A Perfect Day

Just being back from the beach and Facebook Memories reminded me that 10 years ago today, my parents visited us in NC, and I took them to the beach. – HH

I never saw the ocean until I was 18 and in Boot Camp, which did not lend itself to introspective gazing. We didn’t have money for vacations when I was a child, and when Dad did take time off, we drove 8 hours to visit my mom’s father outside Dallas.

Mom grew up in Southern California, and my grandfather loved deep-sea fishing – Mom has all sorts of memories of surfing and waves and Santa Monica Pier and all of that. But that had been more than 55 years ago.

Dad had grown up exactly where I had, but with less money. His time in the Air Force sent him over the Pacific, but that too had been over 50 years ago.

Since I left home, Dad’s work had taken him to the Gulf of Mexico quite a bit, and Mom would sometimes arrange her schedule to go with him, and several times they timed it to take the grandkids as well, so they all had saltwater memories together.

And while I love the Gulf of Mexico, it is a sad, pale, quiet, and still imitation of the open ocean, with neither waves nor surf.

So anyway, on this day in 2016, we had nothing planned, and it was a Saturday, and it was beautiful, so we drove to the ocean, just 3 hours away, with the parents, and we ate at one of our favorite restaurants, and I watched my momma’s eyes take in the surf for the first time since she was 16, and Daddy had at least three different cameras with him, and we stood on Johnny Mercer Pier at Wrightsville Beach for what seemed like forever as the wind whipped our hair, and I quietly wept on the way home because it was such a perfect day.

Smyrna Dunes Park

While visiting New Smyrna Beach this past weekend for our 17th wedding anniversary, we spent a morning at Smyrna Dunes Park.

It’s 184 acres of dunes and beach, filled with native plants and wildlife (look for the gopher tortoises that are everywhere!). There is a 2 mile (handicapped accessible) boardwalk that circles the park, observation towers, and docks that go out into the ocean. As my wife said, there is no place to look that isn’t beautiful.

Admission was $10 per car (regardless of number of passengers) so this could be a very family-friendly place to go. There is a large picnic pavilion with bathrooms at the trail head, plus eight pavilions with tables scattered along the trail at scenic spots.

We try hard to invest in memories and not things when on vacation, and we both agreed that this was the highlight of our trip, and had it been the only thing we did, it would have justified the drive.

6205 days

Give or take a leap year, we have been married 6,205 days, or 17 years, as of today. My life is pretty much divided into the sad days, and the days I have been married to her.

It hasn’t always been easy, but most things worth doing are not always easy. But it’s always been worth it.

It’s been a rough year, but thanks to some friends, we are able to spend this weekend outside Daytona Beach, Florida. We needed this. Like I said – it’s been a rough year. Next year doesn’t look much better. But we will do what we have done successfully for the last 6,205 days: Face it together.

It’s been six years

Six years ago today (October 22), my dad died after a brief illness from COVID. He tested positive on Saturday, and died the following Thursday.

Dad worked in Emergency Services, and so his death was ruled a Line Of Duty Death. I have written so much about him over the years, but it is the most Dad thing ever that he would die as a result of helping others.

Grief never ends. People ask sometimes how I’m doing, or how Mom is doing. Mostly, I say we are fine, but we miss him.

But the fuller truth is that when he died, it was as if a piece of glass shattered, with sharp edges and jagged pieces everywhere. And for weeks, these pieces just tumbled around, slicing and stabbing. It was really bad.

But as time went on, they rubbed up against each other, and eventually the edges wore smooth. They are still there, easily observable, but for the most part, they are softer, less abrasive, almost beautiful, like sea glass.

But every once in a while, you find a sharp edge. It catches you by surprise when it happens. Those hurt the most. It happens less often than it did.

But it still happens.

This is my favorite picture of my Dad. When the local paper ran a profile on him, this is the photo they took to run with the story.

