Life’s Funny

The Giving Tree

The arms of an old magnolia take a young reader to new heights

By Maria Johnson

When a fellow book lover like Renee Lewis invites you up to see her favorite reading spot, you go.

I confess that I was a little nervous. It had been a while since I’d climbed a tree, so I was relieved when 9-year-old Renee tutored me on the proper way to enter her sanctuary, a glossy old magnolia across the street from her family’s home in Greensboro.

Renee walked to the high side of the tree, which grows on a gentle slope, and grabbed a forked branch just above her head.

“Feel how smooth the bark is?” she asked like a good coach.

I ran a hand over the magnolia’s fine-grained skin, remembering what it was like to be a kid, touch a tree, smell it and realize that it was another living thing — one that could give you shelter and an entirely different perspective if you learned how to feel your way through it. Kind of like a book.

Renee — who was dressed for a cool summer morning in fashionably ripped jeans and T-shirt the color of orange sherbet — knew that already.

She pulled against the forked branch as her gold-and-silver gladiator sandals walked up the trunk. Her pigtails hung free. Then she grabbed another small branch, vaulted herself to a broad arm of the tree, spun around, seated herself and smiled.

She planted one foot against the trunk and dangled the other leg, swinging it for a couple of beats. Then she showed me around the tree, gliding onto neighboring perches, pointing out available seating.

On the ground, her dad, Ben, cautioned her not to go higher.

“This is as high as we usually go,” Renee said, patting a branch above her. “This is the highest one that’ll support us, actually.”
Her meaning was subtle: Higher branches had been tried, out of the view of adults. That’s what leaves are for.

It was my turn. Dressed in my own tree-climbing jeans and sandals, I latched onto Renee’s pull-up bar and shimmied up to a stout branch opposite hers.

We weren’t that high up — our eyes were maybe 6 or 7 feet off the ground — but it felt so different up there.

Sunlight filtered through a filigree of green.

Creamy magnolia blossoms, as big as salad plates, gave off shy notes of sweet and sour.

“Nice,” I said, complimenting Renee on her refuge.

“Mmm, hmm,” she confirmed, her dark eyes shining with confidence. “Yep.”

Below, everything below seemed smaller.

Renee’s mom and dad looked up from an apron of leathery brown leaves spent by the magnolia.

Boys coasted by on their multispeed bicycles. Tick-tick-tick-tick. Somewhere down the street, a lawnmower droned toward the heat of the day.

Closer, a mockingbird moved through its repertoire by whistling, squawking and chirping.

A cardinal sang background — pur-DEE, pur-DEE — and a tortoiseshell cat named Vesper slunk along the curb, thinking we couldn’t see her.

But we could.

Renee, a rising fourth-grader, has been climbing this tree for two or three years. All the neighborhood kids do, if they have permission from their parents. The couple who own the house and yard — Charlie and Ellen Witzke — are empty-nesters who like having children around. When they hired tree trimmers, they made sure the crew left enough low branches so the kids still could hoist themselves into the magnolia.

It’s only for the last few months that Renee has been coming up here to read. Her school, Caldwell Academy, required third graders to read at least 90 minutes a week outside of school.

Usually, Renee zoomed through her quota in the car on the way to and from school. Her parents timed her on their cell phones. But if she was really into a book, she’d get home and say, “I’m going to the tree to read.”

The magnolia is, as Renee likes to say, “the only serene place” she knows — much calmer than home, with her yellow Labrador retriever, Nugget, romping around, and her old sister, Carter, busy being a teenager, and her parents taking remote meetings for work.

Whenever Renee came up here — to a tree not yet populated by after-school kids — her parents could keep an eye on her, and she could have some privacy.

Win-win.

There was another bonus for her mom. Watching Renee beeline to the tree brought back good memories for Jennifer, who used to play in a magnolia at the home of her grandparents, Kitty and Dr. Sam Ravenel, in Greensboro’s leafy Fisher Park.

“Oh my gosh,” Jennifer thought. “That’s just like my brother and me climbing the tree at Pa and Nanny’s.”

The first book that Renee took across the street was Ava and Star, the third book in the Unicorn Academy series by author Julie Sykes. Each book pairs a girl with a unicorn, and together they use their unique powers to benefit Unicorn Island.

Later, Renee climbed up with The Shimmering Stone, part of The Rescue Princesses series by Paula Harrison.

Renee broke her extracurricular reading record that week, logging 200-plus minutes, thanks to the story of Amina, whose mission is to return tiger cubs to their mother.

“I loved it because that’s where I got my information about tigers,” Renee says, explaining that she’s into big cats — tigers, lions, cheetahs, leopards.

Really, Renee says, she loves animals, period.

Maybe that’s why she’s enthralled by her current book — and one of my all-time favorites — Charlotte’s Web, by E.B. White.

Renee thumbs to a dog-eared page of the paperback. Wilbur has just escaped. The other barn animals are egging him on while humans are trying to lure him back with a mixture of “warm milk, potato skins and wheat middlings.”

“Doesn’t sound very appetizing,” Renee’s mom says from below.

“Well, he is a runt, Mom. And milk — he’s a baby,” Renee counters.

Her mother smiles. “That’s true.”

Renee continues. Wilbur has already met Charlotte, the spider and title character.

“She said, ‘Hi,’ and he screamed,” Renee recalls. “I thought that was funny.”

She guesses — partly from the book’s title — that Charlotte is going to have a big impact on Wilbur’s life.

“I think the spider could show something to Wilbur, like bravery or something he hasn’t been through,” she says. “I could see the spider changing the way Wilbur sees things . . . I can see maybe more conflict with Wilbur.”

Renee says she likes to read about how people — and animals — respond to the problems that lie at the heart of every riveting story.

She knows this already.

“It kind of opens up your imagination, when you can relate to a character in some book,” she says.

Then she giggles out the precious truth of a nine-year-old reader.

“I have a very wild imagination.”  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. She reads books and climbs magnolias whenever she gets the chance. Contact her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Life’s Funny

Finding Tia

How a lost dog helped humans locate their kindness

By Maria Johnson

It had just stopped raining, but the sky was still rumbling when I saw her that Sunday afternoon.

