Fragments From Floyd

Near Home

Daily Savings is spent and I have reclaimed an hour of morning light! Dawn comes early now, and while it is not quite 7:30, I've already been out and about and come inside with 30 shots to play with.

And what do I discover but the forgotten farm scene I took almost a week ago on the one morning drive to work when it was not drizzly or dismally foggy.

I pulled over the first place I was able after reaching the hardtop, since the traveler behind me was in a bigger hurry and not interested in seeing anything but the road in front of him. I chose to take my time on this morning when heavy fog filled the low places while the sun brightened the ridges.

I glanced around through the truck windows while waiting to get resume my slow trip to Radford, and there just over the fence was the scene you see here. I honestly had never noticed this little barn building before, although I'd driven past it many, many times.

How selective and blinkered our vision is. Photography, for me, is an exercise in purposeful seeing. I will always see this farm outbuilding now, so my world has grown because I slowed down, and I looked around me to discover the unseen familiar.

Boo!

Image shamelessly lifted from the "Photograph of the Month" at the Virginia Herpetological Society page.

Dregs of a Week

* I'm looking forward to the Boston trip next weekend, especially since I won't be obliged to make my own entertainment, totally, while Ann is busy with her conference on Sunday and Monday. Two bloggers have offered to show me the town and country, and I am most appreciative of their company! More about that next week.

* I met on Wednesday with a young lady who approached me after the guest lecture I did at Virginia Tech a month ago. She is a future healthcare professional (type undecided) who is especially interested in working in a rural community. Her enthusiasm, hope and energy was infectious and I'm so happy I had a chance to meet with her and tell her some of my stories--not of injuries, not of treatments, but of people that have made my experience so rich and full of good memories.

* Yesterday I received the desk copy I'd requested. I don't think I've mentioned it here, but I've agreed to teach again next semester (snowy roads notwithstanding). The Anatomy and Physiology text we'll be using is over 1200 pages long, and complete with lab manual, study guide, anatomy atlas, and multimedia CD and instructors guide. So here we go again. All new preparations until May. Overwhelming. Baby steps. Baby steps.

* Tomorrow I'll be attending the Appalachian Teachers Conference at Radford. I will be among the very small minority of attendees who does not teach in an Appalachian Studies program somewhere in the southeast. I was invited to participate, and I'm sure I'll be glad I did, when it's all over. But I anticipate a lot of what I do poorly and reluctantly: standing around in a crowd of strangers, balancing a cup of coffee in one hand and some crumpets in the other, dreading the awkward juggling act required to shake hands with someone whose eye I have caught quite by accident. I can be gregarious in this kind of social situation. But it does not come naturally and is usually draining.

* It's black powder deer season already. Yesterday before I got home, our neighbor asked if he could hunt on our place again this year. He told Ann he was putting some kind of deer detector somewhere down the valley (motion sensor? camera?) so maybe I'll come back soon with a tall tale about that.

* As for the image, here's surprising dash of color--the odd late-autumn flower that radiates the glory we've missed in our recent drismal weather.

These Two Things

Faith and trust. Both are being besmirched by policies and centers of power, and next week I will not chose to continue this for another four years.

Deceptive words come from those who would speak on issues of national policy ostensibly through the lens of my Christian faith; distortions come from those who speak the "truth" of science constrained, coerced or wooed by profit or political ends.

Science and faith: these two pillars are central to my understanding of what the world and the cosmos are fully about in a material and spiritual sense. And both have fallen into the hands of those who see both these realms of human understanding as tools that can be morphed to their needs of the hour.

I recommend the following articles that express some of my concerns on these critical matters.

Confessing Christ in a World of Violence "Faithfully confessing Christ is the church's task, and never more so than when its confession is co-opted by militarism and nationalism." ...from Sojourners Magazine.

The War on Science: White House disinformation in the face of unwelcome facts threatens everyone. From Orion

Homo Obscurum

Fortuitous. Tomorrow we spend one class period discussing the Primates to complete our survey of the animal kingdom. Early in the chapter appears the following statement regarding current theories of human origins.

