Fragments From Floyd

The Way We Were

I'm still muddling through the archives of Fragments, revising and reordering the parts of the four seasons of life here that may become a little tome at some point. It is a love-hate experience to go back over pieces written on a morning long ago, then promptly forgotten. The advantages and disadvantages of writing for daily publication lies in the spontaneity of the writing... the Moving Finger writes...and the mind quickly forgets. And so going back through the archives is to open old trunks and boxes filled with precious and terrible mementos rediscovered. Some are comic. Some, tragic.

"If there are no tears in the writing, there will be no tears in the reading" someone has said.

This week, I'm working on Winter. Buster, our black lab, turned FOUR last winter. He was such a fine specimen and faithful companion during the turmoil of the past few years. Here is his birthday card. He died five months later.

And, mistakenly in with winter posts, was this account I called the Joys of Home Moanership. Now that brought back some traumatic, hilarious memories.

Time Wounds All Heels

Oy! What could I have done to make my left elbow sore this morning? And dang, my calf must have cramped in the night--I don't remember. And why, after using the same pillows now for years, do I have a "crick" in my neck today? I think it's time to consult the Third Age Disease and Conditions Finder to identify the Aches and Malaise du Jour. But I have to ask, just what is the Third Age, anyway? And if I'm there, I don't think I was quite finished with the first two and would like to complete those assignments before I do Number Three, please.

My name is Fred First and I am an age addict. I guess I'm just getting what I deserve here. I admit it. I have an aging problem. Every birthday, every ten year marker, I have craved ever more of it--an age fix--even knowing the consequences: the sore neck, the aching elbow, the lapsing memory. I've only recently learned that there is a scientific, diagnostic name for this condition (and this not from the Disease Finder above). I am hopelessly "methusalated": a birthday junkie. Hooked on decades. You can read about it here from a confessing addict who tells it like it is.

Sleeping in the Forest

From the poem by Mary Oliver

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

Three Fingers

This week our only grandchild turned three. She's become phone shy, and this is a problem because she lives 1500 miles away, and wouldn't come to the phone for us to sing happy birthday to her last night. Abby, I want you to see a picture of your momma when she was three years old.

I hope you grow up to be just like her. Mostly. And send me and GrannyAnny a picture of you holding up THREE fingers. Okay?

Love, Dumpa

Un-named

I visualized this image in its final state when I happened across it yesterday, and I ran and got my camera. A few minutes can make all the difference. It says something to me about organic interconnectedness and complexity. I'd be happy if you'd help me with a name from the list above (my 4:30 a.m. coffee-induced word-ramble) or some combination of your own.

Or, if you're feeling creative this morning (I'm not yet), could you write a verse or mind-wandering free association paragraph using the image as a catalyst? Willing to share it?

Readers Radio Theatre

First of all, let me just confess that the neatest part of this message is the little banner up there, created by the online Acme Label Maker. Thank you folks, that was fun. But here's the lesser news: The Fragments staff is pleased to announce our tenth "essay" to air tomorrow on WVTF if anybody's got three minutes to spare during the busiest part of your Friday morning.

And I must tell you that there was considerable controversy about this one before the decision was reached where all parties (in particular the one with the two X chromosomes) agreed to make this subject matter public. Also, I will warn you that there is a bedroom scene. And there is conflict. But in the end, sensual moans of satisfaction presage a happy ending.

You can listen via Real Audio: HERE (Live, real-time only)

Or if you're local: Regional radio broadcast: 89.1 - Roanoke; 89.5 - Lynchburg; 88.5 - Charlottesville 89.3 & 89.7 - Charlottesville, Waynesboro & Staunton; 91.9 - Marion, Wytheville, Galax & Abingdon

Date: Friday January 30, 2004

Time: Immediately after the regular short Civil War series that airs at 6:50 and again at 8:50 a.m., EST... so ~ 6:55 and 8:55-ish

The Road Less Travelable

Our road. It's not exactly a super-hiway. Actually, it's not exactly a road. It's more of a two-lane pig path with grass growing in the middle, even though it bears a state road number and is "maintained" all the way between the hardtop roads it connects. Our place lies right in the middle of this four miles of jeep trail. The eastern half is almost level (after the first tenth of a mile) and follows the creek, never rising more than a few feet above it. Piece of cake.

But to the west of us, the road ascends almost four hundred feet in elevation before it gets to the hardtop, and there are eleven very blind curves along the way. In winter, it is treacherous and we usually take the eastern route, even though it adds some miles and minutes to wherever we are going.

This morning, the Clarke Gas Company delivery truck showed up close on the heels of our weekend snow storm. I heard the sound of a heavy machine approaching and assumed it was the hi-way folks come back to scrape the snow again. But no, there was the big white tanker trying to pull the grade up our snow-covered driveway in reverse; and after several attempts, he gave up and moved on up the road -- as if he would try to get his largeness up the canyon west of here to service the next customer. I could have told him he was courting disaster.

Twenty minutes and a quarter mile of reverse gear later, he comes rear-end first through the woods around the bend, back toward the house. I know he would have loved nothing better than to pull up into our drive and turn the heck around. But alas: too much weight, too little traction. And so, bless his cervical mobility, the poor guy had to back all the way to Griffith Creek Road, a mile of gravel trail east of us, before he could turn that rig around.

And the heck of it is, we've burned so much wood since the last tank fill that we'd not used enough propane to warrant a fill-up anyway. Give us a call next time, Gas-guy. We'll let you know if we're getting low. And give you the pig path road report.

Shine a Little Light

The very little town of Floyd gets some momentary attention from the DC area music lovers once again. This one is particularly interesting to me because, by way of Fragments, I met Julian Smith, the young writer who visited our town not long ago. He was kind enough to mention our piece of pie and cup of coffee, and now I know why I'm getting quite a few google searches for Fragments this morning. Much appreciated.

Here's the article (that also includes the rest of his trip to the Carter Fold). You'll have to quickly register for the Washington Post if you haven't already. Painless. Really.

What's So Funny?

Well that does it. I've managed to meter them out over the past two years, and as of lunch today, I've seen them all… the three VCR tapes that contain the first year's episodes of M.A.S.H. Of course I can watch them again, and had seen all of them countless times before. Even when I perked up during the first scenes thinking "AHA! This is one I had never seen before!" half way through I'd find myself saying to no one "this is where Hawkeye shows up wearing only his hat and a pair of cowboy boots" and it would surprise me that I knew that.

But then, these stories and these characters have incredible staying power for me. I've followed other sitcoms before, in decades past… All in the Family, and later, Seinfeld. But I watched those characters as caricatures with faults larger than life and was often disgusted, shocked and mildly aghast even as I laughed at Archie's bigotry and Cramer's total lack of social inhibitions or restraint.

But I always admired Hawkeye.

Honestly, I confess that I have wanted to be somehow like him, I will confess. I had never thought about why, exactly. But watching the easy exchange between Pierce and McIntrye, I realize this is part of it: I envy the close and easy bonds between Benjamin Franklin Pierce and his partner in crime--first Trapper John, and then BJ. He was never alone against the "enemies" in camp. He always had a friend.

His sidekick understood his point of view and took his side in every battle with the "enemy" in camp. How few people can stand united with any one other person against all obstacles and laugh? And more than that, his partner always shares Hawkeye's sense of timing, his ironic twists. There is always at least one other person who 'gets the joke' and cooperates oftentimes in setting it up. Next to sex, the bond of shared laughter has got to be one of the most intimate of human experiences.

If I had life to do over again, there would be more music and there would be more laughter in my life. The music I could make alone. The laughter-- that is a more elusive fish. One can laugh alone, but the most satisfying humor is shared, and just as one finds only one or a few with whom he or she could spend a lifetime, it seems that finding another who shares the same way of coping with humor, of crisis management with laughter, of word play and wit-- is just as rare.

Two people who laugh at the same thing are more likely, perhaps, to stay married than two who balance their checking account the same way. Humor involves the intellect (wit), the emotions (mirth) and the physiology (laughter) and so when two people laugh at the same thing, there is a deep connection that is beyond words and a bonding occurs, or the bond that was always there is uncovered.

I am decidedly not funny as in joke-telling. If pressed, I couldn't come up with a half dozen jokes (half of them knock-knock) and I'd flub them sure as the world. But I do see (and too often voice) the ridiculous with some clarity in the news and my own bumbling life, and absurdity abounds on every hand. I see myself as a mirthful person; my family may not agree because I've learned to keep many of my witty quips to myself over the years. Language is packed with humor, and puns are not off limits, no sir. While I am definitely not into cruel humor at another's expense (which seems so popular on TV comedy these days) sarcasm and irony are fair and oft-used tactics, but I have to be very careful where I use them and have been misunderstood by my more concrete and somber colleagues in the past. There's nothing more lonely than to be the only one to get the joke.

The most laughter-filled time in my life was, paradoxically, while working in a Chronic Pain Program as a physical therapist. I would come home on Mondays, after our medical rounds, with permanent laugh lines etched in the corners of my mouth. While I'll confess, some of our pitiful patients were easy targets, the more usual victims were the clinical psychologist, the nurse, the sociologist-director (who gave presentations on humor in medicine), the exercise physiologist, the PT or the DO medical director. We were all such exaggerated characters in our own right, working in a stressful situation where terrible things had happened to the people in our charge-- not unlike Hawkeye and Hotlips and Radar in the heat of battle and bloody operating rooms. Lordy, it felt good to laugh.

If you and I spent time together, would we share a sense of humor? For some whom I've come to know via Fragments, I think "most definitely over a pitcher of some bubbly beverage, he and I or she and I would quickly find common ground and each other's humor-frequency… they are the BJ's and Trappers of this little blogging world". And there are others for whom I think "we'd get along intellectually, but he or she is too (serious, concrete, up-tight, academic…) for me to be wide-open with my authentic quirky way of seeing and expressing things… these are the Frank Burns and Hotlips of the blogosphere; we'd smile, but we wouldn't laugh often."

Sorry. I've gone and gotten ruminative about humor. I'm a mess. But then I've been alone with the dog for two days since Ann's snowed in at work. I'm starting to get a little cabin crazy and everything seems absurdly tragic or funny to me. Better laugh than cry. Eh?

TeleTubbies On LSD

I heard the TeleTubbies "creator" (using the term loosely) on NPR the other day describing with obvious pride her new mind-abortion called BooBah. Now fortunately I got my child-rearing years over soon enough that I was only grazed a glancing blow by Barney and SPongeBob and TeleTubbies. But this one, folks, will indeed require the wearing of little preschool foil hats. It is too "out there" for words, except the Greeblie One has done a pretty good job capturing the, er, unfortunate resemblence of BooBahs to, well, yes, male boobahs... with a pointer to the BooBah Zone so you can see for yourself.

If this doesn't make parents of small children throw a brick through their TV screens, there is no hope for us as a species! They're coming to take us away, hahahohoheehee....

Beautiful Mind

Princeton University bioethicist Peter Singer thinks we increase the net pool of happiness by letting defective babies die:

"Suppose a woman planning to have two children has one normal child, then gives birth to a hemophiliac child. The burden of caring for that child may make it impossible for her to cope with a third child; but if the disabled child were to die, she would have another. ... When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him."

Seventy pound wheelchair-bound Harriet McBryde Johnson has taken on Dr. Singer's shallow disability bigotry and gained the attention and admiration of many... and a cover on the New York Times Magazine. This, folks, is worth a read. From New Mobility Magazine

What's At Hand

There is an old country bromide that deals with this question thusly: What's the best kind of wood to burn? Answer: whatever you have plenty of. Maybe in the same way, the best place to write about is where you sit and the best images to gather to show the forms that light takes are the ones it falls on within your vision.

I have an inordinate number of pictures of our barn. When I look up from my work I see it from my window every day-- weathered and gray, some rot in the timbers, but full of character. I love the way its hard edges cut the light reflected from the morning snow. I am entranced by the way moonlight bathes the roof in blue light when cloud shadows surge across the valley and up over the ridge. And I appreciate the old barn for the very fact of its existence. Like the house, the realtors figured whoever would buy this land would come in right away and tear down the old structures and put up new. They placed no value on house or barn while we saw the riches both would offer. And we were right.

I had first seen the barn as utilitarian storage. But it has come to represent so much more. It is the same barn every day and yet each hour's new light makes it different, shows another of its faces to me. It is a testimony of craftsmanship, to still stand after more than a hundred years of ice and heat, wind and storm. It is a emblem of aging gracefully.

I had said for years before we finally found our place here that I wanted to put down roots somewhere and know the same trees and hilltops through the seasons year after year. I suppose I can include the old barn as a fixture in my sense of belonging. It is not permanent any more than I am immortal. But it is a relative constant in this quiet life, an icon of green pastures by still waters. And so you will see more of it from time to time because it is the barn I have plenty of.