She was a little bigger than a bread box. Her black-and-white fur was soaked, and her tail was tucked between her legs as she crept out from between some townhouses about 40 yards away.

She looked like a purebred spaniel, a dog someone would be missing. She also looked scared, just like my foxhound must’ve looked when he slipped out of the yard during a thunderstorm last summer. I remembered how my heart sank when I realized he was gone.

I called to the little spaniel.

She turned and ran the other way. I jumped in the car and drove around the neighborhood hoping to catch a glimpse of her, but she’d seemingly vanished.

So I did what I had done last summer. I sent up a flare on NextDoor, a social media app that connects people in neighborhoods.

“Black and white spaniel pup on the loose … Whitehall neighborhood off Lake Jeanette Road just now . . . ”

Within seconds, people responded with sympathetic emojis. One woman connected the dots, linking my post to a fresh “lost dog” notice from another neighborhood that she also followed.

Soon, I heard from one of the dog’s owners, Virginia Masius.

“I think that’s my dog, Tia,” she wrote.

A little more than an hour earlier, Virginia had let Tia out to relieve herself just before the storm hit. In the time it took Virginia, a professional musician, to fetch her coffee cup from upstairs, the sky opened and thunder shook the house. When she stuck her head outside and called Tia, there was no response.

Virginia looked under the deck. No Tia.

Then she saw a gap under the chain-link fence.

Fear grabbed her.

She tried to calm herself. Four-year-old Tia had wandered off before, but she’d always come back shortly, usually muddy and happy, wagging her thumb-like tail.

Virginia walked her neighborhood of Bellwood Village calling Tia’s name as she went. Nothing.

She texted the news to her partner, Margo Freibott, a professional dog groomer who was driving back from a grooming competition in West Virginia.

In her car, Margo listened to Virginia’s text and dictated a reply: “She’ll come back. Leave the basement door open.”

She suggested that Virginia check the neighborhood retention pond, where wildlife often gathered. Tia, nicknamed Bird Dog, often followed her nose down to the pond.

Then Margo roused the employees at her business, A Becoming Pet in Greensboro. One of them, Brianna Davis, blasted out more social media alerts and left the dinner table to join the hunt as bulletins flashed across NextDoor and the Facebook pages of individuals and animal-related groups.

Text chains lit up among friends: Be on the lookout for a black-and-white cocker spaniel.

Into the evening, people in the Lake Jeanette area scanned their surroundings as they walked, jogged, and exercised their own dogs.

Others searched as they drove, tacking extra miles onto their normal routes in hopes of spotting Tia.

It was getting dark when a woman called Margo.

She’d seen a black-and-white cocker spaniel running up an exit ramp for I-840.

Oh, no, Margo thought. More than anything, she feared Tia trying to cross the partially finished interstate loop.

She and Virginia drove up and down the highway until 9:30 p.m.

They went home dejected.

Margo left voice messages at veterinarian offices. She posted Tia’s information on PawBoost, a site devoted to lost-and-found pets.

Virginia put a venison roast on the gas grill outside, hoping that Tia’s nose, sharpened by hunger, would pick up the molecules of sizzling fat.

They left the gate and the back door standing open, just in case.

They couldn’t sleep.

Where was Tia right now? Was she safe? Was she scared?

The next morning brought a glimmer of hope.

A woman who lived on Cottage Place, about a mile away as the crow flies, posted that her doorbell camera had captured an image of Tia at about 11:30 the night before.

Margo and Virginia chucked their Monday routines and combed the area. Nothing.

They studied Google Earth to guess Tia’s most likely path, figuring the shy dog would stick to easements and creeks.

Margo focused on the neighborhoods that hugged those spaces, retracing streets and parking her car to walk behind developments and call Tia’s name.

Virginia concentrated on distributing “REWARD” flyers bearing Tia’s picture. She stuck the pages to utility poles and stop signs. She dropped off copies at a branch library, a fire station and nearby pet stores.

Everyone she talked to promised to help.

On Monday night, someone on NextDoor posted a picture of Tia taken on Bluff Run Drive.

Indeed, Tia had crossed the interstate, perhaps by going through a culvert that channeled a creek under the road.

A handful of searchers descended on the area, hollering Tia’s name until 10 p.m.

That night, Virginia and Margo felt hope slipping.

Would they see Tia again?

They clung to a lifesaver they’d never expected: The knowledge that dozens — if not hundreds of people — had Tia on their minds, too.

That day, they had run across people walking with treats and leashes in hand.

“Are you looking for the cocker spaniel?” people had asked them, not realizing who Margo and Virginia were.

“Yeah,” they answered.

“We are, too,” the strangers said.

Tuesday morning, when Margo made a brief appearance at work across town, a client commented that she didn’t look well. Margo explained that her dog was missing.

“The cocker spaniel?” the woman replied.

Tuesday afternoon pinged with more sightings in the Bluff Run Drive area.

A house painter had seen her. A dentist had seen her. A couple of women who were walking had seen her.

The tips were promising — and maddening. Margo, Virginia and friends drove from sighting to sighting, literally moving in circles.

Finally, they zeroed in on a swath of woods where they believed Tia was hunkered down. No one had seen her for a couple of hours.

Margo decided to use a live trap loaned to her by retired local wildlife trapper Bobby Farrington. He’d advised her to bait the cage with fried chicken.

Virginia ran to Bojangles.

Margo set the pressure-sensitive trap just inside the woods and sent everyone home. She sat in her car and watched for three hours. At dusk, she saw a family of deer enter the woods. They looked like the herd that had frequented her neighborhood retention pond before construction had driven them away.

Had Tia followed her nose to familiar animals and bedded down near them at night?

Was she overnighting with friends?

That night, Margo left for the Raleigh-Durham International Airport to pick up her 25-year-old son Cody, who was flying home from Oregon to get his car. On the way home, they stopped to check the trap. It was 1 a.m.

They shined a flashlight into the woods.

Two yellow eyes reflected back at them.

“I’m going down there,” said Cody.

A few seconds later, he spoke again.

“Mom, it’s Tia.”

Sitting on a sofa in the family’s living room, Margo continuously runs her fingers through Tia’s wavy fur.

