I recognize the sounds coming from down the road, the clanging of metal against metal, like a blacksmith’s hammer coming down on an anvil, but there is no forge out here in the bottom of the county. The cacophony arises from the fact that my neighbors are cutting timber.

It was one day a couple of weeks ago that I, determined not to be dissuaded from my walk by 95-degree heat lingering after sundown, saw the access road bulldozed into the pine forest that for as long as I could remember had created a tunnel through which my road winds, cooled by mottled shade. In the days since I have witnessed dozens of loaded log trucks head toward town and return empty, hungry for another load. Still, the carnage (or harvest, depending on one’s perspective) was far from the road and my path looked the same.

Today the scene was different. The tunnel had been turned into a skylight, a laser pointer spotlighting the shy ferns and bashful palmettoes that have long grown quietly in the shadow of the pine trees. The sawing and chopping and dropping had reached the road and I acknowledged with a sigh that my afternoons had changed forever.

I am old enough now that change is not nearly as overwhelming as it used to be. I have lost too many people I loved, too many dreams I tended and stoked, too many ideas I was convinced were facts to be knocked on my fanny by something that is inevitable.

I have, in fact, on the cusp of my 70th birthday, found in myself the ability to create (and not just endure) change.

Toward that end, this column will be my last regularly-scheduled column for the Herald. Jim Healy, the newspaper’s editor, has graciously agreed to accept possible future offerings should I come up with something that might be worth saying, but for the time being, this is my benediction.

Generally the last words of a religious service, a benediction is a “good word,” a “blessing.” For 30 years I have shared with you what I hope have been good words, words of remembrance and encouragement and wonder. Words that made you think and blink your eyes and see something maybe a little differently than you had before. Words that led you to say, “Me, too.”

This column, these words, your reception of them, week after month after year, is one of the proudest accomplishments of my life. Thank you for reading, for affording me the platform to share my wild imaginings and hard questions. Thank you for stopping me in the grocery store to tell me you always read what I have written. Thank you for being the community that made me, that taught me to look at everything with curiosity, that made me brave through your belief in me.

“Words are magic ... and completely inadequate.” So says the poet Maggie Smith. I agree. I simply trust that, in the thousands of words and hundreds of stories we have shared, my heart has been made visible.

Godspeed.