To Confuse the Muse

The muse is both the deity and the messenger... for it is surely not only for our own sakes that the gods are willing to appear to us and breathe their holy fire into our work. The muse, when she appears, takes us out of our little life and thrusts us into the world. -- Deena Metzger, Writing for Your Life

Yeah. I need to be thrust out into the world. Come on, muse. Thrust me. It might take two of ya. I dare ya. I've had enough of basting in my own juices in my little life. One can marinade in nostalgia and simmer in solipsistic solitude only so long before the dish gets a gamy off-flavor. Let's vary the menu a little, shall we? I have a nice barn, a fine dog, two beautiful creeks and I have served them over and over. But they are not the world. My memories are not the whole of consciousness. I've given it away freely (and worth every penny of it)-- my gardening tales, and stories from the trail, and philosophies about heating with wood and some of the yarn of how we got to Goose Creek and whatever comes to mind from my back yard. I've written every day for eighteen months so that "the morning pages" seem safely set apart for the act of writing. They no longer dawn each day like a punishment but more like an opportunity to relieve myself of pent up language, like being "milked" as blind John Milton has described the urgency to get down the words.

I have the intimation that perhaps soon, writing for the sake of writing will not be the only point and reason for writing. I have a sense of impending purpose. Perhaps this is only the coming of spring talking, for this is a fact: under the snow, blossoms grow in buds and energy stirs in roots and rhizomes in frozen ground. It is the dead of winter, but I feel currents moving underneath me that I cannot explain. I am ready to flow and leaf and flower, a perennial incarnated each year into some new thing bearing new fruit.

And the Muses looked at each other this morning and said "maybe we need to postpone the thrusting for another year or two. Ya think?"

Goose Creek Traffic Report

This update is for all you * who anticipate traveling the Goose Creek bypass between Terry's Fork (Former) Grocery and the YoYoVitro Glass Shoppe on Shawsville Pike this morning. The VDOT road scraper came through at half til daybreak and cut it back to about 3 inches of packed powder. However, it only opened one lane. No, wait a minute. The road is only one lane. The scenery is phenomenal so drive carefully. Just stop your trucks in the middle of the road and get out and gawk. You'll not see another soul to worry about. We haven't. For days now. Other road info here.

Also, we have this report: Fred First, a local resident, says "My feet have never been happier" and he beams as he points proudly to his new Muck Boots that took their maiden voyage in the snow this morning. "They feel just like my bedroom slippers.... even when I'm standing in the creek". His wife was overheard mumbling that she had been telling him for a year he needed new waterproof boots and is tired of listening to him gloat, like it was his idea.

The neighborhood dog Tsuga has been dubbed "Tsuga the Tsubaru" after this morning's outting in the snow. Yes, traction-lovers, he is indeed the AWD Dog (Model **YL... with custom package: webbed feet, lowslung chassis, extra power in the front end, but a bit greedy in the fuel department). * Up to a half dozen vehicles are anticipated in the next 24 hours! ** Yellow Lab

Humans...

... are some of the neatest people I know.

The creative play of this fellow resulted in a mockup of M C Escher's mind-boggling image, "Relativity" ... done completely in Legos. I can imagine this man's dreams while he was puzzling through the X, Y and Z planes he would encounter during his daytime play-periods. Which way is UP?

And let's hope that ugly is a universal quality and that American cities and hiways may someday have a bit less of it. Let's follow the lead of the British, who are disguising their cell phone antennae in most creative ways. (I did see one faux "tree" tower when visiting Birmingham during the summer.) If this is to become the rule rather than the exception, there needs to be more voting with our feet (or mobile phone contracts). Can you hear me now?

Via the Ecotone and Google, I've had the opportunity to meet Tom Montag this weekend. Tom is in the midst of a most fascinating undertaking. I'll let him explain (in the first paragraph of his mission statement, read all of it, okay?)

On October 2, 2002, I left a career in the printing industry to devote myself full-time over five years to "Vagabond in the Middle: An Expedition Into the Heart of the Middle West," an attempt to elucidate what it is that makes us middle western. The project is an exploration of place on a wide scale, across the tall grass prairie from western Ohio to the eastern half of the Plains states. I want to identify the "middle western" characteristics; but, more importantly, I want to find the stories in our lives that illustrate those characteristics. This will be literature, not sociology; it will be creative nonfiction, not scientific report.

Notice, too, that he is looking for occasional lodging in his target areas. I can imagine that after an evening of conversation with Tom and his wife about their work, I'd have a hard time dozing off to sleep. The wheels would be spinning. They already are!

Moving right along... my future Floyd County neighbor Doug Thompson has snazzied up his blog, American Newsreel, and adds this to a long list of things that keep him busy. For instance, check out Capitol Hill Blue and his writerly persona at DC Darkside.

And lastly, speaking of humans, let's talk about dogs. (Neat segue, eh?) Yesterday, I wondered outloud about the dog's long days at home should I get the Parkway job. Pascale suggested I just take Tsuga to work with me! First response: NEAT IDEA! Second reflection: NAH. Even if the dog was the epitome of good behavior and docility (I think regular readers know better than that) I would not take a dog with me into quiet places where people have come to the solitude and sounds of nature. I've had my own reveries too often shattered by Irish Setters (with jaunty bright yellow bandanas tied around their necks) and experienced other doggie presence in the waffles of my Vibram soles. I understand the freedom of letting your city dog run free in the woods, but too often, this infringes on the experience of other hikers or campers, in my opinion, even while more and more dogs are showing up in National Parks and on the Appalachian Trail. What are your thoughts about dogs in campgrounds and on trails?

Sunday Ruminations

~ Tsuga-- our little boy-pup-- is finally growing up. Today, twice out of five times on our walk, he lifted his leg in the male-dog way to pee. When Nate was home, he tried and tried to train the pup, demonstrating in mime fashion how it should be done, but Tsuga squatted in a most embarrassingly gentrified way.

~ It has just started snowing. And unlike most snows we get, this one waited until daylight to start. I love the depth that a light snow gives to the view out the window: the bridge over the branch is sharp, hard-edged, the color of wood; the barn across the road is muted, soft cornered, going to weathered gray; the far ridge is a flat silhouette of faint pink-gray against gray-white sky sifted with snow and could just as well be a painted backdrop for a winter play.

~ One of us tends to catastrophize when a storm (meteorological or otherwise) is upon us or possible. And so the Army of One has been instructed to bring copious supplies of milk jugs full of emergency water up from the basement. We're rounding up our Y2K supply of candles, making ready, hoping we don't need all of this preparation, but just being the good Girl Scout and Marine. We'll know this time tomorrow if the all-clear has been issued. In which case, we'll have lots of free flushes and empty containers for Tsuga to play with.

~ This Park Service application thing sort of throws the coming months into potential confusion. Will the dog be okay five days a week for ten or more hours inside the house alone if both of us are gone all day? Should we plan the trip to visit the daughter in South Dakota in May and then cancel if we can't both get away? On the one hand, traveling hopefully, it would be nice to sink my teeth into a new experience that requires the putting on of an old and familiar hat (the field biologist hat, that is). In other ways, if a miracle happens I get the job (winning over the vet-applicants who have a ten-point bonus added to whatever their applications rate) that will subvert everything I had thought I was going to do this coming spring and summer. For everything you do, you make choices to not do myriad other things. This mortal deal of being stuck in merely one instance of time and place sure gets to be an impediment sometimes, and I'll be darned if I can think of any way around it.

~ I borrowed a book (as if I needed to fill a book-void) from a friend. This book is by and about the writing life of Nancy Slonim Aronie (Writing from the Heart). The author got her foot in the door by sending a tape with a few of her essays (previously only locally consumed) to NPR. And the rest was history. My friend thought I might be interested in this book since my little writings have been locally consumed via our NPR affiliate in Roanoke. I'll air my tenth this week.
These radio essays are about the only products I have to show for my time away from a regular paycheck. Hearing one's voice broadcast regionally has been fun (and terrifying) but I have no illusions or hopes of the larger stage. So many successful writers with whom I've spoken (including email) seem to say the notoriety of a few hard-won publications may not be worth what it took to get them in print. They hold up the weblog as the no-middleman way to make your words available to readers around the world, instantly and permanently on record. I think there's merit in that. And still, I feel compelled to have a more tangible consequence to my writing than my Sitemeter statistics and three thousand brief comments. I confess, I don't completely understand what drives me or where the journey is headed. And I sometimes feel guilty that I'm having so much fun going there.

To Boldly Go

This blows me away. By all means, load a full size image (here). Scan across the image slowly, as if you were flying over it yourself, which, in a sense, you are. From your computer chair, a tiny speck on the face of Earth, you are seeing something no eyes in history have seen... the water-carved surface of Mars. There seems to be no other explanation for the mesas and plateaus, arroyos and canyons and alluvial fans, pocked here and there by round meteor craters. I am awed by our technologies, our drive to push back the edges of our ignorance, to extend the reach of our hands.

As animals go, we are rather pitiful and puny, clawless, weak-toothed creatures. We can't run particularly fast or for very long. We have the five senses, each of which are easily outstripped by "lower" animals-- the vision of an eagle, the hearing of a fox, the touch sensitivity of a mole's pink nose. But look what we have done with our minds to extend the force of our hands, the sight of our eyes, the edge of the known and knowable universe. Man has reason to be proud. As Shakespeare said--

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!

And for a moment this morning, imagining myself flying near the very surface of another world comprehended now by human sight, I basked in pride at our accomplishments as a species. Then, I clicked on a couple of news sites, and now I am ashamed and humbled by our smallness and violence to each other and the Earth. And so, it is also true:

What a piece of work is a man! How brutish in reason! How myopic in faculty! In form and moving how violent and deplorable! In action, how like a lunatic! In apprehension, how like a beast! The destroyer of worlds! The most destructive of animals!

We still have far, far to go.

Spring of Genius

The unnamed creek springs to light from darkness underground, from a dozen springs a mile south. Since its infancy before time, it has flailed north and south, forth and back between the ridges, swollen and angry, to carve our valley home from Appalachian stone. Today the little stream falls along peacefully enough, cold and clear as liquid glass, down mountains, carrying the smell of snow to a sandy beach on the coast.

Tonight the creek will freeze along the edges. In a month, we will hear a river embryo calling faintly from under ice. And we will walk on water. -- FBF

"Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius." ~Pietro Aretino

With Friends Like These…

I have this friend. First, he recommends my services to a patient who needs physical therapy. This patient just happens to be a former patient of his and he has offered the man and his wife the use of his guest house below the big house for a few months until their home is built. So yesterday, I go there for my first visit to see the patient, and beforehand friend Joe fixes us a big lunch (and then all I wanted to do then was go somewhere and take a nap!) After my patient visit, he had offered me the chance to cut a truckload of wood from his nice, level, mature hardwood forest; so I brought my overalls and the chain saw; and Joe goes with me and loads it onto the truck as I cut it. I am overwhelmed.

I left Joe's and on my way back toward town, lo and behold the infrequently-open-for-business bookstore is actually open! This is an old store on the highway where a newly relocated bibliophile has deposited her life collection (three truckloads of books, she told me) and is now selling them, mostly for $2 a piece. I brought home six (Hal Borland, Michael Frome, and others) and they will be temporarily shelved on the floor where they sit in their shopping bags until I build more bookshelves. Can a person ever have enough book shelves? I'm thinking of putting a shelf up near the ceiling in the "kid's room" upstairs and maybe in Ann's study.

And when I got home, I found an email saying one of my little doodahs has been accepted for publication. This man is editor of the southern arts magazine where my stuff will show up in a future issue... what a neat bookstore this is, back in my hometown! So, now I will be a professional writer. I get paid-- two copies of the magazine. Hey. Gotta start somewhere!

Now, it's Saturday morning and I have work to do... thanks to some recent help from my friends. Two days ago, just as I was walking in the door from recording another essay (broadcast announcement forthcoming) the phone rang. A neighbor up the road heard I needed a couple of downed trees relocated with tractor power (one was a 16" birch that spanned the creek; the other-- a 15" walnut dropped by the power company--was lying up on a bank too steep for safely using a chain saw). My neighbor (new to the road, I've talked with him two or three times) called (on his day off) and told me he could be here in 45 minutes to help. He wouldn't let me refuse. So, a short while later in the cold wind, we wrapped a chain around each of these massive trees, and with the amazing horsepower of his trusty Ford 4WD tractor, they now lie out in the open on level ground, waiting for the old reliable Stihl and a little spit and sweat equity.

Then, this morning I got a nice treat wrapped in an email from a good blogging buddy. You've caught me in an intense moment of warm fuzzies induced by the kindness of friends I've never met, strangers I've just met, neighbors I can never repay, and friends who feed me and keep me warm. Faith, hope and charity. I feel the charity and hope to pass it on.

We have another "winter event" heading our way tonight, so, after one more cup of coffee, I'd better get out and make sawdust.

Trinkets

"I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book–-let him [or her] relate the events of his [or her] own Life with honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them." Samuel Taylor Cooleridge (From, "A Writer's Almanac" 10/21/03, quoted by Garrison Keillor)

Beauty in the Woodlot: Jewel Beetles... link via Mark at WoodsLot

Well I'm outta the loop. Who are these people that are nominated for Weblog Awards? I never heard of most of them (except R Blood for Lifetime Achievement... waydago, Rebecca!)

BigWig is presenting at the "Weblog in Journalism" conference that starts on Jan 26.

