You Are Here
A walk at dusk
Foreword to my first post
I’ve been writing most of my life, privately and quietly, in notebooks and margins. Over time, that practice became a poetry collection called Tiny Happy Things. Recently, I’ve been craving a place to share more. This Substack is that place.
I’m not trying to build an audience so much as make a small library room, a place to deposit poems, essays, and stories that matter to me, that feel honest in me.
If this feels like a place you’d like to return to, you’re welcome to subscribe.
What follows is my first piece.
Before I left, I sprinkled pellets in the little pond for the fish and seeds across the tray for the birds in my backyard. I didn’t want to disappoint the adolescent babies with their mamas and daddies when they showed up for their last feeding before dusk.
I didn’t have much daylight left, but I didn’t care. Something was calling me to the forest, to strike out on my own.
Rush hour traffic chiseled ten more minutes from the daylight I’d counted on. Clipping my car key to my beltloop, I estimated forty-five minutes in and the same back out would put me emerging from the trail in the final haze of twilight.
It was perfect. Before I was a hundred yards from the trailhead, the last of the hikers passed me on their way out. One group of loud twenty-somethings, arms flung out lazily, chest-high, feet flopping heavy on the downward slope. Their laughter still bounced off the ridges on either side of the trail when I passed a middle-aged couple with a greyhound. All of us kept our eyes on the ground and slipped by without even a nod.
I didn’t notice the wolf-like dog about twenty yards away – his head hung low between his shoulder blades, eyes fixed on me – until I heard a sharp whistle from somewhere farther up the trail. Then I saw a man with a scruffy gray beard and a tall walking stick jog up behind the dog, grab him by the scruff of his neck, and lead him off the trail. I instinctively averted my eyes from the dog and kept them low on my feet until I was well past them. Thank God the owner had been right there.
I shook off the tremor that moved across my shoulders and down my arms. I was done feeling scared, which had defined much of my life as a compliant, God-fearing girl raised in the Deep South in the seventies and eighties. Obey your parents. Get baptized. Stay alert for the damning pleasures Satan scattered in dark places. Keep on the straight and narrow so you become your parents, who became your grandparents, until one day you’re all holy and dead like your hallowed great-grandparents, singing hallelujah for all eternity.
It took me the better part of forty years to trust myself to choose a winding and sometimes darkening path like this one. And to realize that all my greats and great-greats, all those who’d come before me, carried precious, ugly skeletons of pleasure and damnation, same as I now did. And they were still, I believed, somehow holy, somehow alive.
The last rays of sunset at my back filtered low through the yellow leaves. My cadence slowed. I became aware of how my hurried steps had hushed the birds and wildlife around me.
Now I moved more like a squirrel, stooping here and there to pick up a giant white oak acorn. I felt the smooth, garnet-brown resist my tug, its little root already burrowing through crumpled leaves toward dark soil.
My fingers slid across cinnamon-brown shaggy cedar trunks, across the thick overlapping gray plates of oaks. I paused, letting my head fall back, chin jutting high into the cool November air, watching the breeze ripple through the half-dressed limbs draped above me like worn-out scraps of golden lace.
I knew predators could be lurking, especially with darkness encroaching. Once, in high school, running the track around the football field at this same hour, I spotted a cougar staring my way from the thick forest on the far side of the field. A baby cougar, in fact, that a classmate eventually captured and paraded around as our mascot. We were, after all, the Cougars. For one brief year, we seniors thought we could tame it.
That night in high school, I sprinted to the parking lot and jumped into my car. That was my response to anything that scared me: cougars, rejection, conflict, failure. Run. Retreat. Hide.
But not anymore.
Now my tiptoeing wasn’t about staying small. I tiptoed because I wanted to hear the songbirds call their babies in for the night. I wanted to hear the possums and raccoons begin their nighttime foraging, and the turkey and deer nestling into their underbrush beds. I wanted to breathe as one of these forest creatures, doing what our ancient bodies instinctively know how to do.
I came to a fork in the trail. You are here, a sign read. And I felt it. I felt here more strongly than I could ever remember, since before my infant mind learned to accumulate memories and forecast futures. Before fear-rooted patterns took hold.
Which way? Down toward the river on the left or higher up the ridge to the right?
Why rush the decision? Why not stop right here? Sit — no, lie down — on the flat boulder wedged against a massive red oak, like an altar at the foot of a cross.
I stretched myself flat on the slab, letting my neck and shoulders sink heavy. I tucked my hands inside my hoodie pocket and warmed the acorns I’d collected. I closed my eyes, and the tree branches shone white against my eyelids.
I listened.
My heart thudded a steady whir of blood through my veins. My breath whooshed in and out, stirring the tiny hairs in my nostrils. Crickets trilled their leg-song. An owl passed overhead with a whomp-whomp of feathery softness. Doves cooed somewhere nearby.
Then the dry skitter of leaves nudged by something light-footed. Then closer, a heavier step. Deliberate. I felt it as much as I heard it: a shift in the ground, the pause before an animal decides whether to stay or go.
My chest tightened, old instincts flaring hot and familiar. Run. Retreat. Hide.
Instead, I opened my eyes and sat up.
A shape stood just beyond the gray of the trail floor, motionless, its tawny body cut clean from the dimming woods. A bobcat. Or a deer misseen in the thinning light. Its ears angled forward, then away. We regarded each other, neither advancing nor fleeing. I thought of the cougar on the edge of the football field, of the years I’d spent sprinting toward asphalt and certainty. This time, I stayed.
After a moment — long enough for both of us — the animal turned and slipped soundlessly up the ridge, absorbed into the darkness.
Hallelujah, I whispered.
This momentary pleasure in this dark place was nothing less than sacred. It was here I could sing hallelujah for all eternity, feeling the presence of my ancestors who had stood at forks and thresholds like this before me. Women and men who had been afraid and gone anyway, or afraid and turned back, or chosen wrongly — who trusted life. Breath to breath. Step to step.
I didn’t choose a path. When I rose, I turned toward the way I’d come, not in retreat, but because I wanted to. Because I belonged here, and I belonged to the life waiting beyond the trailhead too.
The acorns were still warm in my pocket as I walked out in the final wash of twilight. I would carry them home. I would press them into the soil of the tiny forest behind my house and let them do what they were made to do — crack open, reach down, and grow, unafraid of the dark.
Afterword
Thanks for reading.
I’ll keep writing, whenever there’s something honest to say and the space to say it well. No fixed schedule, but you can expect a few pieces a month.
Everything I write here is free. If I add paid options later, it will be for those who want to support the work more directly, not to gate the writing itself.
If you’d like these pieces to arrive in your inbox, you’re welcome to subscribe.