Every few minutes, her fingers feel a bump, and Margo checks to see if it’s a scab where a tick was removed. They found 26 ticks on Tia when they got her home.

Tia stank, too. Margo figured that she had been eating the remains of dead animals in the woods. Margo’s employees bathed Tia repeatedly to get the smell out.

The fence where Tia slipped out? It’s more secure than Fort Knox now.

And Tia? She crawls all over a visitor on the other end of the sofa.

“Oh, now you come to me, huh?” I tease.

It’s mid-May, a couple of weeks since Tia returned from her two-and-a-half-day holiday, and she seems as happy-go-lucky as ever.

Her humans, though, are forever stamped by the experience, especially the feeling of community that Tia’s disappearance prompted.

“It makes me get goosebumps,” Margo says.

“We were amazed at the outpouring of support,” adds Virginia, who had recently considered quitting Facebook because of the divisive tone that has run rampant in the last several years.

This time, though, social media — and the feelings awakened by an 18-pound pup — led people to reveal their better sides.

“Just when you think you’re losing faith in humanity, your little dog goes out and shows you otherwise,” says Margo.  OH 

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry magazine. You can reach her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Life’s Funny

Paper Chase

The joys of springtime shredding return

By Maria Johnson

My heart leapt in my chest.

There, on my laptop screen, was a solid sign that the pre-pandemic pleasures of life were returning.

Shredding events were back.

Yee-ha!

In case you’ve had your head stuck in a pile of papers, shredding events are community gatherings that involve long lines of cars dropping off loads of personal documents at designated sites, where boxy trucks with huge metal teeth grind them to ribbons — grrrunch, grrrunch, grrrunch — in front of your very eyes.

It’s a contemporary phenomenon, this voluntary destruction of docs, and it usually happens on Saturdays, which adds to the going-to-the-fair feeling.

For your viewing pleasure, some shredding trucks are outfitted with screens showing live feeds from cameras focused on the churning blades and the mountain of pulp inside the truck.

“People like looking at their stuff getting shredded. They really like that,” says 33-year-old Jorge Acosta, who drives for a company called Shred Ace Inc. “It’s a peace of mind thing. I get it. Once those documents go in, they’re not coming out.”

That’s comforting in an age when almost everyone knows what it means to be hacked, breached or compromised.

Bottom line: Public shredding is one of the most cathartic, satisfying experiences I’ve ever had, so much so that I’m willing to overlook my disdain for the word “event,” as in “weather event” (tornado) or “cardiac event” (heart attack).

Every spring — peak season, as any master shredder knows — I schlep old records to an advertised event, where I feel a deep kinship with other defenders of the PIN.

That’s one reason 2020 was small-T traumatic for me.

Not only did COVID inflict true suffering on millions, it cancelled public shreddings far and wide for two years.

Sniff-sniff. I missed myyyyyyy evennnnnnnnnnts.

So imagine my joy when mass shredding resumed this spring. Finally, the mountain of old files that kept me from reconfiguring the closet in my office could be cleared.

Now, the hard work — weighing what to keep and what to shred — began.

Some of them were no-brainers.

Paycheck stubs, expense reports and tax returns more than a few years old? Gone.

Receipts from ancient purchases and routine medical appointments? Outta here.

Statements from accounts closed long ago? Sayonara, suckers.

Other papers, that stirred memories, were harder to part with.

A tattered file marked “Furniture” stopped me.

I leafed through receipts and notes about pieces my husband and I bought when we first started housekeeping 30-plus years ago.

I smiled at copies of letters — typed on a chunky computer monitor, spat out of a dot-matrix printer and mailed with a stamp — that I’d sent to a furniture retailer, insisting that they replace our brand new (cracked) dining room chairs with a new batch after their attempted repairs on the first set of chairs failed.

Lord, I was feisty. And probably over the top. But effective. My grandmother had given us money to buy that dining room furniture, and I was going to make her gift right.

She’s been gone for 25 years now, but when I thought about how much she liked that furniture, and how proud she was to have had a hand in making our home, she was with me again.

I kept the letters and pitched the receipts.

My husband got into the game, combing through files stuffed with his college course work. He kept a few tests marked “100.”

We joked that we should start a new file called “Damn, I Was Good.”

And maybe another one called, “Damn, That Was Stupid,” which we’d fill with evidence of the investments we’d sold right before they took off. Expensive lessons in patience, indeed.

We loaded the car with boxes and bags of old files and headed to the event. My pulse quickened when I saw a line of cars backed out onto the street, like a queue of concert-goers waiting to get into the venue.

Doubt crept in. What if we were throwing away something we’d need later? I crawled into the backseat and started pulling files. Then I said to heck with it. There probably was a mistake, a future regret, in there somewhere. So be it.

Half an hour later, we forked over a donation of $5 per box — some organizations use shredding events as fundraisers — and pulled up beside the hungry truck. Volunteers emptied our boxes into a huge plastic trash bin and rolled it to the truck.

We watched as mechanical arms clasped, raised and tipped the bin into the shredder.

Grrrunch, grrrunch, grrrunch.

Gone for good. Ashes to ashes. Pulp to pulp.

It’s the best show in town. On paper, anyway.  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry magazine. You can reach her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Life’s Funny

What in the Wordle?

How an online game catches fire one green tile at a time

By Maria Johnson

I start with goodbye.

A-D-I-E-U.

It’s a good opener because it contains so many vowels.

Yes, I’m talking about the web-based game Wordle, which gives you six chances to guess a five-letter word.

And yes, I’m hooked, just like the many millions of people who’ve glommed onto the game since it appeared online last fall and became a viral sensation over the winter.

I heard about the puzzle from my elder son’s girlfriend, who made a custom Wordle-like game for them to play virtually on his birthday as they sat on different coasts.

Each of them supplied five words for the other to guess.

I was charmed that she would, and could, create such a smart and intimate gift.

I wanted to know more. So I sniffed out the real Wordle and gave it a try.

I couldn’t get the hang of it.

Then some friends brought up the puzzle in a group text. One pal compared it to the 1970s board game Mastermind, a code-breaking challenge based on colors.

“It’s the same concept, but with letters,” she wrote.

Now I was intrigued.

The next time my younger son was home, I cornered him.

