Alice and my mothers were sisters who looked alike and sounded alike. But Alice and I look nothing like the first-cousins we are: she takes after her father's side of the family and I my father's. Our love of spoon bread, cheese straws, our grandmother's garden, family stories and traditions, and now Sewanee make us kindred spirits if not close like the cousinship my niece's and nephew's children enjoy.
Growing up, I always found Alice's house in Eutaw exotic. The curving drive, pecan trees, outbuildings, columns, and surrounding countryside; the sleepy downtown, complete with square; the fields of cotton; the red dirt -- all bespoke "the south" in ways Birmingham and my suburb never did. I held a romantic notion of where and how she and her five siblings and parents lived. We called them our "country cousins," an amusing appellation as they were never entirely "country" and none live "in the country" any longer.All families, I suppose, begin like a surprise ball -- tightly wound, all of a unit -- that over time unwinds to surprises, some welcome, some not. No matter how unwound, stretching further and further out from the center, family is still family, as Alice's brief visit proved.We may not see it when we look in our mirrors, but blood is blood.
Friday afternoon, Susie arrived for her 15th reunion at the college. I have known her since she was 17 and a student at McGehee's. She looks just the same; she's just as funny and kind and smart; she still talks faster than Superman flies. She's still delightful, in other words.
Long-time acquaintance is a good thing, as Martha Stewart would said, and as timeless as her best designs are. No need for catching up or soul bearing, just an easy conversation about books, teaching, school leadership, close friends of different generations in the same family, and friends and colleagues lost.Sometimes old acquaintances are more than good: they are the best.
Sunflowerstossed into garage
garbage glowed,
bursts of a dying star,faces too fieryfor eyes.
There is as much beauty through an electron microscope as in the Louvre. 
Nikon Small World bears witness more eloquently than my words and snaps possibly can.
MandalaAtlanta artist Matt Gilbert creates hallucinatory computer-generated videos, including one based on mathematical principles derived from Islamic tile design and applied to Unless and Until, the multimedia exhibit about which I have previously written. His work for "Perdita's Monastic Song" creates a mandala of pattern repeating pattern repeating pattern, always moving in and in and in and in. Fractal animation gone wild.Paper
The star lit from within casts pattern in the dark corner of a room, like a silent explosion.
Flower
The leaf hopper complements sunflower spiraling open in morning, green and yellow and aquamarine, like a sun in bloom.
Pattern Maker
The mind makes pattern from chaos, always seeking to connect and creating meaning where there might have been none. Celebrate the absurd and the patterns the brain makes in response.
On my friend Betsy's suggestion years ago, I started reading Alexander McCall Smith's novels about a Botswanan detective named Precious Ramotswe. The series, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books, is charming: Precious is a gentle, intelligent woman; her secretary Grace is impossibly prissy; her friend Mr. JLB Maketoni the kind of man all women dream of; the mysteries loving stories of village life.Lately, I have started watching the HBO series that aired at least a year ago. This afternoon, a friend and I saw the third installment, complete with black mambas, poison, and a child actor playing Wellington so well that he can break your heart. I mean it: he can break your heart. Rarely do I enjoy a film version of a book I have loved as much as this. The setting is authentic and exotic; the scripts faithful to the novels; the directing gentle; and the actors 
terrific. I am especially charmed by Jill Scott who plays Precious so well that I can never imagine her otherwise now. Wise, gentle, sweet, good-humored, independent, intuitive -- Precious is a great figure of the imagination (and of traditional build) no less great the talent of Jill Scott.Read the books. See the series. You will not be disappointed.
This mature grasshopper sports fantastical armor of variegated color and design as beautiful as a tortoiseshell mosaic or a stained-glass study of brown.Isn't he lovely?
Growing up, I always found Alice's house in Eutaw exotic. The curving drive, pecan trees, outbuildings, columns, and surrounding countryside; the sleepy downtown, complete with square; the fields of cotton; the red dirt -- all bespoke "the south" in ways Birmingham and my suburb never did. I held a romantic notion of where and how she and her five siblings and parents lived. We called them our "country cousins," an amusing appellation as they were never entirely "country" and none live "in the country" any longer.