It’s Dad as I remember him best. He’s at his desk, his funny signs in the background, his ubiquitous baseball cap on his head, his phone and coffee cup within reach, and his emergency radio close by so he is not out of touch in case of an emergency.

I miss him every day. 

Overbuilding

I’m working on building a screen house for some folks, and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that I am an overbuilder. Where most folks would use 3/8 sheathing, I use 1/2 inch. When 2×6 joists would be adequate, I spec 2×8. I hate it when structures have bounce in them.

Things used to be built to last for an indefinite amount of time. I think they still should be.

“When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, ‘See! This our father did for us.‘ ” – John Ruskin (1819-1900)

As one in love with the world

The writer (and personal hero of mine) Will Campbell told a story in his memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly, about a time as a child in Jim Crow Mississippi when he and a bunch of (white) friends are playing and a black child walks down the road.

Campbell and his friends begin chanting slurs at the boy, using the N-word. His grandfather, hardly a bastion of egalitarianism, calls the boys out for it, and told them that N-words don’t exist anymore. In other words, we don’t call people that now.

Campbell would recall this story in middle age as formative for him, one of half a dozen experiences in his life that shaped him forever around race. And yet, he says, it had virtually no impact on anyone else who was there. He wonders why it stood out so clearly to him as instructive, while others who were there don’t even remember it happened.

I feel a bit like that these days as I, a teenager in the 1980s who watched countless cautionary tales about machines that revolt and kill us, watch my peers embrace machines that even their creators think will revolt and kill us.

Sarah Conner would be ashamed of us.

In his essay “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” Wendell Berry delivers a response to his critics who came out when he mentioned, in his legendary piece Why I’m Not Going to Buy a Computer, that his wife types his manuscripts.

Both pieces are brilliant – Berry at his best. And while parts are dated, as any conversation about technology and culture must be, his critique of technology and the roles we assign it are biting.

My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves. – Wendell Berry

As I write this, the sun is rising, and since my desk faces east, the light through the east facing window in my office increases bit by bit. To my left, outside the north facing window, the call of the myriad birds that nest in the oak tree make a pleasant harmony, and my cat Puss scratches at the door to remind me that her food bowl has been empty for approximately 23 seconds and she is in danger of starvation. I live 1/2 mile from the interstate, and when the birdsong pauses, I can hear the hum of the semi-trucks, carrying their cargo to markets hither and yon.

As I embrace all of these senses and sounds, all I can do is feel joy that I am alive to experience them, and to know that there is no way I can write anything at this moment not influenced by all of it, even if I do not mention them. After High School, you no longer have to show your work.

Like Berry says in the first essay, I do not want to write faster. I do not want to write easier.

I want to write better. I want my writing to be more tender. I want it to reach deeper into the human heart. I want my writing to be more human, to invoke more compassion for the natural world, and to evoke a sense of empathy for other humans who need help to thrive.

AI cannot do that for me, because AI has never buried a parent, never feared for their life or the life of someone they love, never doubted, never hoped, never watched a sunrise over the water, never heard the call of the mockingbird, never walked in the woods, never felt relief when a check arrived, never eaten a piece of blackberry cobbler.

AI, in other words, knows jack shit about anything real. Your AI agent can quote a poem about love, it can even “write” one, if by write we mean rearrange words until it looks like what it believes a poem about love should look like, based on the millions of poems it has stolen from the creators of those poems. But no emotion will have gone into it, no judgement, no sense of self. No AI agent has ever cried as words appeared on a screen. No AI agent is enraptured by the hum of the data center in which it resides, moved to tears at the thought of the water table it is destroying with its existence.

Any reader familiar with my blogging will know that I have spent the last quarter century constantly struggling to figure out what I am actually doing. Am I a nature writer? A self-help writer? A spiritual writer?

The rise of AI, and the rush of my peers to slurp at its teat, has shown me that I am, first and foremost a human writer.

I write about and for humans, as one who is in love with humanity and the world in which we live.