"... the small number of skeletal remains and the incomplete nature of most of them make it difficult to amass enough evidence...to be convincing."

I've certainly seen ideas of when and where Homo sapiens arose shift all over the map in thirty years. And now, just today, I read of the discovery of a new species of primate, probably a hominid that was still around 18,000 years ago, genetically isolated on a tropical island with limited resources. They are three feet tall "with a head the size of a grapefruit" and have already been nicknamed the "Hobbits." They say bits of six individuals were found in one cave. I guess my first question is, can you extrapolate from one genetic cluster, perhaps a family in one cave to a conjecture that this is a new species?

The remains are not fossilized. Possibly, DNA can be extracted and molecular comparisons will bear clues. But there will likely be disputes over how this find is to be interpreted. Surely, it will step on the dainty toes of somebody's pet theory and spawn yet another scientific dichotomy. Never a dull moment.

Hemlock: Post-mortem

I'm having regrets this morning. And tendinitis. From sins of commission, sins of omission.

Yesterday, I tried to make best use of a fallen hemlock. I could tell there were risks involved: because of the way this tree grows, there are literally hundreds of branches on a forty-foot tree. To cut them, I have to lift the chainsaw to shoulder height or higher. I know better than to do much of this. The repetitive use of my wrist extensors will always get me a case of lateral epicondylitis: tennis elbow; or in this case, chain saw elbow.

And once the branches are off, the trunk is so full of knots from all those branches that splitting it to woodstove size won't happen in a single stroke of the maul, which is all it takes with a section of oak, hickory, or locust.

And so I left the most of that tree there in the neighbor's meadow to be heaped in a brush pile and burned between snows this winter. A younger man, perhaps, would be willing and able to do what needs to be done to burn hemlock. I cannot.

I feel bad about this waste of a tree, about this waste of a species as all the hemlocks in this valley die and fall in the next years, and I can't use them for heat. I'll not be able to turn their untimely death to our comfort over the winters. Sad for them. Sad for us.

Here's My Card

Well, I'm being swept back into the current of class-related busy-ness again, so blogging and photography take a back seat one more time in this ebb and flow of responsibilities. At least it's not all ebb. From time to time there is a minor flow of creative excitement and space to act on it as there has been for me this past week.

But now I've reached the end of my prepared lectures once again; have test three to make out for next Friday; have another round of labs to make digestible for my students; and will have maybe fifty research papers (very brief at 2000 words) to facilitate before the first week in December. And so it goes.

One thing I'll share this morning is the idea of having some photo-business cards printed for this budding attempt to recoup my hobby expenses. The free cards I've been using are lacklustre, and also lack the weblog address since they were made up before June of 2002. I'm interested in your opinions: would it be worth the extra cost (guessing it will double the price) to put a full-color image (picture) on the back? This feature, I'm thinking, would make the "First Impressions Photography" card less likely to end up immediately in the trash. A new contact would have something colorful and scenic in hand that they could put up in a tiny place at their desk, or at home on their refrigerator.

Such a card would be both functional and aesthetic. The aspect ratio of a business card is much wider rectangle than most standard images, so the scene would have to lend itself to a longer, narrower composition. And it must be a bold image where the details are not all lost in the process of shrinking it down to this tiny size.

If you can recall any photos you've seen here over the past months that pop out at you as a good pick for this business card usage, I truly am ready to put this together. I'd be happy for your thoughts and ideas!

BeanTown Bound

I'll be escourting my wife to Boston for her professional conference in early November. Sure, she could go by herself and I could stay home and tend the house and the dog. But we were in Boston five years ago this time (for this same organizational meeting) and frankly, it wasn't a bad experience for me as big cities go. I will have all day to take the hotel shuttle to downtown, Harvard, and other touristy places, camera in tow, while Ann enjoys schmoozing with her cohorts in clinical nutritional pharmacotherapeutics.

On our first trip, we had just moved into this house and had spent our first night a few days before leaving it to the ladybugs, empty and quiet for five days. It was so odd to come home to a house we did not know yet, and know that in time it would be our home. Now it seems like we've never lived anywhere else.