Gospel or Gibson?

I've been reading the hype about Mel Gibson's Passion movie for so long I thought it had been out for a year. I think I'll pass when it comes to a theatre more-or-less near me. But a Toronto-based company is getting the jump on Mel with the release of the "Gospel of John" and I would be tempted (get thee behind me) to go see this one.

This three-hour movie has gotten surprisingly good reviews, even from non-Christian reviewers. While it attempts to remain true to the Biblical Gospel of John (apparently the narration, read by Christopher Plummer, is drawn from the contemporary Good News Bible), it of course will not give a complete picture of the life of Christ that benefits from the perspective of all gospel accounts. More here and here.

Morning Pages from the Province

Journal, January 03, 2003

Seven months ago, my wardrobe changed abruptly from casual business to casual farmer. I left my job as a physical therapist, and perhaps I have left my profession. We'll see.

On this side of the divide, the cerebral chemistry of stress and competition have given way to a sedate satisfaction with being in the present, cloistered in a rural safe haven with myself. It is a different way to live, an altered state of being, with a different center. It is more like being than doing. Words that passed fleeting and dismissed as I hurried to work -- the images, alliteration and allusion of internal dialogue -- are finally sifting down onto paper, or its phosphor equivalent, finding a voice beyond the stifled thought world of one man alone carried by the currents of a busy life.

Writing has become a daily celebration, and I have begun to learn who I have been under the costume all these years. Fortunately, I am mostly happy with what I see, and read, of this man, myself, and to know through the kindness of readers and correspondents there are others who know this struggle and this joy as well.

And yet I am not at fully at rest in this in-between state. I do not yet know fully what I should do with my life.

Journal, January 23, 2004

I set out this morning thinking I wanted to write a personal "state of the union" epistle, but that seems way too ambitious given the lack of vision and clumsiness with the keyboard that afflicts me as I first sit down to write this morning. The muse is not with me. It is Friday, after all, and I notice a cycle in my inspiration with this day at the nadir of the curve.

I am thinking about everything that has happened, for good or ill, in the past year (yes, I am a few weeks late for this kind of annual reflection). So much of the good centers on the writing, the friends made, phone calls and visits and kindness shown by those who have "met me" through this medium. I think about the radio essays and other chances I have had to touch lives through my writing, even sequestered as I am in this out-of-the-way place. I marvel that the words and images from such an ordinary life in a tiny valley have been viewed so many thousand times by visitors from places I have to look up on the world map.

I think of the peaks and troughs of professional identity and self-esteem, the weeks of loneliness during the never-ending winter of last year, the cycles of too much and too little rain, two gardening seasons, ice, wind, wood smoke and morning mist. I remember the dog's slow dying, the new puppy, the various wars and rumors of war, the silliness and attempts at serious expression that so often failed their mark. Last year the Ecotone was born; my computer crashed and so did the first Dell replacement; Nathan did his "V" thing (came home from Vermont to Virginia and left for Vancouver); we traded cars, carpeted the floor, and had all sorts of encounters with the wildlife: phoebes, king snakes, moles, and wrens. When you review your life set out in such ordered detail, even the backwaters of the rural provinces don't seem so dull as one might think.

Looking back, I can see how important the class at Tech and the Radford writers workshop and the Campbell School have been through the people I met who have influenced my enthusiasm and confidence and ambition; I think of all the things I've learned from writers and editors and geekly friends who have gone out of their way to help me with the technology of blogging. I look ahead with excitement to the next year with an unexplainable confidence that I will know, if not fully, at least in part, what I should do with my words and my life. Good things lie ahead. I cannot help but think so.

Simultaneous Submissions

I said yesterday that I had another question about writing. But since there is not likely to be decisive answer--any more than there is for the first question-- let's just call it a concern, an ethical dilemma. And this will only interest those of you who have, or will publish.

Is it okay to submit the same work simultaneously to two (or more) recipients?
From what I've gleaned reading on the issue and talking to folks, I have come to this incisive conclusion: it depends.

Fewer publishers these days are insisting on "payment on publication" and "no simultaneous submissions". Wait times for responses have increased to six months or more with many book publishers, and if a writer only eats if they publish, this is a long time to play a fish that will spit out the hook two seasons later.

Again, the bottom line is: be honest. If you want to be able to submit to more than one place, chose those who say it is okay. If you've got something out there, tell the publisher. It may be that, even if they say "no" to simultaneous submissions, if the other place where you've shopped your piece is not a direct competitor or is in a different genre of publication, your primary recipient may give the go-ahead anyway.

These are just conclusions I've culled. Here is one good (if dated) discussion on the matter.

If any of you have thoughts, or experiences or horror stories on this topic, I'd love to hear them.

Or Would You Like to Swing on a Star

I am pretty sure my granddaughter is going to be a risk-taker and a high-flyer just like her momma. She will have lofty aspirations and not be afraid of heights. And she will know how and when to bail out and how to use her parachute.

Happy Third Birthday, Abby. Wish you were swinging from the walnut tree over Goose Creek.

Is a Blog a Publication?

I have two issues and questions related to writing, blogging and publishing. I'll post them separately, maybe the first one today and the second tomorrow. First question...

If a piece becomes a blog post published on a weblog, has that piece been "previously published" when it comes to print publication? Is anyone aware of a magazine or book publisher who has refused to accept something because it had appeared on a weblog?

Update 22 January: Thanks to all who've weighed in with opinions and thots. I think the answer boils down to "it depends". Weblog posts are, as Chris suggests, more like emails shown to a relative few. Emails are not "publications" but can count as such if you sell the rights to broadcast them in any way. It is up to the party that potentially might purchase your essay or book or magazine article to decide if they consider a weblog post as "previously published" and what, if anything, they want done with the web version should they publish it in print (or online elsewhere).

This is not a dead issue, so please continue to pass along thots, precedents, even facts on the matter as you run across them. I'm not the only one asking this question.

Deleting Movable Type Comments

Thanks to Julie of Seedlings and Sprouts for passing along this tip-- it works wonderfully-- to remove blog spam. Share this with every Moveable Typer you know so the slugs who leave their waste on your blog will be wasting their time. Sweet revenge, it is!

This is the URL you need to delete comment #XX from blog# 1 on your movable type implementation:

http://...put.approprate.stuff.here.../mt.cgi?blog_id=1&_type=comment&__mode=delete&id=XX

Took me a minute to figure out that I clip my MT script from my edits page up to the cgi? then substitute the "blog id..etcetc =" above and the XX is the comment number for the one you want to remove. You can find that at the end of the address (in the address window) while viewing the soon-to-disappear comment, e.g., 4195&blog_id=1 was my last comment, so I would append 4195 to the url, click it, and it's gone.

Cold Crossings

Dang it's cold. The thermometer I keep on my desk says it is 60 degrees in here this morning, only six or seven feet from the woodstove where only a few pitiful coals remain from last night's eight o'clock feeding. The keyboard and genuine simulated wood surface of my desk, the arms of my chair-- feel like they just came in from a night in the barn.

We've had a string of below freezing days and single digit nights; the west winds have found their way in eddies even into our sheltered valley. The mass of the house doesn't retain much heat on mornings this cold. So I'm sitting here wrapped in an afghan (or as we called them as kids, an african) over my legs and I'm wearing clothes suitable for a winter outting.

I'm not complaining, mind you. (Well, maybe a little.) It was colder last year before we put the carpet down over the worst of our wood floors. When we lived in our very first house, it was often in the low fifties in some "heated" parts of the house, and we kept our outdoor coats on when we came inside. I learned a lot about heat tapes and plumbers that first year.

And going back farther in the history of cold, can you imagine what it must be to sleep on the frozen ground on a night like the ones we're having now, with nothing but a wool blanket? Or wake up in a stone castle with twenty foot ceilings and a meager fire from a heat-sucking fireplace?

It's plain that the human body can tolerate a lot more discomfort than we're accustomed to in our soft lifestyles and 70 degree thermostats, give or take one or two degrees only, please. I'm thankful that this old place is as snug as it is, and it's a comfort to look out at ample firewood that will easily get us through another couple of months of cold. But it's time to start thinking about next winter's cold mornings, and getting more wood stacked and drying under cover.

Seems all I do these cold days is feed wood and clean ashes. The woodpile disappears by the cartload every day, and I am not able to add back to it with temps this cold. I have a good bit I could bring over to the house from across the creek-- except, as you see looking at my creek crossing (that stays in shadow all winter)-- getting over the creek and back might make for more adventure than I'm up for.

Okay. I've suffered enough. Time to kick on the 30,000 BTU radiant gas fired wall heater in the other room, stand back-end to it with a cup of hot coffee, and think warm thoughts while this danged keyboard defrosts. I'll be back directly.

Continental Drift

Update 22 Jan: Okay. You've had long enough to wonder. This is a picture of the Ross Ice shelf breaking away from the Antarctic mainland that I took out the window of my reconnaisance suborbital aircraft one day last week. Or a picture of the ice in the creek with hue shift to produce the infrared look. I forget which.

Fit for Work

Well. Since my current little project (deadline tomorrow!) is offering me an opportunity to write but mostly to the exclusion of blogging about more interesting things, I will write about me in a self-promoting way, and blog that! Hey. I got no scruples. So, if you really want to see the bureaucratic side of your old uncle Fred on paper, here's one of four areas to be addressed by the job candidate. This response describes my "Knowledge of natural and cultural resources of the Southern Appalachians":

While my major field of study for my first masters degree was Vertebrate Zoology, it dawned on me midway into my degree how important and absolutely necessary the plant community is for food, shelter and all the other needs that animals required from their habitat. In the end, those years of study gave me a good balance between zoological and botanical interests and knowledge base. After graduating, I taught for twelve years with special personal and pedagogical emphasis on field-related study, feeling that looking at prepared slides or films in lab was a distant second to actually seeing living specimens in the wild whenever possible. I developed two courses never before offered at my community college (though course descriptions existed in the system wide course catalog): Regional Flora (a more technically challenging course using Radford, Ahles, and Bell's Vascular Flora of the Carolinas), and a hobbyists level class called Plant Life of Virginia (that used the very accessible Newcomb's Wildflower Guide.)

I spent two five-week tenures at Mountain Lake Biological Station (University of Virginia) for courses in pteridology and ornithology during summers when I was teaching at the community college. I won second prize in a one hundred station field quiz created by the faculty to test knowledge of all aspects of natural history.

I have lived in Sylva and Morganton in North Carolina and Wythe and Floyd counties in Virginia. In all these locations, the Parkway has been a destination for botany forays or photography shoots, and so I am familiar with the flora and fauna over a good bit of the southern three-fourths of the Parkway.

Southern Appalachian culture has been an interest of mine since reading Horace Kephardt's Southern Highlanders after moving to Virginia from my home state of Alabama. In the mid seventies, I was exposed for the first time to claw-hammer banjo music and the rich history of mountain folkways in my frequent visits and coming to know students from the Grayson Highlands area. While living in Sylva, I learned a great deal about the Trail of Tears and the flooding of mountain communities to create Fontana Lake. Living in Morganton, I was able to explore the mountains around the Grandfather and the Globe area with their rich history. As a therapist, I have provided home health for elderly patients living near Floyd County's Buffalo Mountain who were around during the years in Floyd County when Rev. Bob Childress "moved a mountain".

The cultural past and future of the town of Floyd and Floyd County are of particular interest to me now. In January of 2003 while a student in "Appalachian Identities" at Virginia Tech, I wrote a project paper entitled "Floyd County: Culture, Tourism and Identity" that is still referred to by staff at our local cultural incubator facility, the Jacksonville Center. In June of 2003, I attended the Highlands Workshop on Writers and Writing at Radford University to increase my exposure to the written culture of the southern mountains and to gain abilities to write on this subject in my own explorations. I am a charter member of the Partnership for Floyd that seeks to find the best match between our rich heritage here and positive visitor experience.

The Branch

Ten years ago, if we had found a piece of property that had as much running water even as our little branch meandering down beside the house, we would have been overjoyed. Ann and I both grow up far south, and water has been a big part of our lives... ponds, bays, bogs and puddles full of frogs. Finding land with water seemed a vanishingly slender hope. You can see it here beside our shed, weaving its way down to Goose Creek, passing under the culvert we put in when we made our driveway. Then beyond that, where the shaded pasture is still blue with morning, it flows under the little footbridge, then under the gravel road. Where it joins the creek, it has left a wide delta of black topsoil carried from the bowl of rugged hillsides that it drains.

The branch has its source underground. Exactly where its waters emerge and flow on the surface, we will never see because the source is on the steep logging-ravaged land behind us. The little stream at the very bottom of the steep "V" is too filled with logging waste and brambles to wade it very far. How serene this little trickle of cold water it must have been in the deep shade of forest before the first axes felled the tall white pine and hemlock and tulip poplars that grew there when this place was first settled and farmed just after the Civil War.