“Do you Wordle?”

“Yep.”

“Will you show me how?”

“Sure.”

A couple of days later, I texted him.

“I got Wordle in two tries.”

“Two?! That’s the white whale.”

Welp, there’s nothing like a little success to spark an obsession.

I dived into the history of the game and found out it was invented by a Brooklyn software engineer named Josh Wardle. Get it? Wordle. Wardle.

Anyway, Wardle, who’s originally from Wales and used to work for the social-news aggregator Reddit, had been noodling with game-making for about 10 years. During COVID, he decided to create a game that he and his partner could play together.

God bless the game-loving lovers of the world.

Eventually, after refining the game with family and friends, the couple decided to put Wordle on their own website with no pay walls and no ads because as Josh Wardle has told several interviewers, they wanted to give people a simple, fun, relatively quick game to play for free.

Do you love these folks or what?

The first Wordle appeared in October 2021.

The number of players grew exponentially. In January of this year, The New York Times Company bought the game for a sum “in the low seven figures.”

For now, Wordle is still available for free, and it has spawned spin-offs galore. Wardle, the inventor, hosted an in-person competition of Wordle, the game, at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, Connecticut, in April.

Every day, players share their Wordle triumphs and defeats on social media, often with green-and-gray grids representing their attempts in a non-spoiler way.

A player who goes by @iSlutsky recently tweeted, “It’s with great disappointment & sorrow that I inform you of my loss in todays [sic] Wordle. I am heartbroken to have my streak broken and [am] currently entering a dark period of the day. Please send cookies.”

I get it. I have a streak going myself. Twenty-seven games.

I take a sip of coffee and a deep breath.

A-D-I-E-U.

Enter.

The “A” turns olive green, meaning it’s in the word somewhere, but not in the first slot.

I go to the second line, where I’ll get another chance, planning to use the “A” in a different place while trying new letters and fishing for an “O.”

F-L-O-A-T.

The “F” and the “A” turn bright green. Yay. They’re in the right spot. The “O” is olive green, so I need to move it.

On my third opportunity to nail it, I type “X’s” to visualize possibilities.

F-X-X-A-X.

Focal?

Foray?

You could say it’s a toss up. But I’m guessing that “R” is more common in the English language than “C.”

F-O-R-A-Y.

Enter.

Green-green-green-green-green.

Bingo! With three tries to spare.

I wallow in a squirt of self-esteem and a sliver of hope that some mysteries are solvable.

Today, anyway.

And for those that aren’t, there’s always tomorrow.

According to the website, the next Wordle drops in 18 hours, 13 minutes and 24 seconds.  OH

To play today’s Wordle, go to nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html.

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry magazine. You can reach her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Life’s Funny

Hanging in the Balance

Notes from land, sea and air

By Maria Johnson

It was one of the all-time best Christmas presents ever: a red plastic folder from my engineer husband, Jeff.

Ah, but this wasn’t just any festive red folder lying under the tree.

The title page said: “Trip to Florida: Swimming with Manatees.”

The following pages, printed from a PowerPoint presentation he’d made (not kidding) explained how we’d get there; where we’d stay; what we’d do.

The main attraction, hanging out with manatees, was something I’d wanted to do ever since two newspaper colleagues gushed about snorkeling with sea cows 30 years ago.

But I had no clue until I started brushing up on manatees — 1,000-pound mammals that resemble a cross between a big seal and a small whale — that they’ve been very much in the news lately.

That’s because there’s a state-backed program in Florida to feed them romaine lettuce. That’s because a record number of manatees died last year. That’s because the sea grasses they eat have been choked out by algae blooms. That’s because of fertilizer runoff, sewage discharges and the like. And that’s because . . . ta-da, humans.

Merry Christmas.

Still, I was in a cheery mood as we boarded our nonstop flight to St. Petersburg. The sun was shining, the plane was on time and no one at the gate had stopped me because my suitcase was possibly — i.e. definitely — over the weight limit.

I smiled the smile of a scofflaw.

We buckled up as one of the attendants pantomimed what to do in case of an emergency. The engines revved. A couple of seats over, a white-knuckled woman squeezed her eyes shut and started her mantra: “Please Jesus, please Jesus, please Jesus.”

I decided it might be a good time to study the survival cartoons tucked into the seat-back pouch in front of me. I’d never done that. And don’t necessarily recommend it.

But just in case you’re interested, here’s the gist:

If an oxygen mask drops down in front of you, yank on it, put it on, then help the expressionless child who, according to the card, will be sitting right next to you.

If you look out the window and see you’re about to crash on land or water, put your head between your legs so the child will not be able to read your lips.

If you happen to land in one piece and leaving the plane on an inflatable slide is an option, do not jump onto the slide as if you’re having a big time inside a bouncy house. Sit down and slide gently. You won’t have to explain this to Zen-child because they’re way calmer than you are. (Who is this kid, anyway?)

And finally, don’t wear high heels as you leave the plane because if you puncture that freakin’ slide, and the people behind you can’t get off, your fashionable ass will be the last one on the life raft.

I’m just reading between the cartoon lines here.

Conclusion #1: Flying in an airplane is like riding in a bubble. A thin film of safety surrounds you.

Conclusion #2: Don’t wear heels. Ever.

I needed to get my mind on something else. I leafed through a magazine I’d brought and landed, naturally, on a story about a filmmaker and entrepreneur who has been experimenting in Arizona with an enclosed Earth-like environment — imagine a big terrarium, with people — because he’s convinced the actual Earth is going to break up with humans by saying something like:

“Listen, it’s not you; it’s me. Nah, I’m lying. It’s you.”

You might remember that someone else tried to create a sort of miniature Earth — with the idea of eventually hurling it into space — in Arizona in the late 1980s. The experiment was called Biosphere 2, and it failed, basically because the oxygen ran out and the knockoff environment was not complex enough to replace it.

The story pointed out that oxygen accounts for about one-fifth of the air we breathe, and once atmospheric oxygen drops below 19.5 percent, human cells start showing signs of distress.

Guess what the oxygen level was in the latest Arizona bubble after four hours?

Seventeen percent.

I closed the magazine. It seemed like the universe was trying to tell me something. Other than don’t wear heels.

