“Clear the court and let’s play points!” instructs my hitting coach. We always start with FBI. Not the bureau, but the “first ball in” -- a way to get free reps of the serve before scorekeeping begins.

I stuff one used yellow ball under the leg of my Lycra shorts and bounce another with my left hand.

As a girl who loves the grind of a drill, I do not dread the first half of our practice.  “Three deep cross-court forehands then one winner down the line” is the manifestation of Churchill’s “man who grins when he fights” for me. The over and over and over again seduces and sedates. I’m happiest when straining to build necessary ruts. 

But the last half of practice, playing points, is my favorite part.

She was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a daughter, a friend. 

A teacher for decades.

A lifelong warrior for the not-quite-yets, Freeda Richardson’s classroom was a haven. Students found their way there for the jar of peanut butter and the box of saltine crackers she put on the table every day at lunch (a practice that gave those with no set place to go a place to be.) But they came for a hundred other reasons, too. Like mostly how she made them feel. Teenagers wandered in and hung out. Word got around: Mrs. Richardson was kind. 

During the most chaotic spans of my life, I’ve kept a gratitude journal.  When my kids were little and I was building a college basketball program, I kept one religiously. It was my calibrator. Daily, it seemed, an avalanche of things that either came out of left field or simply did not go as planned would pile into the sanctuary of my mind. When I closed my eyes at night, my brain would re-count them as if at confession. While tons of good stuff obviously happened, too, it didn’t naturally land in pews of prominence.  So I had to put it there. 

Sara Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance Gratitude Journal was my prompt. 

Hiking presents a conundrum for me. I can never decide what to do with my eyes. If I look up and around at the grandeur—which is, in fact, why I love to tromp around in nature in the first place—I am bound to trip or roll an ankle or end up three-feet deep in mud.  But if I look down to ensure I’m putting my foot where I need to put it, I miss what I came to see. So I look up and out, then down. Up and out, then down. Up and out, then down. Constantly wondering if I should be doing the other while I’m doing the one.

I never get it right. 

The white clapboard house with two front doors had an OPEN sign taped in the window.  Our phone’s GPS had directed us via the walker’s route to the vintage Vermont structure masquerading as a UPS shipping center about 2.9 miles west on Main Street, just past the Dandy Doggie Groomer and across the street from the furniture mart.  Walking parallel to the river alongside the busy road, we made the picturesque trek, motoring briskly--both to get there on a Saturday before it closed at 2:00 pm and to keep step with the anxiety that had ballooned around the misplaced package of medical supplies my friend and travel buddy had to have.

Crossing the natural spillway where the lower lake pauses before reaching the brink of its fall (a decision I made to avoid an additional forty-five minutes of hiking in the freezing mist that had moved in), I carefully plotted my route, rock by rock in real time. The first few steps felt daring, like an adventurous Twister game without the plastic mat of brightly colored dots. I was a kid again, riding my bike along the top of a three-foot tall by one-foot-wide concrete barrier wall that surrounded my elementary school. Fear of falling wasn’t a factor. I was footloose and fancy free. 

Testing half-submerged rocks for stability, I moved steadily though not quickly across the top of the icy water. 

I chose landing pads, locked in on targets, solved problems before they became them. I tightened my core and deepened my breath. I was a ninja defying frigid peril, measured step by measured step by measured step.

Then I looked up to check my progress and panic swallowed me like the whale that devoured Jonah.

Suddenly, I knew not what to do.

In the HBO limited series, “Task,” an intense tale of cops (in the form of a small special ops FBI team) and robbers (in the form of a drug trafficking motorcycle gang), Mark Ruffalo plays Tom Brandis, a last-leg federal agent who is running in place inside of himself. When we meet him, Brandis is working a recruiting desk for the FBI at a career fair while waiting for the sentencing of his adopted mentally ill son who is in prison for killing his mother, Brandis’ wife. 

The weight of love that looks and feels like anything and everything but is pulling him under. 

Some of the most necessary ingredients for a thriving society seem to be a bit scarce right now. Cantankerous human knots are everywhere we look . . .it’s hard sometimes to imagine a way to unravel it all. No matter the complexity of the problem (or the problem(s)), however, kindness never hurts. 

The following is an excerpt from my book The Compost File released earlier this year.

A biologist friend of mine says that when we ooh and ahh at the rapturous explosion of fall foliage, what we’re really doing is clamoring about watching trees pee and poop. My granddaughter would say, “That’s bathroom talk.”  And she wouldn’t be wrong, but neither would he.

Once a year—every year-- before dropping, leaves collect the garbage. All the stuff that a tree can’t use gets channeled to its appendages into a sort of trash can to be dumped when the time and temperature are right. It’s a shedding process called abscission. Leaves hoard the crap, a layer of cells seals it off at the base, and when the leaf falls, it takes the excrement with it.  Detox with a vibrant, kaleidoscope glow.

It's the natural order of things—healthy, glorious, graphic, necessary.  A ridding to make room for regeneration.

An irritant shows up that an oyster can’t get rid of.  That’s how one in every 10,000 of these sea creatures creates a pearl. 

When parasites or random types of organic matter get lodged between the mollusk’s mantle and its shell, an oyster’s defense mechanism ratchets up and surrounds the invader with layer upon layer of a substance known as nacre. Over years, these sacred layered secretions create a pearl.