Site Changes

It’s been a busy morning.

In keeping with the rebrand I mentioned last week, the blog has now moved to a new url – smallofferings.com. Unless you are reading this via RSS or on Mastodon, it should be seamless for you. If you are reading on RSS, the new feeds are here. It’s being syndicated to Mastodon at this account.

I did a light redesign, with a whimsical logotype and using red highlights. I’m not sure I like it – we’ll see. I still have some rough edges to knock off around the corners.

There is a new About page, that tries to explain what’s going on here.

If you are reading this via email, you are currently on the Essays plan, which means you will get the longer essay type posts when they publish – likely 1 or 2 emails a week. In other words, the way it has been.

But I am now going to begin sharing links and short notes to this site as well, and I don’t want you to get 15 emails a week. If you would rather a weekly email with everything I post in it, you can go to the footer of this email, click on manage your subscription, and then click Digest, instead of Essays.

I think that’s it – pardon the dust during these renovations, and we now resume regular programming.

PS: Wanna see something cool? Here is a short video of the pollinators playing on the 12 foot tall Swamp Sunflowers in my front yard.

Here. I made this for you.

The way I was told the story, there was a pastor who had finally gotten to go on a long, well-deserved vacation, and while he was gone, a young preacher just graduated from the seminary filled in.

When the regular preacher got back, he asked his head deacon how it went.

“Oh, he was decent,” the head deacon said. “But I think every great preacher has one sermon they preach over and over, and he just hasn’t found his yet.”

Recently, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what I’m trying to do with my writing. What my one sermon is, if you will.  And I think, if I have to nail it down, I’m just trying to make a case for a better world.

I have a newsletter that has gone out each week for almost 12 years, and it has a pretty tight purpose: It’s about how to survive in a harsh and brutal world.

I wrote a book about food, love, and memory.

I write sermons each week about how we build a better world than the one we have now.

I have a podcast where I tell stories that tend toward hope.

And then there is this blog. I have struggled with what goes here. It tends to be a mishmash of things. The leftovers, if you will. Things that don’t easily fit anywhere else. But mostly, they are small personal essays that trend toward the same pattern: Here is an alternative to this current world.  It doesn’t have to be like this.

The essays are descriptive, not prescriptive. “This is what I did”, not, “This is what you should do”.

All of this makes me a very bad internet writer. It also makes me a horrible spiritual teacher. Because the world is desperate for people who tell them what to do.

Not just what to do, though. What to think. How to think.

In the before times, the marketer Hugh Macleod told us that the market for something to believe in is infinite. And it’s true.

But I am not interested in telling you what to do, or believe, or what to think.

I don’t want to tell you how to schedule your day so that you can drink a cup of coffee on your back deck and watch the sun rise. Hell, I don’t even know if you have a back deck.

And then there is social media. Which is a damned mess.

What began for me as a way to stay in touch with people I care about and as a way to find new people has become a place that seeks to addict me to posts that either make me sad or outraged. Except when they want me to buy something.

Yesterday I opened my Facebook feed and the first 12 posts were either ads or people or groups I don’t follow, and have no real interest in. I have more than eleven thousand followers on there, and less than 10% of them ever see anything I write. Instead, they see what Facebook wants us to see.

Which is apparently things they want us to buy, or things that will make us mad.

And don’t get me started on the ways social media throttles free speech. If I have a link to an article I think you should read, if I post it to any of the social sites, they make sure virtually nobody sees it in their feeds, so you will stay on their site.

They have algorithms that decide what you can or cannot write if you want to be seen. I’m sure you have seen the social media shorthand folks use to get around it: Unalived, graped, yte folks. I totally get why they do it – if you don’t, nobody sees your stuff.

But I want to write and link to what I want. I hate being told what to do. I hate the idea of an algorithm training me to write acceptably to them as the cost of readership.