I got the message again a couple of days later, as we wriggled into wetsuits and snorkels and slipped into the 72-degree water of Kings Bay near Crystal River, Florida, a favorite manatee wintering spot because of the warm springs that feed the river.

Our guide, Rob, a former Marine who’d gotten sick of working under fluorescent lights in a warehouse, swam to a spot and pointed down.

We dipped our masks under the water just in time to see a gentle giant glide by.

Rob waved us to another spot, closer to the edge of the cove, where a manatee and her calf noshed on sea grass. The grass grew only in a narrow band, where the sunlight could reach it.

The manatees slipped away faster than we could follow. Rob had told us not to chase them. We were to disturb them as little as possible. We were in their home, he said.

The wind whipped the palm trees on shore. Our captain, Glenn, who described manatees as “the ultimate hippies,” waved us aboard. We’d try another spot. We might get lucky, he said, because a cool front was moving in, and the manatees, ever sensitive to the Earth’s whispers, would respond by eating more.

He piloted the boat to another cove, where we descended again and peered into a world vivid with darting fish and waving crabs and swaying grasses that gave off tiny bubbles.

Several yards below, on the sandy bottom, a mama manatee and her nursing calf hovered.

We hung there in a loose circle on the surface, rocked by the waves and the rhythmic rasps of our breaths moving through the snorkel tubes. With ears submerged, we could hear the squeaky patter of mom and baby.

The torpedo-shaped calf, all 7 feet of it, detached and rose to the surface, its curvy face passing a few feet in front of mine. Smoky spirals of milk streamed from its thick hound-dog upper lips.

Its eyes were round, calm, trusting.

Its blunt snout breached the surface and took in air.

I floated there, enchanted. We were to touch the manatees only with one hand — and only if they touched us first.

Mom and calf drifted away.

A few minutes later, as we paddled toward Rob, who’d made another sighting, Jeff tapped my shoulder with urgency.

I looked over. A huge manatee was moving right beside us.

Its sandpapery skin brushed Jeff’s hand as it slipped by peacefully.

We smiled around our mouthpieces.

It was their home.

And our honor.  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry magazine. You can reach her at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Life’s Funny

Not-So Instant Messages

Deep in a quiet wood, a notebook offers glimpses of a kindly human spirit

By Maria Johnson

The sight of a black plastic mailbox usually doesn’t make me smile.

But this one — lashed with a blue bungee cord to a splintered stump in the middle of the forest — brought a grin.

The red flag was up.

I had mail! And so did everyone else on this wooded trail, a hilly vein hugging one of Greensboro’s drinking-water reservoirs.

I opened the hatch to find a composition book titled Mailbox in the Woods.

“Share a thought, blessing, poem, or just say Hi!,” the creator had penned on the cover in blue ballpoint. She (my guess) signed it with a smiling cat face and noted that the book was Volume 2.

The entries, which started in November, filled more than half the book, suggesting that she had started her project during the pandemic.

It made sense.

The past year had twisted the norms of, well, everything, and like scads of others, my husband and I had doubled down on our woods walks, partly for exercise, partly for solace.

The woods reminded us that destruction and creation live side by side, in balance, though it might not seem like that at any given moment. So during a time of national darkness, with nearly 600,000 Americans perishing from COVID-19, Greensboro’s sublime system of watershed trails was a lifesaver.

Literally.

Someone else had felt it, too, and she’d cast a net to catch the sentiment and let everyone know that, even though they might be walking solo, they weren’t alone in their thirst for beauty and hope and a smile.

It reminded me of similar expressions I’ve seen in other remote locations: the mailbox that harks to walkers at the north end of Wrightsville Beach; the spontaneous shell art stuck on driftwood at the Botany Bay preserve on Edisto Island, S.C.; cairns that rise from the forest floors of state parks; Christmas ornaments that hang on trees behind Safety Town in Greensboro.

For some, these creations say that human beings can’t leave nature well enough alone. But to me, these traces are like candles in a chapel, a gentle sign of community. The Mailbox in the Woods — and the messages inside — whispered that there was a tribe of heart-bound souls treading the root-laced paths.

Nine days into November, a hiker named Jeanne opened the book and wrote an Emily Dickinson poem that she learned in sixth grade, in 1970:

“The morns are meeker than they were

The nuts are getting brown

The berries’ cheeks are plumper

The rose is out of town . . .”

A few pages later, the scouts of Troop 118 scrawled their names.

Eddy from Germany complimented the nature that surrounds Greensboro.

Amy from Connecticut praised the book itself: “Coolest idea.”

An anonymous young writer struggled with life in plain view: “I had my first sip of Jim Beam today; I’m reaching into my slightly inebriated mind to give you a sober thought: surround yourself w/ people that will be good for the long run :)”

On November 22, C and B drew hearts and shared big news: “We just got engaged, about 30 yards away from you, mailbox!”

Visitors from New Hampshire and Vermont left their marks.

A child shared a brush with adventure: “We almost fell in the water.”

In places, the messages sparked a playful dialogue.

“I like your shirt,” one writer declared.

“Thanks dude,” another responded.

“How about my sweater?” added yet another.

On another page, love blossomed: “I just met a really great girl. I think this could turn into a relationship.”

“Congrats brother,” someone wrote below that.

“I’m going to be a grandma!” someone gushed a few pages later.

“Yay! Congratulations,” someone else responded.

As I leafed through the book, what struck me was the lack of venom. Even though this was deep in the woods, there were no trolls. None of the messages was hateful — unless you counted the swipe at 2020: “Here’s to hoping 2021 doesn’t suck as much.”

Sure, people revealed pain — “Fighting that post-Christmas depression,” and “I’m still in love with my ex”— but there was no piling on. There was only encouragement.

“Keep swimming.”

“You’re gonna get through this.”

“No better time than this, and life is good, the only one,” one correspondent reflected in Greek with a sidebar of English translation.

Was the upbeat tone a reflection of the people who are drawn to walking trails?

Was it because no one was looking over their shoulders, counting the seconds until a response landed?

Was it because of the reflective setting?

Whatever the cause, I was grateful for this slow-walking social media. Another writer said it better than I could.