Just got a call from a neighbor who had a big hemlock tree come down in his front yard during the floods of Hurricane Jeanne a few weeks back. Now Hemlock for firewood probably burns more calories in the woodcutter than it will offer back in the woodstove of a frigid January morning. But as much as I lament the rapid loss of these trees from our invasive insect hordes, I have take this opportunity to use what nature has provided in this windfall (water-fall) gift. So I'll be putting a new chain on the bar here directly. I'll head down the road. The mister and I will do the obligatory geegawing about the storm, the coming winter, the sorry state of the world. And then I'll commence to dissecting the remains of a remaining Hemlock that should not have died in vain.

Rediscovery

They are pretty well done falling--along the driveway, into the high gutters around the house, on the tarps that cover the stacked wood that will warm us through the long, cold nights of winter. Maple leaves by their millions ferment matted, muted, sodden and rotting. And by Sunday, it was time to start collecting them into the back of the truck for the short trip to the garden.

A rounded mound that the rake could not clear away proved to be a flat rock under the leaves, thrown beside the shed for no good reason. I harrumphed as I bent over carefully to prize it up on end to lift and toss it to some other pointless place out of the way. And out of that mundane chore of autumn, in this world of orange and ochre, in that cool, safe space under the flat roof of rock where it would have spent its anonymous days fattening on spiders before winter, a newly-hatched Smooth Green Snake lay coiled in an emerald knot.

On that dreary, misty afternoon of raking away the remains of the long, warm days of another year, I was in one of those morose bogs of sadness that often come at the end of things. But I chanced to turn that one rock and discover all over again that this world is not my home alone; that I share this space with life in its myriad forms I never see, under bark, below ground, floating above me, even living on and in me--and this sudden, verdant insight made all the difference in my autumn goodbyes.

Nature Note: This discovery marks a new record for this species for our county. I've contacted the Virginia Herpetological Society to confirm this, and will be doing the paperwork to submit it for the herp species distribution maps.

The Bear Facts

After speaking with Andrew and having failed to come up with any wildlife for his cameras, I commenced to thinking about this as we took our afternoon walk. It occurred to me that there are still some in these parts that hunt bear in the old ways. I remembered reading Horace Kephardt's account of bear hunts in what are now, due in large part to his efforts, the Smoky Mountains National Park. Those were some rugged and determined and very hungry men back then.

Funny. Their modern-day counterparts use four-wheelers and GPS collars on their dogs. The bears don't stand much of a chance. The remaining black bear are already in great hardship to find mates, find food and avoid man and his noise, roads and houses in what used to be their territory alone.

Most folks my age--maybe especially the guys--will think back to their earliest bear memories and bring up ol' Davy. He killed him a bar when he was only three. And Mr. Crockett continued to spin and broadcast his tall tales even when he was running for Congress from the state of Tennessee. Take for instance this part of his long, rambling bear-hunting story:

"I suffered very much that night with cold, as my leather breeches, and every thing else I had on, was wet and frozen. But I managed to get my bear out of this crack after several hard trials, and so I butchered him, and laid down to try to sleep. But my fire was very bad, and I couldn't find any thing that would burn well to make it any better; and I concluded I should freeze, if I didn't warm myself in some way by exercise. So I got up, and hollered a while, and then I would just jump up and down with all my might, and throw myself into all sorts of motions. But all this wouldn't do; for my blood was now getting cold, and the chills coming all over me. I was so tired, too, that I could hardly walk; but I thought I would do the best I could to save my life, and then, if I died, nobody would be to blame. So I went to a tree about two feet through, and not a limb on it for thirty feet, and I would climb up it to the limbs, and then lock my arms together around it, and slide down to the bottom again. This would make the insides of my legs and arms feel mighty warm and good. I continued this till daylight in the morning, and how often I clomb up my tree and slid down I don't know, but I reckon at least a hundred times."

Aerial View

If you look carefully, from a thousand feet above you can see a car or two moving along this straight stretch of mountain road that cuts through a dense autumn forest of dark pines and red-brown oaks. The green of grasses not yet faded to winter beige peeks out from under the canopy.

