with its feet cut off. This was so upsetting to him,the lover of all living things,the defender of snakes,the naturalist.

Was the bird killed for his feet? For what?This was 15 years ago and what happened perches in the back of my mind and festers there.And I didn't even see the poor creature.What I do recall is the utter powerlessness that I felt to say anything to make it better.To make sense of it.

I remember reading about a woman who wrote to a local paper advising that no one should look for the first robin of Spring because she had just found him shot by the creek.Why do people do these things? Look at those brown eyes encased there in that beautiful feathered head, all innocence and majesty.We are privileged to share space with such a wonderful creature.Do I hear an "Amen?"

Mr.O'Hara and me

I am reading the authorized sequel to "Gone With The Wind," which is called ,"Scarlett." I must say that I find it to be as intiguing as the original.

My family and I first saw the movie at the Hunter Theater in New York and I don' think I have ever gotten over it.I was 17.The scene at the train depot with all the bodies ,spread out as far as the eye could see, was terrible.And then there was Tara. Home.Where Scarlett headed when she,Rhett ,Melanie and her baby escaped Atlanta and the invading Yankees.The horrific fire and explosions.And then home to Tara, the lovely plantation of her family.

The original Tara was in fact the plantation of Margaret Mitchell's great-grandparents, the Fitzgeralds of Clayton County,Georgia.We have lived on the original 3,000 acres for the last 20 years and never knew it.A very informative tour of Stately Oaks, a refurbished Civil War plantation near downtown Jonesboro, led us to this revelation.We live on two acres that borders the Flint River flood plain where Margaret and her brother used to play as children when they went South from Atlanta for the summer.

The original building was taken apart and it sits under blue tarp somewhere in Clayton County, waiting for the money to be donated to bring it back to life.

Of all the towns in this country that we could have moved to when we left New York, we came to Jonesboro.And Tara.

When I wander around our small parcel,the wind whispers through the pines.The white rue anemone and the violet wild geraniums nod under the pink native azaleas that are tall and unnoticed until Spring. It is then that I can hear that old Irishman, Mr.O'Hara.He is telling his beloved daughter, Katie Scarlett ," It's the land,Katie, the land.It's the only thing that lasts or matters.The land." And I feel chills all over, again.