“Hello MailBox in the Woods! It’s been a tough year, but moments of whimsy like these make it bearable. Thank you & blessings to all.”  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry magazine. She can be reached at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Life’s Funny

Blanking Out

How to live a storied life amid a pandemic

By Maria Johnson

For the entertainment of our Covid-weary readers, we’ve concocted a fill-in-the-blank game in the spirit of Mad Libs. To play with another person, don’t read the story aloud. Just ask him or her to supply a word for every blank space, using the prompt. Remember, the wackier and saucier the answer, the better. Then read the story aloud. If you want to play solo, go to ohenrymag.com/mad-libs/.

How I Spent My COVID Summer

By ( ______ —  _______ your playmate’s first and last name if you’re playing with a partner, or your name if you’re playing alone)

One pandemic day, it was really hot and humid, and my air conditioner was broken, so I decided to go to a Zoom meeting wearing only a ( ______article of clothing). The camera was focused tightly on my face, so nobody noticed. Then my ( _____uncommon animal) walked across my laptop keyboard. Forgetting my attire, I got up to put him out, and then someone said, “Hey, nice ( ______ vegetable, plural) and I was like, “Excuse me?” And they said, “In your garden. I can see your new raised bed garden through the window.” And I said, “Oh, thanks. Maybe I’ll bring some of the harvest into the office when we have another meeting there in ( _____ year in the future).” And everyone laughed ( _____ adverb ending in -ly). Except my boss. She just sat there looking like the proverbial cat who ate the  (_______ cooking utensil). People were getting slaphappy because already the call had lasted for ( _____number) hours.

When the call ended, I needed a break. So I put on a mask made of solid  ( _____ type of metal), which they say is the best kind because it lets nothing through. I saw a picture of ( ______ name of a celebrity) wearing one, and I thought maybe I could pull it off, too, because people say we look alike. Also, I put on a pair of ( _____ Disney character) sunglasses for eye protection, and I hung a garland of ( ______type of fruit) around my neck. I felt pretty safe.

We were in Phase (_____ number) of the reopening, which meant you could leave home but only if you were an essential ( ______ type of worker), which I happen to be. Perhaps you didn’t know that about me. A lot of people don’t. Anyway, I put on more clothes, including a ( _____ type of hat), which I stuck with a (______type of bird) feather as a fashion statement. I got in my car and drove to ( ______ a North Carolina town) because there’s a store there that always has
( ______ noun, plural), which have been hard to find locally. I know it’s a long way to drive for that, but I enjoy the scenery: the rolling hills with trees, cows, horses and an occasional ( ______ zoo animal) ( ______verb ending in -ing) through the countryside.

Anyway, I turned on the radio and listened to an interview with a chef who became famous for making pan-seared (______type of toiletry) with tofu. I had it once, and it was surprisingly good, considering the main ingredient. Anyway, this chef got Covid while her restaurant was closed in Phase I. Her first symptom was a fever of ( ______number above 100) degrees Fahrenheit that lasted for ( ______number) days, during which she was plagued by nightmares of ( ______verb ending with-ing) squid. Naturally, her doctors were ( ______adjective) about the whole thing.

Finally, her fever subsided but she had lost her sense of smell and taste, which is terrible for a chef. So she decided to close the restaurant permanently and go into the ( _______type of flying insect)-farming business, which seems like a strange career switch, I grant you, but you have to be flexible in these trying times. By the time the interview was over, I had arrived at my destination, a new grocery store called Trader ( _______ first name)’s, which is a very socially conscious store. All stockholders are required to reduce their personal ( _______type of cookie) emissions by more than 50 percent. Anyway, I pulled up my mask, adjusted my sunglasses and garland and started ( _______verb ending with-ing) through the parking lot. Suddenly I heard a loud voice “Hey! You with the ( ______ color) hair!” That’s right, I dyed my hair this summer just so I could look in the mirror and see someone new. Anyway, I looked up to see a store employee on a megaphone. This was because the number of infections had soared, and social distancing had been increased from 6 feet up to ( ______number over 100) feet. The guy continued on his megaphone: “I need to ask you a few questions. First, have you had a fever or coughed up any ( _____noun, plural) in the last two weeks? “Certainly not.” I replied. Have you had any hallucinations or thoughts of ( _____noun, plural). “Negative,” I said. “Have you ever ( ______verb, past tense)?” I said, “Once. In college. Does that count?” “No,” he said, but I could tell he was smiling under his mask. “You can go in.”

No one else was in the store, owing to the new social distance. I picked up a few items and put them on the conveyor belt at checkout. Then I left the store. This was the new protocol for shopping. You had to put your items on the belt and leave the store, then a cashier would ( ______action verb) in from a back room and leave a note for you saying “Did you find everything you need?” — and leave. Then you would come back in and leave a note saying, “Yes. Also, I find your selection and prices to be (______adjective)”— then leave. Then they would come in and ring up your purchase — then leave. Then you would come back in and swipe your credit card and bag your own groceries and leave. It was exhausting. As a result, people were eating less and walking more and we were actually becoming a much more just, verdant, ( ______ adjective), ( ______adjective) society, if that makes any sense. Which it probably doesn’t.

Who would have ever imagined such a ( _____adjective) surprise ending, except maybe O.Henry himself? OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. She can be reached at ohenrymaria@gmail.com

Life’s Funny

Ankle-High

Weeding out a CBD treatment

By Maria Johnson

I was at wit’s end.

To shush my mewling left ankle, which I’d aggravated while playing tennis, I’d tried all sorts of remedies: anti-inflammatory pills, gels, and a cortisone injection, which worked — until it didn’t.

A doctor sent me to a physical therapist, who showed me how to build up my foot and ankle muscles. My peroneus brevis never looked so good. She ended our sessions by dressing my ankle with a battery-powered patch that pushed some anti-ouchy medicine into the gristle end of my boney-ass-chicken-drumstick leg — my words, not hers.

The relief lasted for a couple of hours at a time, probably because I was so caught up in the cool factor of wearing a battery-powered bandage. It reminded me of the light-up tennis shoes that both of my sons wanted so much, at age 3, that they endured the rigors of giving mom and dad what they wanted — potty-trained sons — in exchange for the fly kicks.