Okay. I confess. This is a picture of an oak leaf taken about a week ago, from about an inch off its parti-colored surface. And my first impression on viewing this image was just what I tried to get you to see in it.

I had planned on doing a series of leaf close-ups but the dreary weather unrelenting for the past week has nipped those plans, possibly for the year. Yesterday this same oak tree that contributed this gaudy specimen was drab and colorless, black spots on a dark matte brown backdrop.

An Appalachian Voice

That Andrew would stumble upon Fragments while researching the Appalachians from Great Britain is one of those Googling occurrences that do crop up from time to time. That the searcher would then email and ask if he could call me to talk is much less likely; but he did, and we did.

And that the chap would turn out to be a documentary film producer for the BBC researching the possibility of doing his next film or film series from Appalachia (I was able to instruct him how to say this word correctly to possibly avoid later embarrassment)--well, that was just too very out of the ordinary. We spoke for about a half hour on Saturday, but I must apologize for giving him very little for his telephone investment, I'm afraid.

In the course of the conversation, just to give you an idea of the rambling nature of our chatter, I told him about Eustace Conway (when he asked if there were folks who still hunted and lived off the land the old-fashioned way); I told him about Wendell Berry (as he had asked about those living in close contact with the land and bearing a strong love and attachment for it); I mentioned the storytelling in Jonesboro and Ray Hicks in particular as local "characters."

And we talked a bit about the music. Since he'd done a well-publicized series on the roots of American country music, I'd thought perhaps he was interested next in a documentary on the history of Appalachian music, and Floyd County would be a good place to come and investigate that.

But I think it continues to be wildlife that is his chief focus and interest. The best I could offer on that account was the boring deer, the wild turkey and the occasional bear that wanders into town. I'm afraid we've rather displaced or extirpated what once was a teeming forest of creatures other than tourists.

Oh yes. He asked me about the term "hillbilly" saying that it was still in common usage in his country (to refer to that certain class of inbred toothless mooonshiner that populates these hills, I offered.) I told him this was a stereotype that most of Appalachia was working hard to dispel, even while the media worked hard to keep it around for its marketability as a caricature for people to feel superior to.

We talked some about the mountain poor, and I was able to defend them, for the most part, as folk who did the best with what they had, taking pride in their places, as humble as they might be. We offered him the opportunity for a few days of cultural immersion in the southern mountains should he ever slow down whilst scurrying from photo shoot to interview to taping. Failing that, here's hoping he'll stop by the weblog again from time to time. I was happy to be a brief ambassador for these round-shouldered hills. Nice talking to ya.

Life in the Clouds

A cloud has come to spend the peak of the leaf-peeping season roosted along the spine of the mountains. Today and tomorrow would probably be the two best days for visiting tourists who would come to see the color change at its finest. Some will come, but they will not see much beyond the edge of the road, and that, the blue listless monochrome that comes with light sifted through a wet foggy filter.

This always impresses me when I see it, even though it should not be new information to me. But then, I am easily dazzled by light:

From the front porch yesterday afternoon, I watched as tufts and wisps of ground fog levitated up out of the poplars and oaks, whose leaves and branches were washed of color like very old and lightly hand-tinted photographs. Suddenly, through an unlikely and fleeting break in the gray shroud, a brilliant beam raced over the hillside like a seachlight from an alien world--across the pasture, up the ridge, and down the valley south.

At once an explosion of color and sense of depth! The full spectrum of reds, yellows, oranges, and maroon flared to full intensity and richness. And then as quickly with the ray's passing, the full palette faded again to sepia and dun, blurred and muted as if this year's forest were already a mere memory.

Free-Falling

Muddle
Puddle
Mud puddle
Leaves leaving
Fall Falling leaves
Images Imaginations Reflecting
Reflections
Muddled

Friday Linkage

First, be sure and stop by Horseshues, blogger Chris O'Donnell's 8-yr-old daughter's entrepreneurial effort to pay her way to her very first horse. Chris finessed the webpage in WordPress; everything else comes from the ideas and hard work and motivation of his take-charge young'un. Come on. You know you've been thinking about adding maybe one or two more ornate used horseshoes to your decor. (Not recommended for hanging from your rear view mirror, but hundreds of other symbolic and aesthetic uses too numerous to mention!) Help this gal get her horse(s).