When we first moved here and I was hoping to have my garden over in the pasture by the barn, I had the notion to build a little reservoir at the foreground of this picture, and gravity-irrigate the garden with a couple hundred feet of PVC that I could have easily buried in the bottom of the branch and threaded through the culverts and bridged the cleft of Goose Creek to the garden. Then we realized two things: the branch can go completely dry, as it did in the drought of 2002; and the pasture hides an infinite number of rounded rocks washed into the valley in ancient floods and will foil any attempts at digging.

In the process of clearing out the sedges and burdock and other wildings that had invaded the neglected branch, we have discovered many bits and pieces of this house's history -- old white glass canning lids, pieces of unknown metal tools and bits of crockery. The dog is especially good at finding them. Last summer, Ann spent hours in the branch in her tall rubber boots wielding an old maddock, determined to rejuvenate the little stream. She was engrossed in her project, lost in childlike fascination, mesmerized by the perpetual flow and incessant babble of water that appears from underground. One warm day in July, pulling out tall grasses from the edge of the muddy bottom, she found two very old yellow rubber ducks buried in the silt. We kept them as our mascots, reminders of other lives that have inhabited this house, and splashed in our little branch.

Bloggers Can Be Beggars

Beggars may not be choosers but bloggers can be beggars.

I've had it. This is the last day I'm going to spend half my keystrokes individually banning blog spam from my comments. I tried installing Jay Allen's Blacklist script a few weeks back and couldn't make it work. I'm ready to tackle it again. It requires Moveable Type 2.6 or better. Cheeesh. I don't even know how to find out what version I'm running. This has got to be embarrasingly simple but I'm needing a little pointer. Anybody?

And I've run across other folk who had problems installing the blacklist. If somebody can share their AHA! moments when they got things to actually work, I would be most appreciative. Dang, I am such a parasite on the rump of the Blogosphere.

Jots and Tittles

Do by all means go over and say hello to new blogger nTexas at Mind Crayons and read ALL of the Fish Tale. Gotta love the ending. Don' let your kids read this.

And how about seeing NPR's Susan Stamberg in a bra? A Face Bra, that is. Or you can listen to her interview with the inventor. Actually, as I listened to this on Saturday, it sounded oh so familiar. Alley McBeal's Elaine wore one. Then, it was a joke.

And for those of us who are tubeless, you can catch some of John Stewart's antics via video clips here at Comedy Central.

A Brighter Shade of Obfuscation

So. Do you think that Scots poet Bobby Burns inspired the Procul Harem (what's a Procul anyway?) to write the most obscure of songs (just after McAuthurs Park) in Whiter Shade of Pale? This fellow sees parallels but there are all sorts of other ideas about it. This looks like a question for The Wizard of Wax, Mr. Dustbury. Chaz? (link via Boynton).

The Dog and Pony Show

Blogging detours continue to pop up at Fragments lately. The latest is this federal application (the real thing finally located with a little help from my friends) for which there is a mailing deadline of Wednesday, this week. I am in the midst of compiling my KSA's... of course you know that that is fed-speak for "KNOWLEDGES, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES". Yes, that's plural on all of them; and when written, my KSA's will be reviewed by a "personnelist". Our Bureaucracy... gotta love it. So, I am digging deep to elaborate on my...

1. Ability to deal effectively with people.
2. Ability to operate and staff a Visitor Center.
3. Ability to provide a variety of interpretive programs in a park setting.
4. Knowledge of natural and cultural resources of the Southern Appalachians.

And I read the fine print last night: veterans get a ten-point preferential. Doh! So I can score 99 on this application, a veteran 90 plus his 10 extra points, and he wins. This sort of severs the nerve of fervor in this long shot, but what da hey. Nothing ventured...

Wind, Revisited

January is here again, and I'll admit, I am not happy about it. Even snows that come this month are not likely to be very pretty, flying past on unrelenting wind that blows snow sideways, abrasive and angry. On the brighter side, it is possible we will hear Spring Peepers on a rare warm day later this month, and their hopeful piping always lifts my sagging spirits in the bleakness of mid-winter. But realize that this cheery frog chorus is just a tease, and February turn around and rub it in our faces, February being a month even farther removed from the memory of green things growing, of insect noises, summer lightning and warm breezes.

Winter wind is perhaps the only element of weather I have come to terms with. Cold, you can dress for. But January wind will find a way to poke a stick at you, freeze-dry your eyeballs, and toss your toboggan in the creek. It’s like an annoying little brother waiting for you outside every time you suit up and venture out of doors in January. I ‘d like to have a better attitude about winter wind, to not take personally its bluster and brashness, to accept it without passing judgement. But this is a lesson that will take me a lifetime of winters to learn.

Read the rest, see the image...

Local Color

Floyd doesn't just come in Pink any more. Our little town and county of the same name are also becoming colorful in their own right, and people are coming to see what the music (and arts and crafts, and scenic country roads) are all about.

I got an email last week from a young man who would be returning to our town over the weekend. He had two objectives with his visit that would also include the Carter Fold in Hiltons, Va.: 1) bring his Lovely Companion to Floyd for the Friday Night Jamboree (mentioned here recently with a video link) and write an article for the Washington Post about Floyd and the music scene here; and 2) do a bit of update for his next printing of his travel book on Virginia-- one of several he's written, and probably one day, one of many that he will author. He found me via Fragments when surfing for facts and features in our area, and we set up a time to meet and chat.

You can imagine that I liked Julian Smith from my first impression-- biologist by education, ecologist and editor, writer, traveler and photographer, and half my age! And so we met for a while over a piece of pie at Tuggles Gap Restaurant on the Parkway and talked about all sorts of things. And I apologize. I had promised to try to keep on track with Julian's purposes for the meeting, but I'm afraid I sort of diverted from my digressions at times. When on a typical day you only talk to a pup-dog, a stimulating conversation with energetic young folks with actual lives is almost more than a silverback bumpkin can stand!

As we were picking up to go, he asked "What do you like best about living in Floyd?" By then my mind was racing ahead to all sorts of projects and possibilities that had taken shape as we talked, and my trite answer came from the muddle of this distraction: "I like it because there's one traffic light and no Walmart" I think I said. That is so not the whole answer.

I like the fact that the county remains relatively unexploited, free of congested streets, billboards and flashing neon signs, and is treated kindly by those who come here to share the area with those who have been here all along. I like the fact that these two groups of people live here with very little strife and a lot of cross-pollination, even though there is room for further gains in this area. I appreciate the pristine beauty of land settled but not ravaged, where even modest homes are tended with pride. There is enough open space and horizon to satisfy my need for sky and enough mountain to wrap around me to feel the familiar comfort of the Appalachians.

I love the fact that here, one can live what I call a "slow, progressive" life. There are six people per square mile in my end of the county, but I have DSL to the internet. Half my neighbors are farmers and loggers, the other half artists and craftspeople. Floyd is a WYSIWYG community, about as authentic as they come, and by and large, folks want it to stay that way. One restaurant in town has its logo painted on the window depicting one farmer, one businessman, and one "hippie" standing happily side by side. That pretty well says it in a nutshell.

Current Events

This time last year I was beginning to think of the consequences of unplanned growth on our little town of Floyd and Floyd County. I took a class at Virinia Tech last January and wrote a term paper on "Floyd County: Culture, Tourism and Identity" partly because it seemed the issue of tourism was slipping onto the front burner and needed some attention. My class toured the Jacksonville Center -- at the time, nothing more than a vision... a rough shell of an old dairy barn that was to become the "cultural enterprise incubator" for our county. The old barn at the top of town would be the center of culturally-related business development, a clearinghouse of information for crafts and music enterprise and tours, and a place for county residents -- those who were new to the area and those from lineages going back two hundred years-- to mingle, share interests, become better neighbors and partners in the process of making our town and county a better place for our visitors, but especially for those of us who live here. But were there enough motivated people in the county willing to think proactively to guide future tourism and related growth in the county?

This week I went to a meeting at the fully and tastefully completed Center for a meeting of the "Partnership for Floyd" where folks from all kinds of background are sharing their visions for appropriate growth in Floyd County, and already have some great and do-able ideas related to preserving historic landmarks and cemeteries, restoring our legacy (of music and history), connecting citizens (including such things as walking tours and trails) and building community. It truly felt like the miraculously refurbished old barn was reincarnated into a fine second life and serving the purpose envisioned by its founders. They must be very gratified to see it working.

The Center provides studios and offices for new culturally related enterprises and already some artists and craftsfolks are moving in. The Center provides low cost utilities, communications and space until budding studios can be birthed into autonomous businesses out in the county. One newly occupied space will become headquarters for the Thompsons who are setting up their headquarters in the Jacksonville Center. They bring a wonderful combination of photojournalistic experience and expertise to the area. I thought some of you might like to view the video they produced recently of the Friday Night Jamboree in "downtown" Floyd. Come on. It's the weekend. You can afford to kick back for a few minutes and watch people having a good ol' time on the dance floor!

Take a Hike

A friend called yesterday-- an old Fish and Wildlife buddy from years back-- to tell me about a federal job opening on the parkway for a "Park Guide" in our general area. Wouldn't be much money involved, just about enough for gas and lunch, but it could be interesting for someone who wanted to meet people, wander in the woods with a camera and a field guide, and come home every day with "new material" for the writing endeavors. Sure, I'll take a look at it.

Ah, here it is. But wait. What's this? Here I get the first 100 words of a job description, and the fact that the job is in "southwest Virginia" (which covers quite a few thousand square miles. Where in SWVa is the position headquartered?) and then they tell me...

When you find an interesting position, you may choose to subscribe to gain access to all the information you will need to apply for the opening.

• complete job descriptions
• contact name & phone number
• application instructions
• experience and academic requirements
• eligibility requirements

... the page "suggests" I might consider purchasing a Premium Subscription to the Insiders Guide to Federal Application Process for $10 a month or $40 a year.

I'd have been more inclined to pursue this if they'd just been honest up front and called it a mandatory application fee. But offering me an "option" that is an absolute prerequisite to even begin the tedious process of government application paperwork makes me envision the bureaucratic nightmare I might be walking into. Methinks I will smell the roses where I live and wear my own clothes. I've never worn a uniform and don't reckon I'll start now.

WILL GIVE TO A GOOD HOME

Heck. There have been times in the last week I'd have given Tsuga away to any kind of home. But in my less exasperated moments, I know I have to cut the dog more slack than our misbehaving children. The pup's odd and frustrating behaviors come much more from the hardwiring of instinct while the kid's came from pure willfulness, mischief and the rewarding joy of parental torment.

I can only think that Beagle Perfume was wafting in the air, invisible Siren Calls such that a few mere molecules inhaled could turn a guy dog's head and heart to thoughts of a conjugal visit. Two young ladies unknown to me were walking down our road (very unusual!) with a small beagley dog running along behind. For the next two days, Tsuga would be behaving normally, chasing a tossed tennis ball, for instance, when he would stop dead in his tracks, nose sniffing the air, and turn 180 and head for road. And he would not come. And he could not be enticed by "TREAT!" that has always gotten his attention before.

We literally had to drag his sorry self back to the house. But the pheromonic tyranny has passed now, and yesterday, other than one obstinate episode in which he discovered frozen horse tracks and a large snowy-frozen mass of yummy road apples, he was back to his old semi-obedient quasi-tractable self. Even so, we must get those jewels of male motivation taken care of real soon because when his southern brain takes over his northern brain, he morphs into the Incredible Hulk of Canine Muscle and Sheer Will and I don't do mud wrestling.

And then there is his indoor vice. We've laughed at Tsuga's "hallucinations" before, only to learn that well, there was something there after all. So I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I'm not willing for him to dig his way through our hardwood floors to whatever it is he thinks is under them. We see him act in the same way outside when he has found a mole tunnel (and last week in the snow, he found the actual mole that I rescued from him the day after the wren got inside). So, in our "great room" he presses his nose against the floor intently sniffing, ears waggling, head straight down as if his magnetic snout had been pulled suddenly toward a large anvil beneath the floor. Then he rears back lifting his front end up on his hind legs and spikes the floor with his forepaws and commences to digging until we come at him with a rolled up newspaper or the can of rocks to make him stop. He stops in the front room and carries his digging equipment into the kitchen and starts over again.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt today and throw a couple of packs of DeCon under the house, just in case. There could be mice or rats down there; there could even be a ground hog; or it may be flying squirrels he told us where out on the porch last night. We didn't believe him. I turned on the porch light and there sat a big-eyed nocturnal gray colored prowler, sitting up on top of my hiking stick. Okay Tsuga, some times you are right and we are wrong. But we pay the mortgage so we'll have to ask you to abide by house rules. Dog House Rules. We pay, but you own it. Who are we kidding?

I Rest My Case

Orion Books

Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities By David Sobel and Citizens Dissent: Security, Morality and Leadership in an Age of Terror By Wendell Berry and David James Duncan. Check them out!

The Sky is Falling

There are those in high and powerful places who would convince us that anyone who believes that global warming is a fact and says so is just Chicken Little or the Boy Who Cried Wolf. Having followed the industrial energy-heat equation and its biological effects since the early seventies, I conclude that we are not in a storybook world, the warnings are not fables, and we'd better listen to the cries. But there is no prominent voice to make us perk up our ears.