Who knows? Maybe if the patch had packed a stronger battery and a flashing dump truck, I’d have been cured. Alas, the wee batteries died, and I went back to being my gimpy, unelectrified self.

I tried simpler fixes, too, soaking up enough fragrant Epsom salt to pass as a lavender-scented country ham. And, of course, I’d worn out the RICE regimen, which orthopedic folks use as shorthand for Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation, but which the rest of us know as Relax In a Chair and Eat the ice cream you got out of the freezer when you fetched the gel pack.

I was desperate for relief. So when post-yoga chitchat turned to a new hemp store nearby, and someone volunteered that she’d rubbed hemp oil into her hip to soothe an aching flexor, I was on it.

Skeptical, but on it.

I hobbled on over to the ol’ hempatorium. Graphics on the windows suggested that CBD — or cannabidiol, a non-la-la-inducing compound in hemp — could be used to treat a wide array of health problems:

Anxiety, chronic pain, insomnia, autism, scurvy, rickets, dropsy, hysteria, ringworm, imbalance of the humours. I exaggerate, but not much.

The kid who was minding the store was extremely friendly, in a floaty, underwater sort of way.

“How . . . can . . . I . . . help  . . . you?” he asked languidly.

“I was wondering if you have any kind of ointment that might help a strained tendon in my ankle,” I replied.

“Everyone  . . . your  . . . age . . . wants . . . topicals . . . instead . . . of . . . smokables  . . . and  . . . chewables,” he observed in approximately the time it would take me to watch a whole season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

I was tempted to say, “Been there, done that. Why, I recollect a concert by them Who fellers back in nineteen and eighty-two,” but I preferred to focus on my ankle while I was still ambulatory.

He led me over to a wall of shelves and picked up a small white jar with a smudged label that looked to have come from a home printer. “Full Spectrum Hemp Oil Pain Salve, 500mg/1oz,” it read. Everything was spelled correctly, which I took as a positive sign, medically speaking.

“My . . . aunt . . . has . . . bad . . . arthritis . . . in . . . her . . . back . . . and…”

“Good for her,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

I panned the rest of the seascape: tinctures of oil; packs of multicolored gummies; bottles of lotions; tubes of salve promising to relieve, relax or restore one thing or another; a few textile products woven from hemp fiber; and some prerolled joints.

A tray of loose-leaf hemp lay next to the register.

“Is it, uh, legal to sell it that way?” I asked.

“Yeah . . . as  . . . long . . . as . . . it . . . contains . . . less . . . than . . . point . . . three . . . percent . . .THC,” he said, using the initials of Tetrahydrocannabinol, the chemical in weed that makes you high.

I looked it up later. Hemp, a low-grade strain of marijuana, contains less than 0.3 percent THC, which is currently the legal limit in North Carolina. In states that allow the sale of recreational or medicinal pot, the THC content can be more than 20 percent.

Back in the day of  “them Who fellers,” it was 3 to 4 percent.

I’ll leave it to politicians, pundits and public health folks to hash out whether society’s widespread embrace of cannabis makes sense.

But I can tell you that after a few days of rubbing the hemp oil balm on my ankle, the pain faded away.

In fairness to cause-and-effect, maybe it was because I’d laid off the high-impact exercise. Or because I’d flexed my foot and ankle muscles into a state of Marvel Comics buffness. Maybe in the year since the original injury, the frazzled tendon had finally mended on its own.

Or maybe it was because of the healing properties of CBD.

There’s a seed of truth in there somewhere.  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry magazine. She can he reached at ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Life’s Funny

Hairs to Ya

An essay on living, (not) dyeing, in the gray areas of life

By Maria Johnson

It’s been a year since I stopped coloring my hair.

Almost all of the chestnut dye has grown out.

The last time I sat in my stylist’s chair, she combed up a long swath to trim — wet hair clamped between her fingers, scissors snipping at an angle — and I could see the line of demarcation, the zone where faded brown gave way to translucent strands.

“Only a couple of inches to go,” I said.

“You’re almost there!” she said enthusiastically.

Last year, when I first pitched the idea of growing out my gray, she smiled and crinkled her nose: hairdresser-ese for “oh-hell-no.”

I made my case, using a variation of what I tell myself whenever one of my sons wears his hair in way I don’t like: It’s only hair. Eventually it’ll grow out — or be cut. Maybe. At the very worst, if I didn’t like the gray, I could start coloring it again.

I was ready to walk on the wild side. Woo-hoo.

What tipped the scale?

First, my boss’s wife — who’s also in her late 50s. I hadn’t seen her in a while. She’s a radiant woman, and she looked even more so when I saw her around the holidays.

“You look different,” I said.

“I’m letting my hair go gray,” she said.

Honest to God, she looked younger because of it. Her pretty brown eyes took center stage.

Then there was my brother, who for a while experimented with “touching up,” as they say when men color their hair.

I launched into a treatise: The only men who color their hair are car salesmen and news anchors, and you’re neither, so stop it.

Why is it OK for women and not men? he pressed.

Because, I said, most women color their hair as they age, so it looks normal. Most men, on the other hand, don’t color their hair, so it jumps out when they do.

It’s stone-cold sexism, I continued, but take advantage of the fact that no one expects you to color your hair.

He listened and reverted to his handsome salt-and-pepper self.

I listened, too. To myself.

If I really believed hair-coloring was a sexist expectation for women, why had I been meeting it for 20 years?

Was it to look younger?

Or did I — Ms. Independent-Won’t-Be-Herded-Like-a-Sheep — do it because I feared standing out?

I looked in the mirror.

Ba-ah-ah-ah-ah.

It was time to find out how old I really looked. And I won’t lie. It was tough, especially for the first few months, a.k.a. The Skunk Period, the time when you have a white stripe running down the center of an otherwise dark head.

During conversations, other women didn’t look me in the eye. They looked me in the hair. I knew what they were thinking: “Doesn’t she realize how bad her roots look? Should I tell her?”

Of course, they never did.

One white-headed woman had the courage to bring it up the first time we met.

“Letting your color go, huh?”

“Yep.”

“You’ll never get whistled at again,” she said flatly.

Wow. Well. OK.