There is a trend in recent years to become more analog. People are buying flip phones. Using paper calendars. Sending postcards. Using paper planners. Much of this is in reaction to the ways tech, and especially algorithms and AI are being forced upon us.

So, I am going backward a bit myself – to about 2006. In 2006, I had this blog, and I would post links to videos I thought were funny on the new site called YouTube. I would write essays about things I had strong feelings about. I would link to other writers, and react to their writing. Lots of us did these things.

By 2010, much of that had moved to Social Media, and we got comfortable, and began to post less and less to our blogs. And then in 2013, Facebook began to restrict your audience unless you paid them. But by then, we had quit posting to sites we controlled, and had pushed our audience to social media.

So, I am taking back control. I’m recommitting to this blog, and will now be updating it regularly as if it is 2006 again. Sure, maybe only 200 people will see something I write, but at least it won’t try to make money by making me angry.

I’m rebranding it too, as part of my recognition of what I’m doing with my writing. What was formerly Hugh’s Blog (I hate naming things) is now Small Offerings, a site where I share things with you that either I write with you in mind, or that I found online and thought you would enjoy.

I have come to understand that each thing I create for others, whether a blog post or an essay or a book or an omelet or a cutting board, is a small offering to the world, a tangible representation of the world in which I wish to live. When I post something, it is me saying: Here. I made this for you.

What this means going forward

I will continue to write small (~ 1000 word) essays each week. The subjects will revolve around what is occupying my mind at the time. That might be my work, or my long-term effort to make my yard into a wildlife habitat, or the recipe I am trying to nail down, or the story of a trip we took.

But I will also share links to things I think are important, or that need wider distribution, or that I think are hilarious and that brought me much needed joy.

I will share small things – like a great photo, or an inspiring quote, or maybe a meme that really sums it all up.

Some of you reading this only read these things when I post them to social media. I currently syndicate this to Threads, BlueSky, Facebook, and Tumblr, and I post the full text on my personal Facebook page. For now, I have no plans to stop that.

Others read it via email. I have no plans to stop that either, but I recognize that most folks want less, not more, email in their inbox.

If you are a current email subscriber, you will continue to get an email with the full text of any essay blog post. This will be 1-2 posts a week.

The new posting schedule will begin next week, and after that, there will be an option to get one summary email per week with all essays, short posts, and links. I’ll let you know when that is live.

And some of you are still sitting on your RSS feedreaders. The RSS feed for just the essays is https://smallofferings.com/category/posts/feed/ and the RSS feed for all the posts is the same as it is now: https://smallofferings.com/ feed/

Rebranding is chaotic and involved. I am working off a long list of upgrades and features, so bear with me if things seem to be in disarray, that is because things are in disarray! For example, it really bothers me that I don’t have a logotype yet for the blog title on the website.

And of course, I should say that all of this – the more than 15 hours I have spent on this project over the last two weeks, the costs for the email service provider to deliver the posts, and all the costs of being a professional independent writer in the 21st century – are all covered by the membership team that supports my work and that allows me to focus on you and your privacy, instead of using intrusive ads and sponsorship deals. If my work matters to you, I hope you will consider becoming a member – not just for the perks, but to keep my voice online.  

If you liked this, you might want to subscribe, so you don’t miss future posts.

Tom chose us

We live in town, but in a neighborhood that was a suburb of the city before it was annexed a hundred years ago. Our street was generally built out in the early 1950’s, and leans heavily toward midcentury ranch houses – but plan book houses for ordinary people, not anything like you would see in Dwell magazine.

The lots are large for city lots – ours is ½ acre, and is on the smaller side of average. A neighbor down the street has three acres. The lots are wooded, with fifty foot tall pines and oaks and magnolias everywhere. And also, stray cats.