As author Bill McKibben says, this failure to hear is "a failure of imagination, and in this way a literary failure. Global warming has still to produce an Orwell or a Huxley, a Verne or a Wells, a Nineteen Eighty-Four or a War of the Worlds, or in film any equivalent of On The Beach or Doctor Strangelove. It may never do so. It may be that because -—fingers crossed -— we have escaped our most recent fear, nuclear annihilation via the Cold War, we resist being scared all over again. Fear has its uses, but fear on this scale seems to be disabling, paralyzing. Anger has its uses too, but the rage of anti-globalization demonstrators has yet to do more than alienate majorities. Shame sends a few Americans shopping for small cars, but on the whole America, now the exemplar to the world, is very nearly unshameable."

McKibbens says that "the excretion of our economy has become the most important influence on the planet we were born into" and concludes..."Our ultimate sadness lies in the fact that we know that this is not a pre-ordained destiny; it isn’t fate. New ways of behaving, of getting and spending, can still change the future: there is, as the religious evangelist would say, still time, though not much of it, and a miraculous conversion is called for—Americans in the year 2000 produced fifteen per cent more carbon doxide than they had ten years before.

The contrast between two speeds is the key fact of our age: between the pace at which the physical world is changing and the pace at which human society is reacting to this change. In history, if it exists, we shall be praised or damned." read the essay in Granta

Build It and They Will Come

Sorry. That's way too cute a title for the real design expertise offered by writer, photojournalist, web designer and multi-talented friend of Fragments Philip Cartland. Philip is looking for a bit of informed feedback and I told him I'd be happy to impose on you nice folks for such. I'd ask that those of you who either produce web designs or might have sought those who do such creative work please take a look at Philips front page at EyeImagine.com and send comments here; he'll check them from time to time and thank y'all in advance for your responses. In particular, he offers these prompts to your replies:

• Is the fish graphically interesting?


• What seems incongruous, inconsistent?


• Is the relationship between the fish and title obvious or does it work at all?


• What don't you like about the whole thing?


• First response?


• Is the page too simple?


• Does the page entice a viewer to click on the thumbnail images?


• What about the font. Hate it? Suggest other?


• Layout, balance, proportion...do they work?


• What is the impression, i.e. is the producer of the page a designer or a fireman or what? Is it unconventional and if so does this bother? Like it don't like it Yes or No answer? Would you have your site designed by this person?

By all means, click the thumbs and take a look at his excellent pages, especially the Kenya and African Images to see Philips photography and related travel pages! I live vicariously through such world travelers, and they come to Fragments to watch our grass grow... a pretty equitable trade, eh?

Fish or Cut Bait

For the next two months, or six, or six years -- who knows?-- I'll be watching the cork floating there on the surface between the known and the possible, watching for nibbles. Nibbles would be more than I expect. If at any movement after these weeks of preparation, there would be the slightest motion as I wait, it would justify a little victory dance. If by some miracle that bobber would disappear from view, I'd know that the bait was, at least for short while, being carried down into the depths for further inspection and possible digestion. I would be beside myself with expectation while acknowledging the probability the bait will be spat out and the bobber will rise back to the inert and motionless surface. A moment when I might actually set the hook is beyond my comprehension. And yet I have to make myself believe it is possible, that there are fish in these waters who want what I've cast before them if only I have patience, learn their habits, cast and retrieve, cast and retrieve without losing the vision of pulling the prize to shore.

Oh. Sorry. I forgot myself. I throught up the title to this post and then lost myself in the metaphor it conjured up. What I'm telling you is that yesterday, after six months of burning hot and cold and encouraged by several Fragments friends and editorial comrades, I've taken the advice to "Just do IT!" and sent off thirty some-odd pages and the rest of the submissions material to a publisher for what might someday be a book (the working title is Fragments: Field Notes from an Appalchian Year.) There. Done. I've cast my bait. It is good to know it is finally out of my hands, and the temptation is to kick back and just passively wait. But there is the slight possibility that in two months, they may say "now send us the rest of it". So I guess yesterday was my one day of stretching back with the cane pole resting tween my toes, straw hat down over my eyes, hands behind my head relaxing in the sunshine watching that quill-float cast a perfect vertical shadow on calm waters.

Thanks to all who have been Fragments readers that have kept me wanting to write out the silly and beautiful and meaningful details of my odd life. Thanks especially to those who have encouraged, emboldened, exhorted and otherwise aggravated the daylights outta me when I lost confidence and lost the sense of excitement and forgot the thrill of fishing. And trust me, I will remember: It's not about the fish.

Cycles

When the kids were small, we enjoyed several books by David Macaulay, including one called "City". Particularly, I was mesmerized by his architectual cross-section of a metropolis, looking up at it from its roots, showing the detail of what was underground below it. His images revealed a world of things and processes that were going on under our urban feet, day and night, to keep our city working... a world that was necessary and real, but out of mind and sight. I never saw the city the same way after that.

We once moved to a small farm where there was pasture but no water for cattle to drink. The old spring sat against the edge of a shallow bowl that was filled with mud and long ago invaded by willows and overgrown by alders. The closest I have come to witnessing magic was in the finding of the source of the spring. Over the course of a month, I dug further and further back into the muddy bank, until finally one day, I reached limestone. But there was no water. The next day, in that spot was a damp patch. With more digging, a slow seep. Finally, a miraculous flow that fed a pond where the kids would float on rafts and we would iceskate in winter. Water out of stone, the nearest thing to magic I have known.

There is a 'city' of structure under my feet here in this very spot, many miles from any city. Carry Mr. Macaulay's camera down a thousand feet below our pasture on the banks of the headwaters of Goose Creek. See above the impervious core of ancient rock a vast blanket of rock full of tiny pores and cracks. Through it run creeks and rivers in the dark. Contained by it are canyons, caves and lakes filled with ancient rain. Two thirds of the world's fresh water is down here in this underground liquid world we never think of.

In places this spongy-watery rock shows itself to the world above ground, and cold subterranean water oozes and flows from clefts in the side of snow-covered hills. Finding each other in low places, united by gravity, ribbons of mountain springwater merge and flow together cutting their way through the very rock from which they were born.

See. This water of Goose Creek rushing past with such apparent intention. It will someday rise from sea to cloud to move again over mountains to saturate the very foundations of earth. From under these ridges will pour light and sound into creeks to fill those who will stand on these banks, careless above river worlds underground.

(This is a rerun from last January. I like to revisit the year and compare, see how seasons share common themes while each year has its own idiosyncracies and pleasures. The theme seems to be water in its various (mostly frozen) forms and you can expect more of the same for another six weeks or so. -- Fred)

Continuing Fred

Arrrgggh. I have until April to complete the mandatory continuing ed requirements to keep my Physical Therapist license. I have the choice at this point to drive to DC or Raleigh or Atlanta for face to face hours (including motel costs, auto expenses and meals) or-- the path of less resistance but considerable tedium-- to take a total of seven text-based courses online. I've completed three of them in the past two weeks. I mention this because they are open to the public and some of them might contain information you can use.

I'm working now on the Carpal Tunnel unit, for instance. Other topics, like Fibromyalgia, Ataxia (balance problems), Low Back Pain, and Total Hip Replacement may contain reliable, professional (non-commercial) information you need for yourself or someone who suffers these conditions. You don't have to pay for them unless you want the CE credit. Which I do. So I pay. But sitting here doing the coursework is way cheaper than spending three days in DC for a class in pressure sore management or urinary incontinence biofeedback (yes, those are PT topics, no thank you).

But I tell ya, this sure is cutting into my blogging time.

Slug Book: The X-rated Sequel

Leopard Slug Sex. You saw it here first, folks. (Nah, you might have seen it on BoingBoing). But isn't this just the kind of hard-hitting natural history drama you'd expect from your weird ol' Uncle Phred? I love it that this guy took the time to capture this Kama Sutra of slug sex for our edification. And you think about this mucoid love scene next time you're tempted to put salt on one of these beauties.

Now I want a confession: how many of you have salted slugs? It'll be good for you to get it off your chest. And some of you have pulled all the legs (except for one) off a Grand-Daddy Long-legs and one of you for sure has put a cherry bomb under a box turtle. You'll sleep better tonight if you'll clear your conscience of these old crimes against nature. We're all ears....

Fragmented and Photographically Frustrated!

Help PDQ! I'm trying to get two portrait-oriented images 4" x 6" side by side on a piece of glossy photo paper and Photoshop is not being cooperative.

Paint Shop Pro used to make it so easy! Here is a download page (supposedly) to download PSP but I can't make it work. Can you? Is it my popup blocker or is this a sham page?

I need to send these two images (and a few more in the same orientation) off to a publisher tomorrow. Can anybody help me do this simple little trick? It is taking way too much time! Photoshop, surely you can do this tiny task for me?!

Burning temptations

I was on the verge of becoming openly boastful-- impressed enough with my own false strength to brag on myself to the blog-reading world. I thought that finally I had freed myself from the demon of temptation. In my arrogance and pride, I thought myself resolute and strong and above the prickling desires that come into my life each morning for the past several months. Almost, I was free of this awful habit that has visited me as I kneel there on the carpeted floor in a dimly lit, cold room at that ungodly early hour each day.

But no. I am weak. I cannot stop myself, though for a few days, I won this battle. Today, sadly, I have given in once more and know that this habit holds a hideous grip on me. Please allow me to confess it to you as partial absolution. I hope you will understand.

For two days, I resisted. But this morning, once again, I succumbed. Why, oh why is it that the local newspaper holds no interest to me until the very moment I prepare to crumple it into a loose ball to start the morning fire? What kind of voice comes from the rag-paper pages of court dockets and prize tomatoes and accident reports and high school sports that compels me-- just at that moment there in front of the open woodstove door when those pages are about to serve a higher purpose in our lives -- to stop in mid-crumple and read every last word that held not the least interest to me when that paper was news months before?

But hey. This morning, the kindling was more than any mortal could have resisted: The New Years compilation of all the New Baby pictures from the county for the past year! Nobody could have resisted such as this, don't you agree? There was Yoda. ET. Winston Churchill. Sonny Bono. The Emperor of Japan. Tiny simians of all sorts. Dwarves, munchins, elves, Wookies. Alfalfa from Our Gang. And a miniature, chinless Dick Cheney.

And so I admit that I am weak. But someday yet, I may be able to say "I came, I saw, I crumpled".

Good News, Bad News

Chris Lydon interviewing Tim Berners-Lee draws out some wonderful insights from the man who "invented" the web. What are his hopes for it?

"The general public is seizing on the Web as a way to have a conversation," he said in our own chat this week. "That for me is very inspiring. It doesn't tell me something about the Web. It tells me something about humanity. The hope for humanity is that people do want to work things out. They do want to come to common understandings, and they will do it by constantly refining the way they've expressed their own ideas--and occasionally, on a good day, listening to the way other people have expressed theirs." Tim Berners-Lee quoted in Lydon News.

On the other hand, you might not want to put all your eggs in the email basket if Fred Langa's recent study of 10,000 tracked emails is on the mark, and it probably is. He tells the tale in Information Week.

You're losing E-mails. It's almost certain that some significant percentage of your legitimate outbound E-mails aren't getting to their destinations; or that some significant percentage of your legitimate inbound E-mails are being lost before you ever see them.

When I say "significant," I don't mean a few. I mean something like 40%, or even more in some cases. And I'm not talking about losing junk mail. I'm talking about the loss of totally valid, non-spam/non-junk E-mail.

Think about that for a minute: As many as four out of 10 of your serious E-mails--the sort you might exchange with co-workers, friends, business associates, or customers--may not be making it to their intended destinations.

Burning Bush

January snow and rime ice overnight have set the world to cold flame in first light.

Creature Feature

We were sitting at the table, the wife and I, as we occasionally attempt to do for a meal together when the dog yelped and shot towards us from the direction of the hearth as if he'd been goosed with an icicle. We laughed and brushed it off as just another of his canine hallucinations. Tsuga is blessed, it seems, with a keen awareness of things some dogs ignore-- a chickadee in a pine tree two hundred yards away or Colonel Potter's horse trotting on a ten-year-old VCR'd MASH rerun on the TV screen are major events, fully noted. Sometimes his perceptions take on a life of their own, like now. You silly dog.

But wait. Maybe he did hear something. I stuck my head out the door. There it was, sure 'nuff-- a rustling sound-- it was coming from inside somewhere. By now the dog was really excited because he could tell that I was getting spooked too. There is was again. Ann and I could hear it but we couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from. Then, not two feet from me-- something flashed behind the glass of the woodstove. (This is our backup stove that is rarely used, and was cold, thankfully, on this occasion.)

Yep. This creature yet unnamed had found its way into the chimney (somehow bypassing the wire grill that caps the top of it) and down the smoke pipe and into the castiron firebox. From the bowels of the dark cold stove it could see the light in the room and wanted out-- out into the room where Tsuga was now pronking from his front to his back paws and back again like a broncho on speed, mortified. Something was trying to come out of the stove and get him! The horrorible beast? Seems it is a tiny Winter Wren.