You don't have to go to Iceland to learn about weblogs. But if you did, you would.

Doug Thompson is packing boxes and revisiting the memories. And he has lots of both. Soon, what didn't get Good-willed or green-boxed will travel south to a farm in Floyd County. Who knows: never to be boxed again? Given Doug's peripatetic past, I'm hoping he will continue to unpack his stories on his new and spiffy weblog (the man has as many webpages as Tsuga has fleas. No, scratch that. Bad analogy.) And of course, with a 40 year history as a photog, you'll see some incredible shots from some wooly places: today, for instance, from Jerusalem, 1985: wife Amy on a camel. Speaking of fleas. (The camel. Not Amy. I think I'm going to move on...)

And finally, and of course totally unrelated to any of the above (I certainly hope), here's your one-stop-shopping place for any thing you ever wanted to know about the current wave of global extinction that his happening in a forest, desert, jungle, savanna, ocean, estuary or prairie near you.

No, wait. If you've read this far, maybe you'll stick around for one more very important and serious link: Please take a moment (about 12 for all three audio tracks) to hear author/zoologist Peter Mathiesen's assessment of the interplay between environment and politics. We cannot go on in our present state of disregard for the effect our policies have on populations-- and not just the voting population. At root, it is not sound economies that insure continued survival, but sound ecologies. The smartest Greenspan among us will become one of those multiple extinct species if we continue to nurture our ignorance and indifference toward the health of the planet's support systems.

Unmoved by Movie Maker

I've now seen Microsoft Movie Maker and I'm not moved. I discovered last night that this software was already on my computer (and probably yours)--as part of the XP SP2 installation.

I messed with it some and it looked promising at first. Then I went to watch some "cool sample movies" and was disappointed, at least for my March presentation purposes.

I'm meeting with the Media Guy at school today re this program. Maybe he can show me larger images and better quality than what I saw at the MS site. But then, as some of you have suggested, I'm not sure about the wisdom of taking my front-porch subject matter and shoehorning it into a slick package anyway.

I've never subscribed to the idea that "if it can be done, it should be done" and may just project images and read text. Period. We'll see.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I've been grabbing links on environmental topics that might get my students started with their research projects. In the process, I ran across and signed up for FURL--a web-based bookmarking and searching function that will let me keep and build the same body of references whether I'm working from home or from school. Thot I'd mention it as it might be useful to others of you.

Coming Home

We have lived here a few weeks short of five years. Still, every time I drive off the hardtop into the gorge that Goose Creek carved to make our home place, it seems a retreat from hurry. It feels like a birth in reverse--going from the larger world back into a protected and familiar womb.

I must not take this blessing for granted. And so I am pleasantly compelled to see and record the beauty, the everyday detail--so familiar it risks becoming ordinary. I feel the obligation to share through the words and the images. This accountability urges me to take notice, asks me to look longer and deeper than I might; to see the ordinary through new eyes.

All of it is amazing. Only our indifference knows the ordinary.

MovieMaker

Today I hope to meet with someone from the Multimedia Center to discuss possible ways to cobble together this thing I'll be doing in March.

And by the way, your kind supportive comments the other day were like a B12 shot for an anemic! You folks give me such a boost, and I do appreciate having comments back up and being able to have Fragments a two-way journal again! Siona, you asked that I flesh out this presentation before my readers, and oh I can tell you: there was never a moment's thought of doing otherwise. I just hope before the thing is done that you are not all sick to death of hearing about it. I'll try to maintain some kind of moderation. Promise.

I'm hoping to weave together the images, the words and possibly some background music during transitions. I've been told that perhaps Microsoft Movie Maker is the way to go (at least without struggling up a huge learning curve for more sophisticated software.) Anybody have any experience with this program? Is it reliable? Is it a hair-puller?

Would I be better off using Powerpoint, and humming or whistling at the appropriate times? Hmmm?

First Frost

I feel it: the energy that comes not so much from the change in temperature as from something else about Autumn. Is it this way for you where you live?