Our neighborhood has a pretty severe feral cat problem. It’s a combination of negligent pet owners, biology (cats have LOTS of kittens) and lack of a proper animal control office in our city. There are no easy solutions on a policy scale, but on an individual scale, it’s pretty simple: trap the ferals and get them fixed, and then release them back in your yard. It’s simple, but not cheap – a spay or neuter can easily cost you $250, and that would be cheap. It’s not all that easy either, as you have to hunt to find vets that will work on ferals, you have to trap them, and you have to have space for them to recover for 24 hours at a minimum.

But, if you can swing it, it works. The now sterile cat keeps the territory safe from other cats, and she (or he) will live in your neighborhood for years without making new kittens. It breaks the cycle.

We first noticed Tom over the winter of 23/24. A large orange cat who would come up on our deck and eat the food we put out for the ferals (so we can trap them), we saw him first on the security cameras. At the time, we were working on adopting out a set of kittens another feral had had in our backyard, and one of those kittens was a straight up ginger, so we assumed this was the father. I called him Tom, because some 80% of gingers are male.

I would see Tom in the back yard sometimes, but always at a distance, and I would chide him for neglecting his parental duties. I would tell him that it was irresponsible to go arund getting other cats pregnant and then not sticking around.

Tom was unphased, and would duck into the hedgerow when I approached.

But one day, I stumbled across a batch of kittens, just a few days old, in a hollow tree stump in our backyard, the second batch we had found that summer. Mom was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t mean they had necessarily been abandoned. Momma cats rarely abandon kittens unless they are obviously damaged or dying. It was far more likely she was just off hunting.

If you are going to rescue kittens, it is so much easier, by several orders of magnitude, if you can trap the mom too. Because then you don’t have to feed the kittens every 3 hours for six weeks – you just have to feed Mom, and she does all the hard work.

 So, we set a trap for her, using the kittens as bait. You put the kittens in a pet carrier, then put the trap in front of it, and cover the whole thing in a blanket, leaving the mouth of the trap exposed. The momma cat smells her kittens, and to her mind, they have been moved to the end of a tunnel. She goes into the tunnel to explore, and BAM! The trap closes.

So now we had four ginger kittens and, surprise, a Ginger mom, our old friend Tom, who we had been misgendering all this time.

For the next six weeks, we would feed Tom and the kittens, who all lived in our garage storage room. We would go in and put food in the bowl, and Tom would hiss at us. By the end of the six weeks or so, when she began weening the kittens, her nipples sore and achy, she would tolerate our presence as we played with the kittens, but if you approached her, more hissing and screaming at us.

It was almost September when we got Tom to the vet and got her spayed. Two days later we released her back into the backyard, exactly where we had trapped her almost two months before. She darted from the trap and back into the hedgerow, free at last.

Two days later she was back on our back deck, eating the feral cat food. We would see her from time to time, sunning herself in the yard. We learned she slept at night in our flower bed.

And then one day, she started showing up when we were putting the food out. She would sit at the other end of the deck and watch us, and then run up to the bowl when we walked away.

And then she started sitting two feet away from us as we filled the bowl.  And then, sometime early this year, nearly two years after she had kittens in our backyard, she declared us safe, and now she rubs against our legs as we pour food in the bowl. She will follow us around as we water the plants on the deck. And, sometimes, she will allow me to pick her up and pet her. She looks a bit nervous, but she allows it, and then when I set her down, she doesn’t run away but will continue to rub against our legs.

She is on our deck most days now. She still sleeps in the flower bed out front, a permanent dead spot marking her shelter among the perennials. Every morning, she greets me when I leave the house, and will sometimes stand at the gate to the deck and fuss at me to open it, despite her being completely capable of getting over it herself, like she does countless times a day.

She’s a pet now, I guess; a permanent resident on our property. Outdoor cats are bad for the bird population, but we have modified things a bit to make it safer for the birds, like making sure there is clearance around water sources and that bird feeders are not just baiting them as a hunting hide for cats.

I would never choose an outdoor cat, but it seems like Tom has chosen us.

The other day, I saw her lying on the deck, sound asleep, belly up in the air. Cats bodies are most vulnerable underneath – they only show their stomach when they feel safest. And I guess for Tom, that space of safety is our back deck.