Okay. Houston, it may be small, but we do have a problem. How will we sleep tonight with the pitterpatter of little wings in our bedroom? But Fred the Zoology major has an idea: we'll put a big black trash bag over the stove door, open it slowly and when the bird shoots out of the stove and into the bag, we'll have him and be able to take him out --past the waiting cat -- and release him. If there is a next time, I will do this little maneuver in the dark, because as soon as we cracked the stove door the bird concluded light = the way out, and he was right. Right out into the room.

He slipped past the bag and commenced to frantically explore first one room, then another through the bottom floor of the house, flying up around the kitchen canister lights, then out to the front room perching for a brief breather on the spider plant, now zooming back toward Ann who dove for the couch just as the bird circled the table where just moments before, we were engaged in elegant dining for two.

The tiny thing knocked itself silly against every window on the bottom floor, but it still refused to go through the large cold-sucking empty space of the open back door. At last, exhausted, it fluttered down on the coat rack shelf and I was able to get my hand over it and cradle it there unharmed. Good. In years past, I've had to resort to the tennis racquet backhand for bats and birds that somehow got inside but who would not be caught, ever; and I've felt terrible about solving the problem that way.

If God knows when sparrows fall, he probably has some kind of tracking system for wrens as well-- this tiny beating heart in my hands, soft and light as a cotton ball, throbbing with a white nameless fear and wanting nothing but to shelter from the bitter cold and perhaps tomorrow, find more insects wintering behind our back chimney. For a few moments, we shared the same space, this little bird and I, felt each others warmth and uncertainty. In the end, the encounter did neither of us any lasting harm, but it works out better if I visit his space than having him come into ours. Ann feels more strongly about this than I do. And I think Tsuga's going to have to see a therapist for phobia counseling.

Center of the Media Universe: US

AIDS killed three million people around the world last year, more than two million of them in Africa. The three major U.S. television network evening news programs devoted a combined total of 39 minutes to the problem in 2003.

The American Geophysical Union and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences both concluded last year that greenhouse gas emissions almost certainly contribute to global warming which is altering the Earth's weather and climate in potentially catastrophic ways. The three evening network news devoted a total of 15 minutes to the issue in 2003.

...civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which is believed to have claimed three million lives over the past five years, was covered for a total of ... five minutes.

Over the same year, the United States invaded and occupied Iraq, an operation in which some 8,000 people may have been killed, the same toll as that imposed by AIDS in a single day. The three major U.S. television network evening news shows devoted a combined total of 4,047 minutes to Iraq in 2003.

Dorman says that the U.S.-centered agenda illustrated by the ADT statistics underscores the "narcissism of American news." Hallin agrees: "Americans are given the sense they are some kind of unique victims and heroes of the world; everything revolves around them."
By Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service -- January 6, 2004 -- From AlterNet

To Walk the Talk

From a recent family email. As a walker, this quiet account of a last day of imaginary walks was especially poignant to me and I thought it might also speak to some of you.

Hi Friends,

A. actually passed away yesterday--but it was a wonderful, God-planned day. I got to spend great time holding her hand and talking to her, listening to her music and taking imaginary flower-picking walks. She wanted to go walking, so we went in our minds--God let me use my drama-imagination practice as we imagined where we were. She was really into it--either the cancer itself or the drugs had her hallucinating, but in a good way since she really brightened up after some awful pain the night before. And it seemed that every psalm I read had something about walking in it--she wanted to go for walks that day, but her legs were too weak and couldn't hold her, so our scriptures and imaginations were especially wonderful. In all of this, P. and I thought this might be her last day and that God had sent us to be there, with her and J. and that was true. 

God arranged at the last hour that her son came by and sat with her, her best friend brought in dinner for all of us (not knowing she was dying) and we had each had time with her that day that was unusually good. She just quietly passed away, sleeping, at 3:45.

Thank you for praying....

The service is Friday and we should be back Sat. night.

M.

Virginia History Near Home

And so in the spirit of expanding my tiny realm of topic matter just a mite, pictured above is a place I've passed on 460 between Shawsville and Salem now for four years. The stately and substantial brick home had often caught my eye as I zoomed along below the looming Poor Mountain, but until this week, I had never stopped to read the historical marker or get a closer look at the mansion. I knew only that the place was known as "Fotheringay".

A year ago when taking an Appalachian Studies class at Virginia Tech, I learned a little more about it from a woman whose grandparents had been slaves on the old plantation. The elderly and very eloquent and well traveled black woman who came and spoke to our class had grown up near Fotheringay. I was excited to find someone who could tell me more about this place so close to where we live, and so I approached her after class.

"We don't speak its name in my family" she said with a look of pain on her face. "The place has a history of cruel treatment to my people. The man who built the house is buried there, standing up so he can keep watch over his slaves". I had thought this was just a local folktale told and retold to hold up the evils of slavery so it might not happen again. But I came to learn that the story is true. Or almost true.

The man was Colonel George Hancock, born in 1754 and died in 1820 on his plantation estate below the mountain there near present-day Shawsville. He was father-in-law to William Clark, brother of explorer George Rogers Clark. He was aide-de-camp to Count Casimir Pulaski in the Revolutionary War. Fotheringay, built in about 1796, was named after the English castle where Mary, Queen of Scots, was executed. Colonel Hancock was a member of congress after the war, traveling up and down the Wilderness Road between Fotheringay and Washington, DC. And sure enough, when he died, he was buried-- either standing, or more likely, sitting. In the picture I took this week, you can see the mausoleum as a white spot above the house. I had never seen it until I stopped and looked for it after all these times driving past it.

In an old manuscript we find this account of the vault on the mountainside, crediting the more logical theory of Miss Edmundson that Colonel Hancock was placed in the vault in a sitting position: "High on the hillside overlooking Happy Valley where flow the headwaters of Roanoke River, in a white mausoleum he had himself caused to be excavated from solid rock, the earthly remains of Colonel George Hancock and his daughter, Julia, were laid and to his day the darkies of the region say with trembling, 'De Cunnel he set up dah in a stone chair so's he cud look down de valley and see his slaves at work."

There is considerably more about Fotheringay (including early pictures of the house and the grave) and more about Colonel Hancock's strange burial posture and his history on this page, from which the excerpt above was taken.

Well, Here It Is…

I'm crawling the lists of literary journals and online magazines, hunting a home for something I have written-- anything I have written that anyone anywhere will take-- so I can heap up a few writing credits and be given a first, much less a second look by a book publisher. What an incredible time sink. "What am I doing? What are my motives? Where does all this angst and excitement and ego and energy to create words come from, anyway?" I tend to ask myself this kind of navel-gazing question especially on weekends and rainy days. Or in this case, a snowy one.

Writer Richard Ford (found in my browsing in Granta) takes a look at "where writing comes from" and hits a few nerves in his answers. Some Snippets, but read all of it if you're prone to ask these writerly questions:

... Plenty of writers for plenty of centuries have furrowed their brows over this question—where does it come from, all this stuff you write?

... It may be that this investigation stays alive in America partly because of that principally American institution, the creative writing course—of which I am a bona fide graduate, and about which Europeans like to roll their eyes.

... How we do what we do and why we do it may just be a subject a certain kind of anxious person can't help tumbling to at a time in life when getting things written at all is a worry, and when one's body of work is small and not very distinguishable from one's private self, and when one comes to find that the actual thing one is writing is not a very riveting topic of conversation over drinks.

... And writers, being generally undercharged in self-esteem and forever wanting more attention for their work, are often quite willing to become their work's exponent if not its actual avatar. I remember an anecdote about a male writer I know who, upon conducting an interested visitor to his desk overlooking the Pacific, is reported to have whispered as they tiptoed into the sacred, sun-shot room, 'Well, here it is. This is where I make the magic.'

Drank Me a Dope

... in a paper poke. Which of course means I fetched and imbibed a Pepsi in a sack. So. What do you call a canned drank, anyways? See where you fall in the Great Soda-Coke-Pop Controversy. Great maps here. This is science of the finest stripe (anybody know where that figure of speech came from? I don't.)

And whilst we are at it, what do you call the mid-day meal? It's not breakfast or supper. But is it lunch? or dinner? Let's consult the authoritative Cliffside lexicon of local usage (Cliffside is/was in North Carolina, but these words and phrases are of general rural-southern usage so that it is universally applicable, provided your universe stays south of the M-D line). Here we find the term used in the following manner: We'll eat dinner right after the 11:00am church service.

Remembering Cliffside is an altogether wonderful celebration of local history and culture, and is implemented nicely. I just discovered it. But I'll go back for inspiration. And to bresh up on my pronounciating.

Apologies, Leonardo

The Da Vinci Code has not come to a theatre near me. Natch. There are no theatres near me. But I've read the hype and been irritated at what yet again seems to be a too-easy-belief in conspiracy theories-- this time against the commonly understood relationship between Christ and Mary Magdalene and a reinterpreation of the extra-biblical Holy Grail. This latest craze is dressed up in narrative creatively calculated for mass appeal with a trace of mock-historicity AND a shiny cover on Amazon, To the masses who will devour anything they see on a best-seller list, this stuff is way more interesting than that outdated eternal God stuff between those boring black leather covers. And this makes me sad. Seems by and large, we set our standards for entertainment and "truth" very, very low and there are people getting rich off it.

Though few may care to separate wheat from chaff when it comes to "entertainment", Dismantling The Da Vinci Code by Sandra Miesel looks at some specific distortions made by Dan Brown, author of the book that has sold more than 4.5 million copies since its release in March 2003. For the even smaller number that want to look at greater depth into what is more commonly believed about the personalities and events of Biblical and early post-Biblical times (including Gnosticism from which Brown draws many of his "facts")-- this page looks at

• the historicity and authority of the Bible over and against non-canonical works


• the nature and validity of non-canonical gospels, including The Gnostic Gospels


• Jesus' claims to deity and the early Church's understanding of it, predating the Nicene Council


• Biblical understanding of Christ's view of women like Mary Magdalene


• an obliquely related topic, the Bible code

If anything is more inflammatory than politics, it certainly must be religion. I offer these links FYI and now you know one more in an enormously long list of recent books I will not be reading. I'm not prepared to make further attacks or defense on either side of this topic and haven't read all the articles linked at LeaderU (though I have found their material to be carefully put forth and scholarly in the past.) It's just what came off the top of my head this Saturday morning before my second cup of coffee.

This is just a test

Please note. This is just a test. I am sorry to put you through this. Bear with us.

Had this been a real nuclear attack, you would now be floating over the Atlantic Ocean in an atomized spray of particles of the former you.

This extended text should appear and collapse in place. If not, I will bend over and kiss my blog temporarily goodbye until such time as I can unscrew what I have managed to obfuscate. Doh.

Neighbors

We haven't many. On our four mile road, there are eleven dwellings, two delapidated and empty, one delapidated and occupied for beverage consumption purposes, a few old places that have been restored, a few more old places as-is, one cabin that lacks heat and running water but abounds with cats and one rooster that lives inside during the winter. Our nearest neighbors live in the little house pictured here-- when they are not in their house in Richmond. There are family ties to the old place on Goose Creek. Behind the house are three gravestones that include the father of the Boone brothers who built our house not long after the Civil War. In the snow, it is altogether a most pleasant serenity out here. This morning, we had the whole road to ourselves. It is still snowing gently and life is good.

In the top picture, you can barely see the house as the creek goes upstream, bearing to the right and out of the picture. The creek follows the road (above it on the right). The house can be reached by a footbridge and a ford (as you see here) across the creek. Until the early 1970's our state maintained road was the streambed. Sometimes in wet weather, it still seems that it is.

If you walk on upstream and along the road another quarter mile, you'll be at our place. Matter of fact, you'll see from one point the creek to your left and the pasture ahead, just like in my header at present, above at the top of the page. Stop by and have some hot cider. Take your shoes off at the door. Please.

BOVINE PESTILENCE STRIKES COUNTY!

You won't read this anywhere else for days. Blogs once again score first on all the big news items. This direct from Floyd County, where one lone blogger keeps his arthritic thumb on the pulse of a thriving and fast paced community of grass growers and grass eaters (take that any way you want to). We have us the early stages of an epidemic.

INDIGNANT COW DISEASE. Little known to science, this insidious pestilence happens far from human observation but is no less a scourge to its victims. Onset most often occurs when the sufferer becomes tangled in barbed wire while stretching its neck across boundaries for one more chew of Giant Burdock, Bull Thistle or other delicacies. Once a WhiteFace got her hoof stuck in an old boot and suffered terrible shame until it was removed by EMS personnel. And of course there is the constant opprobrium of being trailed every summer day by a cloud of biting flies that predisposes this breed to the disease.

Pictured here is a disturbing, recently-found mutant strain of ICD. I'm happy to report that the source of this grotesque form of the disease was quickly discovered (parked near the corn crib behind the dilapidated homeplace in the holler) and the irritant successfully removed. The cow is now restored to her usual contented state but is in therapy for PTSD (Pasture Trauma Stress Disorder). Full story at six.

