Ginny Brown is a former paralegal and juvenile advocate whose career spanned decades in South Carolina’s legal system, where she worked closely with vulnerable youth and families navigating its most fragile intersections.
After years inside courtrooms carrying the stories of the overlooked and unheard, she stepped away from the legal field to pursue a new chapter in education and writing. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree and teaching certification.
Her work is deeply grounded in the landscapes and textures of the Lowcountry. Her poetry and memoir examine surrender not only as survival, but as a sacred, rhythmic act of reclamation and renewal. Her writing offers reflection and hope to those standing at their own uncertain shorelines.
The tall oak stood barren and naked.
It had lost its covering when the October wind swept through.
The cold cut to the bone, but it had nothing to do with the weather.
I was eighteen the night the coldness set in.
My body — his choice.
What had once been a canopy of shelter lay scattered and forgotten.
The tree learned the language of exposure while the world looked on.
Spring would come soon, along with its budding leaves, or so I thought.
It was not the wind that lingered.
It was the memory of being stripped.
The bark thickened.
The walls of my heart began to harden.
Branches stiffened, reaching less, trusting little,
bracing for the next blow.
From a distance, it appeared strong
rooted, unbroken, enduring.
Yet deep beneath the hardened rings, where no season could reach, life moved in secret.
The roots did not release their hold, even as the life within me began to grow.
Somewhere beyond fear and winter, the tree held the memory of leaves
not as they were lost,
but as they might one day return.
Budding leaves covered the branches
as the budding life within me began to show.
The tree stretched toward the light.
I shrank beneath the weight of watching eyes.
Flowers opened in fearless beauty,
while I blossomed into a version of myself I did not expect.
The world offered no warmth, yet judgment aplenty.
My aunt scolded me for bringing shame on the family.
My cousins pretended I was not there.
The preacher demanded a confession for a “sin” I did not author,
while the church ladies whispered that I was loose.
I did not know what loose meant
only that I had lost something
everyone else insisted I should have guarded,
even when the gates were torn down by force.
Summer faded, and I watched the leaves begin to fall once more.
The day finally came when what they called my “sin” took its first breath.
The cries remind me each morning of the irony of my life:
that which was born of a winter’s theft became my only spring.
My “sin” was born in total innocence,
and in that innocence,
I finally learned how to live, love,
and bloom in winter’s darkest hour.
The old house stood alone, broken and in shambles among tall, proud oak trees.
Once a beauty in her day, she had been reduced to a thing of the past.
Overgrown with vines and weeds, overrun with rodents and bugs, she was tired.
Yes — she was tired.
People came and went, but no one wanted to call her their own.
She was too daunting. Too much work. Too old.
She had heard the words before, spoken in different voices, in different years:
Too much.
Too complicated.
Not worth the effort.
On a particularly hot day in June, a family pulled up and moved in.
She didn’t know them. They weren’t familiar, but they were here.
She knew they wouldn’t stay long.
No one ever did.
They would be like the rest — just passing through.
They had been there a week when the pipes went out.
She knew it.
They would leave.
And they did.
The silence that followed felt familiar —
like unanswered calls,
like doors closing softly but finally,
like love packed into boxes and carried away.
But not for long.
Once the pipes were repaired, they came back.
Little by little, the vines and weeds were removed.
Windows were opened.
Dust was carried out in clouds.
Light returned to rooms that had forgotten its warmth.
The backyard was cleared, vine by vine, and soon her beauty began to show through.
The family built a back deck and restored the old shed. They called it the she shed.
Appropriate, she thought, as there had been much shedding of pride over the years while the property fell into disrepair.
She did not trust it at first.
Houses like her learned not to believe in staying.
Women like her did, too.
But the footsteps kept coming back.
The laughter lingered.
The doors closed at night and opened again in the morning.
Floors were replaced. Rooms renewed.
The old girl was coming back to life, and it felt good
terrifying, but good.
No one spoke of tearing her down.
No one called her a burden.
No one said she was too much.
They worked.
Slowly.
Patiently.
Lovingly.
And for the first time in years, the old house did not feel like a relic.
She felt… lived in.
Not perfect.
Not new.
Not restored to what she once was.
But claimed.
And maybe that is what she had been waiting for all along
not to be made new,
not to be someone easier to love,
but to be seen, in all her weathered rooms and stubborn foundations,
as worth the staying.
