Peaks and Tides

My Travels through SC

This week, I carried Life Close to the Bone once more into the heart of South Carolina, stopping first at Hub City Bookshop in Spartanburg, then journeying on to Beaufort and the Pat Conroy Literary Center.

Spartanburg was a homecoming of the heart. I lingered in the company of my son, Henry, his fiancée, Sara, and her gracious family. The town holds a private sanctity for me—it was here I first met Mary Lucia. My lodging in Converse Heights, a mere block from Converse University, stirred the tender memory of those first walks together, when the world seemed a long road we had only just begun.

Beaufort welcomed me with its salt-laced air and slow-tide beauty. Before my reading, Kathy Harvey—Pat Conroy’s sister—invited me into the quiet sanctum of his library. I stood in the room I had long inhabited only through the pages of Tell Me A Story, and felt the weight of presence linger there.

At the Literary Center, familiar faces and new friends gathered, many bound to me by the unique fellowship of junior tennis, all bound by the love of words. We listened to each other read, voices carrying over the room like tides.

That night, on the porch of my room at the Beaufort Inn, I rocked in the humid hush, breathing the thick perfume of pluff mud, and wondered what small, unseen miracles God was shaping in the dark waters of the Beaufort River.

Driving home, my heart was brimming with gratitude for both these places and the people within them. Somewhere on that road, this poem began to form—my way of saying thank you.

Peaks and Tides

Upstate peaks reach for the sky,
As rushing shoals go racing by,
The rivers leap in silver streams,
Like mountain-born, unending dreams.

In the Lowcountry where the pluff mud lies,
New life blooms as each sun flies,
The Port Royal tide in moon’s command
Moves gently through the marsh and sand.

Upstate voices, bright and twanged,
Through shops and cafés sweetly rang,
While Lowcountry drawls drift warm and slow,
Like summer winds where salt tides flow.

Both places hold my heart in grace,
Each smile a light I can’t replace;
For there, among both tide and tree,
My friends and kin embrace my art—and me.

Between the peaks and tide my soul will roam,
For each is friend, and each to me is home.