I collect pine needles. I store them in the shed where they tumble off the wooden shelves onto the floor or bury the saws and paint brushes on the work bench. In the garage, plastic bins overflow with pine needles. A limb from a recently fallen tree is pushed into a corner. There are bundles of pine needles stacked neatly on the bookshelf in my office. Pine needles find their way into my car and under the cushions of the couch. There’s usually a sink full in the kitchen.

             I didn’t always like pine needles or the trees from which they grow. When I first moved to southeastern Georgia, I longed for a yard full of deciduous trees. The ubiquitous pines that fill the landscape here were nothing like the trees I grew up with, trees that moved with the seasons, offered their limbs for climbing and swinging, and provided billowy shade and a comfortable backrest for lazy days of reading and napping.  

            Here, in the flat, sandy mid-land between coast and mountains, pines seem indifferent to my human desires. They remain unchanged throughout the year and provide neither leafy shade nor a comfortable resting place. It’s not just the pine needles that I didn’t like – what everyone here calls straw and which have a way of creeping into shoes and under the cuff of pants. There’s the sticky pine sap, too,  and cones with razorblade scales.

            I resisted getting to know these trees but slowly, over the years, my heart softened. I grew to appreciate their unique beauty and came to see the pines that fill the coastal plain as noble sentries, tall, silent and comforting.

            And then I found Pinus palustris and I fell in love.  Longleaf pine. The majestic longleaf. The pine tree that once covered nearly 90 million acres of the southeast. The pine whose forest home may be North America’s most biologically diverse ecosystem north of the tropics.  The author Janisse Ray rocketed to the top of the bestseller list for her book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, a meditation on longleaf pine forests and her childhood among them in south Georgia.

            Longleaf pine trees are majestic, but the object of my love is the needles, or leaves, of the tree, which grow from 7 to 18 or more inches in length.

            For eight years I’ve been using the dried, fallen needles from longleaf pine trees to craft baskets.

            I’m particular about the pine needles I collect. I shun the stubby needles of loblolly and slash pines. They don’t move my soul. But show me the needles of a longleaf pine and I swoon.

            There isn’t always a reason why something grabs your soul. It just happens. It wasn’t that I was attracted to longleaf pine needles as an art form. I’m not an artist.         But there was something about longleaf pine forests, the ecosystem’s dependence on fire, the trees’ role in the history of this region, and the near extinction of the forest that I found compelling. It was as if I needed to be connected in some physical way to all of it. It’s almost as if making longleaf pine needle baskets found me.

            There’s a small stand of longleaf pines near here. It’s not a forest by any stretch of the imagination. Few virgin longleaf forests remain. Still, every year or so even this stand is burned to help rid it of competing vegetation and give new longleaf pines a chance to sprout. I remember the first time I watched as foresters prepared the area and dripped fire in a circle marking the stand’s outer edges. It was a place I had often gathered fallen needles for baskets and now those needles would become the tinder for the fire. The fire burned fast and hot and low. The wooded area around the stand quieted. Nothing, not even the air, seemed to move.

            Within a few hours the fire burned itself out and the foresters left. The fire had crept up the thick bark on some of the older trees. The tips of the longleaf needles on the younger trees were singed. But the pines stood tall, indifferent, it seemed, to what had just taken place. They were, after all, built for fire. I walked the circumference of the stand, a circle of black under my feet. And then as if responding to some unheard signal, the wind blew, the woods seemed to waken, and I was showered with beautiful long pine needles falling to the ground, golden brown against the scorched earth.

            Weaving with long pine needles isn’t a new idea. Native Americans across the country used longleaf and other similar pines to create baskets, and the coiling technique is known throughout the world.

            I taught myself how to weave, experimented with different threads, and learned to dye the needles. During the past few years, I’ve been experimenting with shape and form in addition to weaving traditional round and oval baskets. I usually begin a basket with an idea of what I want but often the pine needles seem to take over. Sometimes I resist, but I’ve learned to be patient, to respect the direction the pine needles want to take me.

            Sometimes my hands and fingers ache. And then there’s the natural hazard of pine needle weaving: the needles’ propensity to break into tiny slivers that slip under tender skin. I’ve become an expert at splinter removal.

            My family complains. Everywhere they sit pine needles poke through pillows and cushions. The needles weave themselves into the carpet and attach themselves to clothes.

            But for me working with pine needles is a meditation, from picking up the fallen needles to stitching, hour after hour, day after day, week after week until after 50 to 100 hours I have something I feel is complete.

            Sometimes I sell my baskets. I’m now in a cooperative gallery in Savannah. I watch people come in and walk past my work. Sometimes they’ll stop to look, and sometimes someone is moved enough to buy a piece. 

            I’ve been a writer for most of my adult life first as a reporter, then a feature writer, and now, almost exclusively, as an essayist. I’m not surprised that weaving also has become important in my life. The parallels are obvious.

            I wanted to write about these parallels and how both writing and weaving move in and out of my life but I couldn’t do it. The words, the story, weren’t coming together.

            There was a time when I’d fight with my writing like an obstinate teenager. I’d struggle with the words, trying to shape them to my will. But weaving has helped me slow down and to trust the process. I know that the other story I want to write will come. Today, however, it had somewhere else to go.