I’ve spent a large part of my career working with victims of trauma, and one thing I have learned is that you cannot heal from trauma while you are still experiencing trauma – you have to have a safe space to heal.

I’m glad we are able to be that space for Tom.

The dead hedge

Our half-acre lot is a rectangle, with our house running perpendicular to the wide side, with a quarter of the lot being front yard, and the rest being back yard. And in the backyard, where it can harm no one, is a large hackberry tree.

Or perhaps more accurately, was a hackberry tree. It’s now actively dying, and has been since the great drought of 2024. It has died from the top down, so that even today the lowest branches leafed out this year, while the topmost limbs have been decaying and falling for a few years now.

It isn’t near anyone’s house or other structures, so we have been content to let it continue to die a natural death. This is best for the other creatures that live on our property – bugs move in, followed by woodpeckers, followed by cavity dwellers. We have arranged native vines to run up the tree trunk, so it also provides food and cover for birds and flowers and green foliage in the summer and autumn color for us.  

But it is messy. After every rainfall, there are dead limbs beneath it that no longer had the strength to hang on. What, exactly, is one to do with this debris? It’s a huge tree, so we are not just talking about 1 or 2 limbs.

There are many things one could do, I guess. I could have cut them into pieces and taken them to the dump, or burned them in my backyard fire pit, or made hügelkultur garden beds. But instead of any of that, I made a dead hedge.

A dead hedge is simple a decorative brush pile. Now, people from the UK, where they are so ahead of us on wildlife gardening, would fight me over that statement, but that is really what it is. A google image search of dead hedges brings up a wild amount of variation, but the concept is simple: Use tree debris like prunings and dead wood to create piles where wildlife can hide, where compost can happen naturally, and they are out of the way of humans.

Brush piles in and of themselves are amazing for wildlife. They provide cover for small mammals and birds, they provide food and cover for bugs and amphibians and reptiles, and they provide structure for other plants to grow on and through. But they tend to be seen  as ugly by humans. Or, at least, 21st Century humans living in suburban neighborhoods in the USA. Other cultures have long since learned how to manage this.

So as the limbs fell from the hackberry, I laid them along an imaginary line, somewhat crenellating, across my back yard, some 30 feet in front of my rear boundary. It is now almost fifty feet long, some four feet wide, and about four feet high. As I have trimmed other shrubs and trees, I have woven their supple limbs in and out of the bigger, dead ones, and we have allowed the native crossvines and pepper vines to grow rampant , so in the summer portions of it are invisible. A few seedling cherry laurels have come up in it, gifts from the birds who roost there. We have left the cherry laurels, and so now the dead hedge is becoming the foundation of a hedgerow. It is one of the most alive places on our property, filled with lizards and birds, and bugs and the snakes that eat them.

Over time, it will change, as the smaller limbs break down and the bigger limbs shift. It also changes as I add new limbs as they fall, and the leavings when I prune the other bushes and trees. It’s an everchanging organic sculpture.

But it is also more than that.

Between the dead hedge and my back fence I have planted wax myrtles, black cherry, and yaupons, and the birds have planted the cherry laurels and some black cherry and elderberry of their own. There are four pine trees in this strip as well, dropping their pine straw obligingly on the ground to serve as mulch.

This is on the eastern side of our yard, and so there is one side of the base of the dead hedge that only gets morning sunlight, while the other side bakes in the sun all afternoon. We are content to let this 30 by 100 foot strip be woodland, but managed, with a path that weaves among the saplings, which I limb up from time to time to make it more navigable. In the mornings I like to walk this path, and hear the birdsong and see the skinks and the anoles, and hear the brush rattle as some small mammal runs to hide from my intrusion into their home.

When we moved in, this rear boundary was a typical privacy fence against lawn grass, barring the four pine trees and the one hackberry. But now, eight years later, it’s habitat.