But only if the water is just right.   

In 1995, a standard horse trailer pulled into Yellowstone National Park and dumped eight grey wolves out into the wild. The wolves’ job was to recalibrate the ecosystem of one of our country’s most prized parcels of real estate that had been severely damaged seventy years earlier by the purposeful eradication of this natural predator. What happened next was a bunch of very bad things.  

“GG, what does ‘galore’ mean?” my granddaughter asks as I read the rhyming stanzas of Designed by God so I must be Special, a book I bought to share with her daddy almost thirty years ago.

“It means ‘lavish,’” I tell her. 

She cuts her eyes and squishes her nose, “What’s lavish??”

“Like lots and lots and lots.”  

She nods her head as if to say, “I got you.” So I read on.  

My friend’s son played well at quarterback in his first collegiate game. The offense he led moved the ball up and down the field as he guided his team to a twenty-point victory. He barked orders. He scrambled. He threw a spiral to his wide-out on an old school post-and-go. 

When the game ended, my friend couldn’t wait to greet his boy with a celebratory hug.

“Great game, buddy! he gushed as he hugged his sweaty son with eye-black stains across his cheeks. Then with emphasis he added, “How fun was that?!” 

The youngster bowed his head avoiding eye contact, and muttered, “Thanks.  I can’t believe I fumbled in the middle of that long drive.”

“Wait, what? Son, you know there’s no such thing as a perfect game.”

“Well, that was far from perfect, dad.”

The waist-high miniature students move as a unit in a line like a snake. From the classroom to the library . . . the cafeteria to the music room . . . the playground back to the classroom, they miraculously slither in single file, mostly not disturbing the temptations they pass along the way. They have been taught how to travel. 

“Assume the position . . .” announces the teacher in a sing-songy voice that floats through the air more like a lyrical invitation than an authoritative order. And in response, fifteen tiny humans interlock their fingers behind their backs in a “buckle” and “blow a bubble” with their cheeks. 

This is the sage’s way of getting four-year-olds from A to B without creating chaos. 

Brilliant, really. 

When summer starts to fade, it does so into the vibrant colors of college football.  Bands begin marching, cheerleaders start dancing, Lee Corso (for the past 38 years anyway) slips on some mascot’s head, and suddenly battle lines are re-defined in permanent marker from Florida to Oregon and all spots in between. Stadiums and the towns who house them percolate. The air feels different, even if the temperature hasn’t changed. 

Such is the enduring power of college football. Little has as much societal adhesive for a throng of people as the colors they are bound by in the fall.

“We have a big family,” he said more than once as he and his teenage son loaded the back of the truck. 

She stood watching, sobbing, though she had offered and was glad to see her dining table go. The eight-foot mahogany classic with beveled edges that gracefully curved at the corners had done all it could do. In her home anyway.  It and its eight matching chairs, tastefully upholstered in textured beige, were headed for new life. She needed the space, and hadn’t needed the table in a very, very long time. 

The father with a house full of children never dreamed he would receive such a gift. “We have a BIG family,” he kept repeating, as a point of pride and simultaneously a salve for her raw edges, the kind that don’t tear clean despite the timely intersection of want and need.

In my mind’s eye, I can see her. Mini-Morgan. My daughter-in-law’s firstborn with a golden splash of her grandmother’s curls. 

My three-in-the-morning brain imagines her inching down the echoey tiled hallway lined with colorful bulletin boards. She’s looking for Mrs. River’s room. I see inside the Pre-K den, “A-U-S-T-Y-N,” by a hook where she is to stow her belongings, and there again on a butterfly placemat at the table where she and her navy blue thermos, also bearing her name, will call home base for a while.

Almost nobody yields anymore. Vehicles merging from on-ramps into seventy mph traffic are not asking for permission. They are expecting to have a place.  It’s not their job to wait for a spot to slide into, it’s the cars’ jobs-- the ones spaced in succession rip-roaring like a  train-- to create room. 

“Yield” was once a consequence-carrying law. Then somewhere along the way (as we humans hurried up to hurry) it morphed from that into a suggestion. Now, it means nothing. Right-lane drivers innately know. They are the anointed absorbers charged with having a  scoot-over plan.

“What,” I wonder, “has made us so reluctant to give way?”

My Granny died worn-out. The last few years toward ninety-four she fought and fought, like Rocky Marciano with his gloves taped up. Then one day she just said, “I’m tired” and with independent grace untied the mitts. Then she laid down on the bed and went to sleep. A few days later as I sat in the recliner by her bedside sort of watching TV and mostly, out the side of my eye, counting the seconds between the rise and fall of her chest, she shed the body that had served her for so long so well. I watched her lungs fill and deflate. Fill and deflate. Fill and deflate and, just like that, not fill.

Slowly she went. Then suddenly she was gone. 

“You have to come see this,” said the wedding planner when the bride-to-be picked up the phone. 

“Right now?!” 

“Yes! It’s just indescribable.”

“But I thought you wouldn’t let us until tomorrow?” 

“It’s too good. You won’t be able to take it all in tomorrow. There will be too many people, too much going on. I want you to see the space—all it holds, how it feels. I have no words.”