I wondered yesterday, surrounded by all the colors of our deciduous forest fall season, if maybe this zing I feel in fall might come from the colors themselves--the golds and reds, ocres and siennas--light and color therapy together.

Or is it the busy-ant impulse to scurry about squirreling away canned vegetables and firewood, knowing at some deeper level that fall's shorter days and first frost are really early warning signals? An unprepared person could (in earlier days) meet death in winter. There seems to be an urgency under the excitement.

I can't explain it. But I feel a high-octane need to be here in the middle of whatever forces are at work as October passes by. Things are happening and I don't want to miss any of it.

For the moment, leaves seem to carry clues to understanding the feeling of fall I feel. You'll see more of them while they last.

Silent Spirits

So still, empty and gray. Abandoned and forgotten. But life goes on. Tendrils of Virginia Creeper cling to the rotting wood, give color back for a season.

Inside behind shuttered windows, rodents rejoice. It is eternally dark where many souls once saw the light.

This ole house is a-gettin' shaky
This ole house is a-gettin' old
This ole house lets in the rain
This ole house lets in the cold
On his knees I'm gettin' chilly
But he feel no fear nor pain
'Cause he see an angel peekin'
Through a broken windowpane
(more lyrics to This Ole House)

Raucous Caucus

The house was chilly when I got home--cooler inside than out. A somber October sun the color of sky, a few shades paler, offered little light, and less heat. I stepped into my rubber boots--a country-dweller's slippers--for the short walk to the woodpile for some kindling. A small fire through the glass doors of the woodstove would cheerify the dark afternoon, would take the edge off the damp-cold before Ann got home. I zipped up my jacket and breathed the familiar smell of mid-autumn's demise in a million molding leaves.

The dog heard it first. His ears perked and he grew suddenly alert. The unsettling commotion above us was not in his or my repertoire of familiar country sounds; we put up our guard. It came from beyond the bare maples, from the near ridge behind the house--a rising backdrop where, a hundred yards away, you'd be fifty higher, looking down on the metal roof of a toy house.

Somewhere up in those adolescent pine trees on the broken hillside, the anxious voices of birds. Thousands of birds. Their frantic sound filled the valley, louder even than the babel of the creeks. Grackles, probably, maybe mixed with other blackbird kin--the loathsome, hapless starlings. But I could see not a one. Their invisibility only added to the eeriness of their thousand opinions: Listen to me! I have an idea! Let's go that a'way! Each one squeekchirped to his incorporeal companions.

Rising, falling as they turned on their perches as each new spokesman, spokesbird, took the podium, a hundred giant rainsticks inverted over and over, tinkling, waterdrop metallic voices that swelled just before they all took wing, became suddenly visible, following the advice of the most insistent speaker, and they were gone from sight, then from sound only to rise and swirl and return to the same two trees out of hundreds of trees on the same ridge having vetoed their twentieth or twenty-first itinerary. Undecided voters, uncertain of where or when, sure that they must go, more or less south, more or less soon. And at once they flushed, and headed north.

Jots

Fragments image by CoolText.

Turns out, the amphibians (previously described as in severe world-wide decline) have their newly-emerging disorders, like our AIDS and SARS. Their healthcare system, however, is out of their hands. Everybody's talking about the weather, and it's killing salamanders. Also follow the link to Frogs: A Chorus of Color. Highly recommended.

And, did you know about the epidemic of conjuntivitis (pink eye) among birds--especially house finches? I learned about this often-fatal disease in birds--TA DA!--from a student last week. Here are two links to tell you how this newly-emerging disorder got started, and its likely end.

A Thousand Words

I want to share with you, dear readers, what may prove to be the most tangible measure that I have done a bit of what I set out two years ago to do: to bring together and share with whomever would come, words and images--of where I live, of where my heart is. And I have to confess, when this uncertain trek began, I knew much less than now of both of these. It has been a difficult and wonderful two years.

Three weeks ago, and only a week before the deadline for submitting proposals, I learned that this year, the Appalachian Studies Association annual conference is going to be at Radford University, where I am now teaching. Not having been to any of these meetings, I had no idea of the scholarly tone of the event; but I did read in the announcement that it would include, among many other scholarly topics, poetry, writing and photography with Appalachian-relevant subject matter. And so I submitted a proposal and abstract.

