title: Pinecones: Autumn Reflections (Pinecones & Woodsmoke)
author:  Mary Summer Rain 
description: "Pinecones" is the first volume of a collection of meditations, insights, and illuminations from the personal journals of one of America's most beloved visionaries. Taken from several of her handwritten woods-walking notebooks, it contains a record of insights that came to Mary Summer Rain as contemplative thoughts, verses, parables, and lightning-bolt epiphanies. Here is a gentle blend of the message and the messenger, a compendium to savor and share for the ages.
zlib_text: # Chapter Four
  
  
  I take Turner up to Ann Street and turn right, grateful for the shade provided
  by the tall trees that flank the sides of the road. I pass Mrs. Gillespie’s
  place with her prize azaleas and the house with a Great Dane who spends his
  afternoons dozing on the porch.
  
  
  This is the Beaufort that brings the tourists back year after year. It usually
  feels charming and safe. Not today though. The wind hisses a little too hard
  and it’s still oppressively hot, though the daylight is fading, leaving
  glowing windows to watch me pass.
  
  
  I see the low wall with the iron fence and the white church at the corner. The
  Old Burying Ground sits behind it. I step inside the gates and take a deep
  breath that takes me right back to another summer day, when Deacon hid with
  bloody elbows and I cleaned him up with a wad of napkins from my back pocket.
  
  
  He’s not by the wall today, so I walk under the sprawling live oaks that
  stretch gnarled arms to the sky. Long leaves spread from the withered l