I thought about it for a minute. Really, for years, the only time anyone had whistled in my direction was when I was standing between them and their dog at the dog park.

As the Skunk Period ended, another period began. Just when I thought I was done with periods.

This was the Hurry-Up-And-Dye-Already phase, when it’s clear that you’re doing this on purpose.

This is when your female friends finally will speak up, usually aided by chardonnay.

“Why are you doing this?” they’ll ask gravely.

“Because I want to see what it looks like. Plus, I’m tired of paying to get it colored every three weeks.”

“You’ll look older.”

“Maybe I am older.”

Sometimes, at this point, a look of horror will cross their faces because  . . . they’re the same age as you are.

The grayer my hair grew, the more it grew on me. And others. My stylist reported that my silver strands looked good with my coloring — better than she thought they would. Anyway, she offered, going gray is a thing now.

To wit: models of a certain age, and younger women whose idea of “going gray” involves violet tinges to their processed tresses.

Both of my sons claimed to like the lighter version of me. So did my husband, who has a very “distinguished” head himself. My graying male friends joked that they must’ve inspired me.

They did. By being themselves.

Mind you, I’m not without vanity. I hit the gym and the eye make-up a little harder now, and I use snazzy earrings and colorful reading glasses to show I’m down — or as down as woman in 2.5 readers can be.

Occasionally, a woman my age will sidle up and say she wants to stop coloring her hair, too. Inevitably, she’ll say, “But my gray isn’t a pretty gray.”

I feel ya on the fear, sister.

But who defines pretty?

And what is your true color?

You’ll never know until you let it grow.  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry. Her email is ohenrymaria@gmail.com.

Life’s Funny

Turf Luck

Mowing with the flow in suburbia

By Maria Johnson

Timing is everything, but the more seasons that pass, the more I see that timing is nothing unless you have the right tools and experience to use when opportunity presents itself.

Take our lawn mower.

Please.

For 20-plus years, we — and by “we” I mean my husband — managed our half-acre Eden with a gigantic walk-behind mower, a self-propelled Troy-Bilt purchased soon after we moved in.

Jeff claimed to love using Big Red. Lulled by the motor’s drone, marching to whatever cadence the height of the grass dictated, he entered a Zen state that full-throated shouts and piercing whistles failed to penetrate.

He passed (pressed?) the experience onto our sons, who learned that walking behind a 300-pound machine is one thing. Turning it is quite another. Hence, one learns to smooth corners into curves.

Jeff tended Big Red lovingly, changing the oil, replacing the air filter, replacing the front wheels as needed, carving out a snug parking place in the garage. It was a beautiful relationship. Until the mower wouldn’t crank.

Jeff called in my motor-head brother for a garage consultation. They circled the patient, prodded, postulated. Indicating the severity of the situation, they consulted the owner’s manual and diagnosed the problem: a bad valve.

They carried their findings to a farm machinery dealer, who delivered a grim news: It would cost almost as much to fix the engine as it would to buy a new mower.

We all knew what that meant: Big Red was a goner.

“Oh, well,” I said. After all, we had a smaller mower, too, and over the years, we’d expanded the natural areas and shrunk the lawn. That was a good thing, right?

Jeff was morose.

He parked Big Red in its usual berth, where it lay in state for weeks.

Occasionally, I asked when we could shuck our black armbands and wheel the deceased to the curb. Soon, he promised. Soon.

Yard life moved on, but the garage was getting crowded and therefore, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit that a reasonable person could expect that one night I would pull our new car into the garage and scratch the bumper a little — OK, a lot — on a seed spreader that had been displaced by a new de-thatcher because Big Red was taking up so much space.

This on the eve of our neighborhood yard sale.

Early the next morning, Jeff and Big Red said their goodbyes. I gave them time alone.

The dew was still on the clover when Jeff donned his mowing cap and green-stained running shoes and wheeled the mower to a grassy corner where curb met driveway. He walked back to the house, head down.

He had taped a sign to the handle: “FREE. DOES NOT RUN.”

Acceptance being the final stage of grief, I reasoned, it was time to enjoy the show.

I poured another cup of coffee and perched by a window as the cul-de-sac clogged with cars full of early morning bargain hunters. In less than three minutes, a pickup truck backed up to the curb. A young man and two women got out, flipped down the tailgate and circled the mower. The guy stooped to lift the front. The women took the sides.

“They’re never gonna lift that thing,” Jeff said.

He was right. The trio rotated: Nada.

Rotated again: Nope.

The guy leaned on the handles and popped a wheelie as the women tried to lift the front: Sorry.

They piled in the truck and drove away, we guessed in search of a ramp.

Would the mower be there when they returned? The drama intensified.

In less than two minutes, another truck backed up to the same spot.

This time, two middle-aged fellows — obviously in need of hernias — emerged.

Same dance steps — heave-sigh, heave-sigh, heave-sigh, damn — plus a good measure of spitting and standing with hands on hips. They, too, rumbled away frustrated.

Oh, to have had a stand selling lemonade and ramps.

I found it rather honorable that neither group had removed the mower’s up-for-grabs sign. It enhanced my faith in humans.

But not as much as the next guy who walked up. He was a white-haired fellow with a belly that said he’d digested whatever life had served. He studied the mower, disappeared for a moment, and reappeared in the driveway in his surfer-style Chevy wagon, an ideal vehicle for stuffing with yard sale finds.

Aha. A different approach.

Using the slight incline of the driveway as a ramp, he rolled the mower to the truck, tipped it back and rested the front wheels on his bumper.

“Still too heavy,” Jeff said.

Sure enough.

But the old fellow was too close to quit. He drew a bead on the house across the street, which had attracted a crowd. Leaving the mower propped on his bumper — in other words, “It’s mine” — he walked across the street and returned a few minutes later with two strapping guys.

Together, they easily picked up the rear end of the mower and slid it into the hold.

Violà.

Granddad had the right tool — the low-slung surfer truck. He used the advantage at hand — the driveway. He claimed the ground he’d gained. Plus, he asked for help. We couldn’t help but laugh and feel good about whatever lay in Big Red’s next life.

Mow in peace.  OH

Maria Johnson is a contributing editor of O.Henry.