I stayed not because I wanted to.
No one ever wants to.
I stayed for the same reason I came: I felt called.
I cannot explain it. Only this — a pull beneath the noise, a knowing beneath the fear. So I stayed.
I did not want this life. I imagined something softer, kinder — doors that opened without resistance, paths that did not ask so much of my feet. But my path led here. Not by accident. Not by force alone. By something I do not have the language to name.
I have stood at the edge of leaving. Rehearsed the goodbye. Packed the boxes in my mind. And still, something in me remained.
Perhaps staying is not surrender. Perhaps it is obedience to a quiet truth that refuses to loosen its hold.
My life was uprooted. My career, destroyed. The name I answered to for years no longer fits in my mouth the same way. I no longer know who I am. But I know where I am.
Here.
Breathing. Standing in the aftermath of a life I did not expect to lose.
I thought identity was permanent, like concrete. But foundations crack. Titles fade into past tense. What remains is harder to name — a pulse, a breath, a woman in unfamiliar rooms, trying to recognize her reflection in darkened glass.
I do not know what I am becoming.
But I am still becoming.
And maybe that is proof this is not the end of me — only the end of who I used to be.
She cherished the Lowcountry, with its salt marsh and creeks weaving through it like inescapable memories.
At first morning light, the marsh is all blue sky and silver water, the tide slipping through the grass as if nothing has ever been lost there.
More was lost than the rising of the tide.
That was the secret she kept.
Egrets lift slow and deliberate, their wings catching the sun. The air smells of salt and something older than memory.
She loved him.
He loved the thought of her the way she stood at the edge of the dock, hair pulled loose by the wind, as if she belonged to the place.
Until he didn’t.
Nothing about the marsh felt the same after.
The creeks still ran their familiar paths, but their song had quieted. The tide came and went without asking what she needed.
She wasn’t the sort to run after a man. They were a dime a dozen.
The marsh had taught her better than that —
but she didn’t listen this time.
The tides roll in and they roll out.
Nothing begs them to stay.
Still, she found herself standing at the water’s edge.
She texted him today.
She knew she shouldn’t, just as the egret knows better than to swoop
without seeing what moves beneath the surface.
But they do.
The egret strikes, white wings folding into the water
predator in one breath, prey in the next,
as something from the deep rises and closes its powerful jaws.
She felt it then, the pull, the grasp, the certainty.
She, too, was devoured by the clutches of a man
she was never meant to hold.
The marsh remained, indifferent and endless,
the tide smoothing over what was taken,
what was given,
what was never meant to last.
By morning, the water was clear again.
As if nothing had ever happened there.
That is the thing about the Lowcountry
the winds of change erase the sands that aren’t meant to stay.
The sands of his time have been carried away.
Yet the memory
is one she will never forget.
And the next day,
she texts him again.
Not because he owns her
but because love, once rooted in marsh and bone,
does not loosen at the first turning of tide.
She knows the water will not answer.
She knows the marsh keeps no promises.
Still, something in her waits
not for him,
but for the part of herself
that will one day stop.
There are places in this world that do not merely exist, they witness.
The Black River is one of them.
It winds through the Pee Dee with a quiet authority, carrying secrets older than the towns that sit along its banks. Dark water, rich with the tannins of ancient cypress and cedar, hides more than the eye can see. Some say it remembers everything: the storms, the losses, the whispered prayers, the sins, the stories time tried to bury.
I have lived beside this river long enough to know this much: the Black River does not lie. It reflects the soul exactly as it is, broken, bruised, healing, becoming.
And in this season of my life, the river became my mirror.
Just as the black river is named for its darkened color, as are our lives during the darkest of days. You don't have to be "clear" to be pure. You can be deeply marked by your past and still be "clean" in your integrity and spirit.
This is the darkest season I have ever walked through, a stretch of time where everything familiar was stripped away, leaving me exposed and unsure of my own footing.
I was left standing in emotional wreckage, grieving a love I had given everything to, burying a version of myself I had outgrown, piecing together a heart cracked in places I didn’t even know existed.
Healing did not come.
Clarity did not come.
Only the quiet ache of being undone.
And yet, I survived.
To follow Ms. Brown's writing journey, visit her website or subscribe to her Substack.