Little Forest Goes to the Doctor

It seems like just yesterday our little Forester was a spotless zero-mileage neonate here at the Subaru nursery at the foot of Tinker Mountain. Now, it's two months old, covered with Goose Creek dust and the interior cluttered with empty CD cases, Cheerios between the seat and console, and sixteen dollars of spare change gangling and sloshing around in the ashtray. Unfortunately, it was born with a birh defect and we are back today for a little minor surgery. Yes, the mirror came out of its place in the visor the first time Ann pulled it down on our way home from the dealership on Day One. So much for workmanship. At least he had all his little fingers and toes.

And, while I find it hard to believe and even harder to admit it, I am blogging from the Service Department. They make two offices available for work-a-holics that can't wait to get important surfing done while they're away from work. I brought a book and a magazine to read, but it looks like this cheap little cubicle with a ten year old computer, Windows 98 and a scroll-less mouse; and what -- maybe a 14.4 modem? -- it is the only place to sit while waiting. So I don't see that I had much choice, really. So I BE MOBLOGGING! Yip!

Yes, Annie Dillard's Tinker Mountain is only a mile away, sad and gray under it's spare second-growth forest looking like a mangy dog of a mountain. And like most high places anymore, it fairly bristles with prongs and spikes and stilted and winged towers and antennae of every variety. The mountain is hardly the stuff of inspiration, even in a mystic that can find wonder in a waterbug or a frog or muskrat. Maybe Tinker Creek is altogether pristine and enchanted. I'll pretend that this is so. Maybe I should walk over to the creek while little Forest is getting his braces fixed.

Or mabe I'll just do my Gump Impersonations for you: "Ah may not be a smaht mayun, Jenn-ee, buht ah know what love ee-uz". Thank you. Thank you very much.

That's funny. I just went in my bookbag for a pen and realized that the book I brought to finish is Annie Dillard's "The Writing Life". How strange. You know, life is like a box a' chok-lits-- you... oh never mind.

Hey Guys! I'm Gonna Get Tutored!

Well, tomorrow is the day the boy loses his jewels. Maybe. The weather looks like a possible issue so he may keep them for another week or two. Thanks to all who wrote to tell us what we already knew: that neutering makes sense and is the right thing to do all around. I just dread the trip to town and back with him, especially if we get more snow tonight. I thought I'd stick in this picture I took a few days ago, just to disabuse you of the notion that Tsuga is a nice puppy. Here he stands at the boundary of the "forbidden room" (with carpet). He is just before barking (really more of a "gosh darn you turn around and look at me YIP) because I was ignoring him while writing, of all things!

The surgery could be more involved than the routine neutering since one testicle is still in the abdominal cavity (possibly) and will involve deeper incisions than the usual external clipping. Do they have to wear that plastic collar after the operation to keep them from biting out the stitches?

Oooh, I see another picture coming after Tsuga is tutored and is wearing his graduation collar. I wonder if anybody can tell me where the title for this post came from? Anyone? I alway assume that my favorite cartoons have universal recognition; but I suppose not everybody shares my sense of humor. Right, mom?

Let's Get Clinical

Talk about your indirect lead-ins to a post. And the title works not at all if you never heard Olivia Newton John's down-and-dirty "Lets Get Physical". Dear Minerva, I heard it over and over... "Let me hear your body talk" as slender, lithe and energetic Ann gyrated to her favorite aerobics workout record in 1981. She'd finish sweating to this number and others (like the Jane Fonda Workout Record that I threatened to burn if I heard it one more time!) and get ready to go to work. As she walked out the door in her long white pharmacist lab coat she'd be singing "Let's get clinical, clinical". And that brings me to my point (why yes I do actually start out with one regardless of my ultimate pointless destinations):

I've gotten analytical about Fragments reader habits. I looked at visit records and wondered if tweaking to our editorial policy was in order. You tell me. Please.

Exactly one out of five readers yesterday visited more than the "front page". This means that one in five took time to click to "continue reading Far from the Tree". That's okay. It was a longish piece. Many of mine violate the blogger attention span of 8-10 seconds reading per weblog before clicking away like a honeybee to find another bloom in another garden. The question I'm asking is: Does the truncated post "to be continued" discourage you from reading a longer post? Is scrolling down to scan or ignore all of a long post on the front page preferable to leaving page one, finishing on page two, and coming back to page one? How do you handle this decision on your weblog?

A year ago, I had some longer yarns and broke them up into "installments" to accommodate reader dwell-times. I've noticed a lot of people also use "newspaper-length" paragraphs-- sound-bites, to encourage readers to not give up in the middle of a long (and legitimate) full paragraph.

That's all. Just wondering if there is a reader preference to go one way or the other. I'll end now, since the average reader left at the end of paragraph two headed for a patch of nectar-filled blossoms over at BlueRidgeBlog or Fishbucket. Ya'll come back now.

Crystal Goblets

In uncustomary fashion, I'm going to do the photographic equivalent of eating SugarSnaps right off the trellis or picking a tomato from the vine and eating it on the spot. While this one is still warm from the camera, I'll just enjoy posting it minutes after it was taken. What a luxury we have available to us in this medium, don't you agree? To see beauty, news, history being made, and put it before the world in minutes!

There will likely be plenty of opportunity to watch the ice sculpt itself this week with temps not pulling out of the low thirties. If I come upon something too good to keep to myself, I'll share.

War Games

Your kids good a combat games? They're a natural, then, to be key players in this kind of war. It gets more and more like a game... for everybody but the grunts on the ground.

Falling Far From the Tree

We've been parents since 1973. In the early nineties, that role became an intermittent one, and it's been only an erratic part-time position since 1997 when, at the same time the kids left the nest, so did we. They went off to college or grad school, we left secure jobs and a comfortable home on the edge of town for the hinterlands of Virginia and eventually found our way here to the relative inaccessibility of Goose Creek. The two "kids" still navigate here from time to time, usually singly, occasionally staying a few days and always, too soon, going back where they came from-- more than a thousand miles away for the both of them in recent years. And during those rare days they are in the house, it is as if I were in uniform again-- whatever it is that constitutes a father's uniform. All of a sudden again I have a function, a role that comes back naturally like riding a bicycle or shooting a basketball. You think it has all left you and then you find how comfortable and genuine it seems to be someone's father again. And by the time it becomes as familiar as the clothes on your back, they are off once more, for a few months, a year-- who knows how long? We put our son on the plane this afternoon, knowing the last leg of his trip is not going to happen as scheduled because of the weather, and he'll be sleeping in the Seattle Airport tonight. And the house is as quiet as a mausoleum.

It is Wednesday, and Nate, rumpled under the best of circumstances, is right this moment a sleeping mass of wrinkled clothes and wild exuberant hair, curled up in a ball on the floor of the Seattle terminal wrapped around his bookbag carry-on, hoping he'll wake up when they call his flight to board. Today, we'll go around and make beds, reshelve old Golden Books and Calvin and Hobbes and Gary Larsen books scattered where he was reading them, remembering. I'll put his (B-team) guitar back in the case and feel a kind of sad treachery-- like Cinderella putting the singing harp into a dungeon, ignored. But Nate is the music maker and a silent guitar on the stand downstairs is just a mute reminder of the music we've had these past weeks. We have some tunes of his on disc that we will listen to when we can steel ourselves to the miles and months between us. It was good to have him home, and somewhere, under the clutter of his leaving and our mundane lives left pleasantly suspended while he was here, there are good memories-- family stories that sleep in perfect detail until one of the kids comes home to lift them from the archives for retelling. Nate brought this one to the surface as we rode home from the airport on his arrival three weeks ago.

We were arriving back home after a long trip, maybe coming back from Biloxi where Ann's folks lived right on the bay and the kids and their cousins caught squeeky catfish and the occasional flounder. Exhausted from the ten hour drive, we pulled into the driveway at our suburban home in Birmingham where we lived for two years while I was a PT student. We all began moving our traveling gear, zombie-like, into the house. Nathan was asleep in the back seat. We unpacked around him. Finally, the car was empty and we were ready for a quick bowl of cereal and bed and another furious day in the big city.

But nine-year-old Nathan in the back seat no longer pretended to be asleep, but he would not get out of the car. "Nathan, come inside now. We're got to get you ready for school tomorrow." Mysteriously, he said "I think I'll just stay in here for a while". Whatever. After a half hour, there he sat in the dark, a tiny fixture in an otherwise empty car. We were beginning to grow tired of indulging his quirky fantasies, whatever might possess him to stay alone out there for so long. Finally, the picture emerged. Oy.

It was somewhere about Montgomery-- a hour and a half south of home-- in a period when all nine year old travelers are getting to the peak of antsiness and prone to do or say most anything in their fatigue and boredom. It was in this state of mindlessness that the small boy poked his small index finger through the finger-sized hole in the flat buckle of the seatbelt. It was at that moment that he had his first experience with one of his father's favorite bromides that states "It's easier to get into something than to get out of it"-- a warning that has served both parent and male child well over the intervening years. The more he struggled to free the detained digit, the more it swelled. A human monkey-puzzle. Monkeys: One. Humans: Let's just leave him there til morning. I've got to get some sleep.

In the end, we decided against bringing him a blanket and a box of dry Cheerios to let him consider that his actions have consequences while we slept. I cut the tough nylon belt so that now he was free to come inside with the cumbersome metal plate permanently fixed to his dominant right hand. Had it not been for the swelling, I think I would have insisted that he go to school that way as a valuable lesson exemplifying another bromide.. "be sure your sins will find you out". But this was no sin. Just, as we call it in our family, stupididity. And what were we going to do about this problem at hand on a Sunday night? No, soap didn't work. Ice didn't take down the swelling. We were going to have to go to plan B: knock on the next door neighbor's door and make it their problem too.

The neighbor had tools. We were just itinerant students traveling light and had one hammer and screwdriver (after briefly considering using one or both, we ruled them out as the tools of choice in this particular situtation.) Judy and Jeff were gracious when we showed up at their door. They wanted to, but they didn't. Laugh. The entourage followed the little retard down to the basement. A chair was pulled over to the work bench for him to stand on, and the buckle secured in a vise, and the arduous process began: 1) a few strokes of a triangle file; 2) a short soaking in cold water to cool the metal from the heat of friction and control swelling in the fat little finger; and 3) Judy poking a piece of cookie in Nate's mouth saying "you poor l'il thing, you". After 45 minutes of this, the finger came free.

What set off this wave of nostalgia is that we saved the buckle as a reminder. There are some things you never, ever want your children to forget. He never has.

So Nate, wherever you are, son, watch where you put your finger. Don't take candy from strangers at the airport. Please comb your hair at least monthly. And do come back to see us when you can. I sort of like wearing my father's hat.

It Has Come to Our Attention

I don't usually blog forwarded cutesy emails, but there is a family related joke about the deceased and my daughter sent this to us this morning. These are sad times in the First household; it will help if you share our grief:

Please join me in remembering a great icon of the entertainment community. The Pillsbury Doughboy died yesterday of a yeast infection and complications from repeated pokes in the belly. He was 71. Doughboy was buried in a lightly greased coffin. Dozen of celebrities turned out to pay their respects including Mrs. Butterworth, Hungry Jack, the California Raisins, Betty Crocker, the Hostess Twinkies and Captain Crunch. The grave site was piled with flours of every kind. Aunt Jemina delivered the eulogy and lovingly described Doughboy as a figure who never knew how much he was kneaded.

Doughboy rose quickly in show business, but his later life was filled with turnovers and critics often panned him. He was not considered a very smart cookie, wasting much of his dough on half-baked schemes. Despite being a little flaky at times he still, as a crusty old man, was considered a roll model for millions.

Doughboy is survived by his wife, Play Dough, two children, John Dough and Jane Dough, plus one they had in the oven. He is also survived by his elderly father Pop Tart.

The funeral was held at 3:50 for about 20 minutes.

Well I Swan

... as my childhood best friend's mom would say. Being southern and genteel, she'd never say I swear, don't ya know. So. I swan, I never had any idea there was such a publication as the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. In order to submit one's writing to this august journal, they require the submission to include....

... your southern legitimacy statement. Think of it along these lines – inspire us with your wisdom and insight –

• Why are you southern?


• Why could you be southern?


• What do you think is southern?


• Do you eat grits? Why are instant grits an abomination?


• Is your mama an icon?


• Do you have yard dogs?

If you leave the South, the South never leaves you.

And here is my little statement of legitimacy...

My first memories are southern smells: of wisteria and zoysia grass and summer ozone lifting from warm sidewalks after a storm. In those days the drone of cicadas rose and fell while the front porch glider squeaked back and forth and I drifted off to sleep with my head in momma's lap and feet in grammaws. We went barefoot and pretty well lived in our bathing suits from March to November in Birmingham and caught lightning bugs in mayonnaise jars months before they appear here in the "south" of Virginia. We played outside until dinner was ready -- always something fried and with ketchup-- then went back out 'til way past dark, hiding and seeking, peeing our pants with the thrill of summer nights. My internal rhythms will always be southern, and for that, I am thankful, even though some of the external markers of my heritage have faded.

