Author: Vivian Bikulege

November, and it is a rainy Sunday morning. Seems like our lowcountry is speckled with puddles and ponds with few avenues available for evaporation. Mosquitoes are abundant, turtles continue in their slow search for sun and high ground, and our chorus of frogs and toads is in harmony with the percussion and pelt of raindrops on my metal roof.

I have been thinking a lot about trees lately. Actually, I think about them almost daily. I love them. Pine and palm, crepe myrtle, Southern magnolia, Eastern redbud, flowering dogwood, American holly, and oaks of every kind – live, laurel, water and chestnut.

  When do we quit doing the things we love? When we are no longer able?   When do we start accepting ourselves as something less than we are meant to be?

I have started at least three columns this year and completed none. Topics on circus peanuts, beheadings, and autumn moved from my mind to the page and they all sound interesting now, and I wish I had finished every one of them.

Not too long ago, a Newark TSA agent informed me that my driver’s license was expired. My heart skipped a beat as I imagined his next sentence excusing me from the TSA Pre-Check line to the hell of airport bureaucracy, a lost soul trying to get home without valid identification. (Only now does it dawn on me that I have secondary identification – a military ID – as the spouse of a retired Marine!)

Every new year, I try to find a word to keep in front of me as something to strive for in the days ahead. It usually comes to me with little effort but this year I struggled, grappling for one word to capture the goal of my annual journey. And like it always does, finally, suddenly, the word arrives. This year, it is simply, love. It is a big, little, word.

Everything comes at a price. Even love. Especially love.   Years ago, as I studied for my MBA, I first learned the basic concept of price as the sum of cost plus profit. Of course, getting from price to profit is much more complex than simply subtracting cost.

Every month, I visit with a few Bayview Manor residents on behalf of my church. For those of you in the Beaufort community unfamiliar with Bayview, it is a nursing home on Todd Drive, just off of Ribaut Road, and down Spanish Point Drive.

Every month, I visit with a few Bayview Manor residents on behalf of my church. For those of you in the Beaufort community unfamiliar with Bayview, it is a nursing home on Todd Drive, just off of Ribaut Road, and down Spanish Point Drive.

Every month, I visit with a few Bayview Manor residents on behalf of my church. For those of you in the Beaufort community unfamiliar with Bayview, it is a nursing home on Todd Drive, just off of Ribaut Road, and down Spanish Point Drive.