Terrain.org essays in this issue:
 

Buckeye
by Scott Russell Sanders, with Audio

Years after my father’s heart quit, I keep in a wooden box on my desk the two buckeyes that were in his pocket when he died. Once the size of plums, the brown seeds are shriveled now, hollow, hard as pebbles, yet they still gleam from the polish of his hands. He used to reach for them in his overalls or suit pants and click them together, or he would draw them out, cupped in his palm, and twirl them with his blunt carpenter’s fingers, all the while humming snatches of old tunes.

Pilgrimage to the Magdalen
by Fenton Johnson

The story is familiar and ancient — seeking to obliterate a local cult, an upstart religion appropriates its holy places and fabricates a myth in keeping with its own designs — but here I, the writer, and you, the reader enter the story. I go on these pilgrimages in homage not to relics but to the imagination that calls them into being, and to remind myself of my roots among these pilgrims who still come by the thousands, many of them Roma or Gitanos, outcasts for whom the Magdalen is patroness.

The Perilous Career of a Footpath
by Howard Mansfield

The pedestrian who walks through the planning manuals is a hunted beast. He or she is given seven seconds to cross the street in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices — or less. It is accepted practice to shorten the crossing time to four seconds. The manual assumes that you’ll step out smartly at four feet a second. But if you’re an older citizen crossing a six-lane road, you may find yourself stranded in the last lane as the light changes, a candidate to become a hood ornament.

Say the Names
by Lyn Baldwin, with Image Gallery

Two coastlines, two maritime landscapes. Neither is where I live, but one is home and one is not. In less than a week, the juxtaposition of work and holiday has me flying from the tortuous bays and inlets of Nova Scotia to the isolated fields of Washington’s San Juan Islands. On one Tuesday, I am on my hands and knees, amidst a tour of botanists, exclaiming over the chartreuse, red-veined, vase-like leaves of carnivorous pitcher plants in the coastal barrens.

Concerning couguar
by Amanda Giracca

The creature was long and tawny, like the late-fall grass. Its head was small and round, as were its ears. Months later, Jay would see a pair of mountain lions at Catskill Game Farm in upstate New York, much bigger than the one he now looked at, but leaving no question in his mind. He stood looking at what state and wildlife officials would have told him he couldn’t have been looking at. It was probably a dog, they would have told him, or a bobcat, a deer, or yes—a housecat. That’s what you saw, they would say.

Ghosts
by Sharman Apt Russell

Obviously, ghosts exist. We conjure them up. My great-grandmother is 60 years dead. I never knew much about her until recently, yet here I am conjuring. Surely, I think, she walked this path along this creek bed, passing these sycamore trees, white bark and rust-colored leaves, black walnut and green willow, the riparian corridor snaking Wood Canyon in Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains. She saw these rock faces—Cochise’s Head overlooking the ubiquitously named Outlaw Spring and Hell’s Half Acre.