I lost my drawl when I went to college (Auburn) and mixed with a more cosmopolitan crowd. I moved from the deepest south because-- I have to confess-- I couldn't stand the heat, so I got out of the kitchen. After grad school we moved to the mountains of southwest Virginia where we have real winters and cool summers and not so many biggie-sized mosquitoes. Now, I think of myself primarily as "mountain southern" because my preference is for higher and cooler places, and for maybe not quite so many rank and file pine trees that grow in rows acre after acre-- the 'new southern forest' disturbs me. But I miss the sweetgum and winter-blooming wildflowers. Sometimes I even long to smell the Kudzu, and this is a sure sign I've not lost my southern upbringing.

The house we live in now (in rural southwest Virginia) had two outhouses (his and hers, I suppose) the first time we saw it. We have a porch dog and a porch cat. In the corner of the county where we live (there's a single traffic light in the entire county) there are six people per square mile and the pace of life is slow-- a very familiar cadence for a boy who still carries Alabama in his bones. When you pass a stranger on the country roads in their 4WD truck or Subaru (the only choices with our winters), both you and they lift one or two fingers off the steering wheel in a neighborly wave. It's the way things are done around here.

SLUGS

Our son has been rummaging around in the ancient achives of his and his sister's old books. He found the paper jacket insert that went with The Hobbit L.P. (1978, with music sung by Glenn Yarborough, voices of John Huston, Orson Bean, Otto Preminger, Hans Conried, Don Messick, John Stephenson, Brother Theodore, Richard Boone.) There was a smashed twenty year old Fruit Loop petrified in the middle of the book. Talk about family archeology.

And then, his favorite of all time, Nate found SLUGS...A book by David Greenberg, Illustrated by Victoria Chess. How could any family get by without it. The first three of 28 verses ... but you gotta see the illustrations.

Swallow a Slug
By its tail or its snout
Feel it slide down
Feel it climb out

Nibble on its feetsies
Nibble on its giblets
Nibble on its bellybutton
Nibble on its riblets

Breakfast? Slug juice
Slug soup's great for lunch
Fry 'em like potatoes
Love the way they crunch

Angry Red Planet

Watch the Rover Mission to Mars Animation (ReaLVideo). Pretty amazing stuff.

Sedimentation

Irregular patches of lacey snow remain here and there, protected in shadow between tufts of pasture grass. In cold of mornings before the sun comes over the ridge, thin remainders of early December's snows are frozen and sharp, brittle and airy, fixed like soap bubbles suspended or crystal spittlebug froth. By afternoon many of these white blotches have become soft, clear and wet, and the next day many have vanished. But some will last through the winter in places where cold sinks into the shadows of the valley.

By the end of February the persistent remnants of first snows will be almost covered in fallen detritus: tiny bracts and bud scales pushed out ahead of spring's leaves to come; sloughed particles of bark come down from the tree branches and twigs; angular stones and clumps of frost-heaved humus tumbled down from the freeze-thaw on steep hillsides; sprinklings settled out of the air like dandruff-- thistle silks launched in September from wild lettuce and milkweeds and the dust of a tilled and drying Oklahoma field.

It seems no small wonder then in light of this organic dusting made visible by the snow that ancient artifacts-- even entire civilizations-- are discovered covered, beneath the surface as if they had been pulled down into soft soil. The truth of the matter is, the earth lays down over those old things, one bract and one thistle silk, one mote at a time, layer upon inch upon meter of the ubiquitous and unnoticed, inexorable sediments of time.

It would be a good end. To lie down under Rhododendrons, and breathe your last, peacefully, hands folded across your chest. And over the months and the years you are interred in a shroud of fallen leaves and winter snows, thistle down and cosmic dust, inhaled by the earth.

Water Music

January Thaw

Having grown up in tropical Alabama, I had never heard of the "January Thaw" until we moved to Virginia. I was skeptical when my new neighbors first told me about it. We had already had flurries in October, a few light coverings of snow on November mornings, and two serious snows before Christmas that first year living this far north. Why would winter pull its punches in January after it already had revved up its full Arctic fury? But sure enough, just as the natives had predicted the first week of the new year was a miraculous if short-lived respite from the cold. The snow melted, mostly, and we could stand on the porch and feel the pale sun's warmth on our bare arms in a dead, crisp-but-not-cold calm. We are having this year's thaw this week, and are emerging from hibernation to enjoy it.

The warm rain started sometime last night and came and went until early afternoon. Just after the mailman made tracks up the muddy road, the clouds pulled apart and the low winter sun lifted just above the treetops for an hour, then sank into forest on the western ridge. The valley floor gets only about six hours of sun on these short days when the sun is so low on the southern horizon that even weeks of winter sunshine have not melted all the snow in the northy shadows of the ridges and the old barn.

In the afternoon as the sun disappears (for us-- our neighbors up top will have it for another hour or two) and cold air flows down the canyon of Goose Creek, heavy, looking for the low places to rest. Gathered over the water and the snow of shadows, the creek's wet aura sometimes shows suddenly as a thin fog over the shining water. I go there into the midst of it and breathe deep, storing up the very air of a warm January day in my memory and my lungs. Next week, the cold winds and the snow and the hard frozen earth will be back. But the few days of the January thaw are enough to give a body hope.

Finally! And In Our Lifetimes!

An End to Evil. And also possibly France, and North Korea, Iran, Saudia Arabia and maybe democrats. I would point out this new book is by "influential neoconservatives and Washington insiders David Frum and Richard Perle" who "articulate what well may become the Republican agenda for the war on terrorism, revealing where America is most vulnerable and outlining tough strategies for unconditional victory." Barnes and Noble

I don't know. The title seems a bit overstated for my taste. But then, I don't do politics. I'd be interested to know it if concerns those readers out there that do follow politics that these men have a direct pipe to the president. Other discussions of the book here and here.

Salubrious Salutations

Okay. I have this friend, see. And he is (bless his heart) determined to try to get a little book published. He tells me that he is ready to send off his manuscript (he feels so writerly when he tells me about his "manuscript" like it was the Magna Carta or something) and here's the deal:

The publisher's guidelines say "Bumpkin Publishing has an acquisitions committee, which includes several staff members. There is no specific editor to whom you can address queries or with whom you can discuss your manuscript." "Mail all submissions to the Acquisitions Committee"....etc etc.

And so, my friend's question is, on the cover letter, what goes in the salutation: Dear Members of the Acquisition Committee? Yuk, he says. Or Dear Sirs and/or Madams and/or Gender-Neutral Individuals (Not That I'm Saying There's Anything Wrong With That)?

I told him I'd ask around and see what kind of advice you writerly publishing types might suggest for the opening lines of the introduction to his... ta da... manuscript. I think it's probably best to humor him at this very vulnerable point without necessarily encouraging him too much, so any help would be appreciated.

A Dog and His Diversions

So, here's the boy after a few months of adjusting to the moving water of the creek. You may remember, at first he was terrified of it. He is no longer afraid, and he particularly loves the softening effect that water has on soil near the edge of the creek. Two minutes after this picture was taken, Faux Paws here began his excavation du jour where the branch by the house has formed a little delta of soft black soil just where it meets Goose Creek. Fondue dog-- black up to his knees and elbows (make that stifles and hocks.)

And, it's time to talk de-balling. It is the responsible pet-owner thing to do, I suppose, so that no accidental unwanted dogs come from Tsuga's carousing. Of course, there are no carousees within a mile of here, but his predecessor, Buster, picked up the perfume of the tiny female dog up the road and, except for what biologist call "mechanical isolating mechanisms" that keep apart mismatched sizes, we'd have had a black lab-pekepoo mix on our hands. So, Tsuga's one 'tickle has to go. Yep, only one dropped, and even at that, he has the teenage fixation on his nether region that often, without his bidding, er.... rises to the occasion, as sometimes happens in maledom. Its sudden and unbidden appearance seems to take the poor pup quite by surprise-- popping out like that green toothy alien that emerged out of Sigourny Weaver's adbomen (mouth?) He barks and growls at his unsheathed member and seems for all the world as if he'd like to run away from it, yet cannot leave it alone. I've suggested to him that he get a hobby. I think he has one.

We've never neutered a dog. Buster was so mild mannered we never even considered it at six months or later. He never was aggressive, never barked, never ever humped our visitor's leg while they sat on the couch (he did have frequent trysts with his large soft dog bed that we took to calling "his girlfriend" but then he got all embarrassed and apologetic and swore it would never happen again). We didn't need the calming effects of reduced testosterone that I understand is supposed to result from the surgery. But on the other hand, we don't want Tsuga to become limp-pawed and poodleoid either. What are your experiences with before and after the neutering of your male dogs? What should we tell Tsuga about how he'll be, after? We need some patient information pamphlets. Anyone?

Cemeteries: Between Epitaph and Epilogue

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." C. S. Lewis

Some things are incomprehensible to me. The expanding edge of the universe. The particles within particles that are not matter but energy that make up this paradoxically immaterial world. Some of those particles have become sentient and clever and occasionally wise in a state we call conscious life. This is incomprehensible and the odds are overwhelmingly in favor that such a thing should never have happened at all.

But the two most incomprehensible facts of all are 1) I know I am going to die, and 2) for all our knowing we can know nothing more of this state just after the moment of death than we do of the instant before the Big Bang. Our minds cannot go there behind the veil. While this is true, the vast majority of the most enlightened ones who have lived on this planet through time have told us that death is a transition between states. It is not the empty end of all things that it appears to be from the perspective of the living-- that instant when a person takes his very last breath and the heart beats its last beat. Death seems alien and wrong like a terrible cosmic mistake, and we feel in our deepest selves that death of the body is not the end.

To ponder the incomprehensibility that I am here at all, alive, conscious and corporeal, I go to a cemetery. There, under the polished rocks and plastic flowers and cold sod lie those who have passed to the other side of this greatest of mysteries and know what I cannot know standing there with my hat in my hand. But I will someday know. Cemeteries are the green and flowered surface dedicated to the memory of the dead who disintegrate below, a faint tribute to their lives and gesture of hope for their eternal spirits, elsewhere. No other place on earth can bring me closer to the reality of my own finitude than a cemetery. All cemeteries regardless of their aesthetics or geography bring me to the day of my own death. But not all have had the impact on me as that one beautiful and horrible cemetery from years ago. It was just the other side of my garden fence.

Our first country home shared a border with church yard and its cemetery. We were assimilated into that little church as members, even though most of the congregation consisted of four or five extended families living in the area for generations. Over time, we came to recognize the family names on the grave stones and connect them with living church members. In a few more years, we knew the person that had been buried under the fresh dirt over by the maple tree; we had sat behind them in church the week before and watched from our barn while the back hoe made a place for their bones. Some stones bore names and birth dates only. The granite surface was ominously smooth where the date of death would some day be chiseled in the standing stone. One day I was out in my vegetable garden bent over hoeing potatoes, and looked up. A person I recognized was in the cemetery, silhouetted against the sky, standing at the foot of their own grave. I knew that they were pondering the polished rock, wondering what date would appear there some day to mark the day of their death. It could be tomorrow. Just like that.

Our son's favorite climbing tree was on the edge of the graveyard. For hours I watched him play happily above the dead. This cemetery, like most, was a still and very quiet place. On that rounded knoll by the little brick church I once guessed that the view took in more than three hundred square miles. The scene spread in all directions, out and down. Below and far away, the angular shapes of church steeples and silos accented the smooth smear of clearings; wooded ridges brooded over pastures dotted with black and white cows. Ridge after ridge receded in paler shades of blue and gray into the distance to the horizon, and in the lowlands ragged mists often rose from countless creeks, lifting like prayers, carried off slowly by soft winds. In winter and summer, snow and storm, I watched the world from that high place.

From that ridge pricked by stony markers of known and anonymous lives, I shouted for joy with raised arms for the glory of the good earth at sunset. And from that same ridge in a cold rain I wailed into the wind and shook my fist at God in the deepest agony I have ever known, grieving and in pain from unjust or self-inflicted wounds that would not heal. It was as if the presence of death all around me made every countenance of life more poignant and more real in that place of death. It was as if the story came together-- the comedy or the tragedy-- when the last chapter was known and so very near, under my feet. All this suffering, and I will die. All this beauty, and then still I will surely die. There among the dead-- not the abstract dead but the dead with faces-- a person is forced to confront the last chapter of the story and consider what can be made of those precious lines to be written between the now and that certain end.

I had thought then that I wanted to be buried in that graveyard just up the hill from our first country place on that windswept hill of tears and joy, of endless vistas and impenetrable fog. Now, I am not so sure. I haven't given much attention to the matter of the disposal of my body or my ashes. The 'where' will be no matter to my spirit that will be occupied after death elsewhere with higher things. Still, for the sake of those who might visit some simple marker (my only wish is that it NOT be polished but rough so as to be a ready surface for lichens) I want the final resting place of my borrowed matter to be a beautiful place for them. The soft humus below a certain rock outcrop at the end of our valley will be my cemetery-- a moss-covered rock comfortable to sit on, a place under arching basswoods and tulip poplars near enough to Nameless Creek that they can hear in its waters my voice and laughter. There they may reflect back on the joy and peace I knew among those hills. It was a remarkable and beautiful world, but it was only the beginning.

The biweekly topic at Ecotone is Cemeteries and Place. New entries will trickle in over the next week, I'm thinking.