It has been accepted. And not only that, but instead of the 15 minute slot I'd hoped for, I'll be sharing an hour with a painter who will (if I'm understanding this correctly) be talking about the creative process in the southern mountains, illustrated with some of his paintings. As a companion segment, I will be presenting "an illustrated personal reflection on place and belonging. This vignette of contemporary mountain living will focus on the everyday beauties of the quiet Blue Ridge valley that has become our home. This short photo-narrative will be drawn both from personal writing in this exploration of place and from digital images from my collection--most from within a short walk of our 130-year-old farmhouse."

I am delighted. And terrified. But at least the conference is not until March.

Sometimes you must step out in faith that when the day comes, you'll be able to deliver what you've promised-- even when that seems to be more than you're capable of. This is one of those times. I'll be happy for your companionship as I begin to put my thoughts (and images) together. I am very thankful for this opportunity to share, and thank you, readers, for giving me reason to say and show over the past two years what will soon become the substance of this illustrated memoir--"a case study in seeking, finding and celebrating a mid-life discovery of place."

Being Becoming

When people I meet ask me "what do you do?" what should I tell them? Who am I and what am I, now that I am not a butcher, baker or candlestick maker? I'm not a biology teacher any more, or a physical therapist, either. So what am I? From what do I draw my identity and my sense of self?

...For years, I've thought "someday I will write. Someday I'll find a way to share my photography again." Someday is here. And if I can find the courage, I should say with confidence that I am a writer and photographer, a composer of images in words and light, and grow to become these things.

... Light and words. These two ways of image-making grow more like each other in my mind. They are merging like conjoined twins, and one cannot live now without the other. Photographic composition is reflexive after decades of attending to light and shadow, form and color. Occasionally I still frame a scene in a mask made of my thumbs and index fingers. In opposing "L"s, I pull the boundaries in, out, first in portrait, then landscape views.

Now I find that in this new and unexpected realm of writing I do the same with thoughts, metaphors, compositions of words. I stand up close, then move back, rearrange, re-examine. Click! I snap the mental shutter on thumbnail word-images for later. I put them in albums of words, a scrapbook I can show the world each day with my pictures. I am a collector of fragments from Goose Creek.

excerpts from July 2002 Journal

Leap of Faith

Faith on my part. Expertise and experience on Doug's.

Today--knock on wood--bag and baggage of 30 months of blog entries and images were successfully transferred from my former server space to a new, spacious home. I am delighted. I've been dreading the move while feeling the need to get somewhere that the blog spammers have less dominion and I don't feel guilty every time I post a space-hogging image. And I have arrived. Almost.

For a few days while the domain registration is being transferred, you'll be invisibly redirected from the old server to the new. All you'll notice is a DNS number in the location bar until Fragments becomes legally associated with the new server space.

I am massively in Doug Thompson's debt for helping me with this move (but hey--he's been moving now for a month; and this one didn't require a single cardboard box!) I have visions of scrubbing his studio floor with a toothbrush for the coming decade in the unattainable effort to pay him back. I'm sure we'll work something out, perhaps short of endentured servitude. Right, good buddy?

So. I feel like it's Christmas and I got a new pair of roller skates. Hmmm. Wonder what good they'll do me on a dirt road....

Our Fouled Nest

The amphibians are in peril...

The first worldwide assessment of amphibians--the group that includes frogs, toads, salamanders and caecilians--concludes that they are in even more trouble than mammals and birds are.

"There's never been a decline [and] extinction phenomenon in human history that's been like this," says team leader Simon Stuart of the IUCN.

Only about half of the rapid declines could be attributed to habitat reduction, human exploitation or both. Some of the remaining so-called enigmatic declines happened even in such well protected areas as Yosemite National Park in California. "Clearly there's something different going on here,"

But they are not alone...

The number of plant species threatened with extinction may be more than three times higher than previously thought, a new study suggests. According to a report published today in the journal Science, between 22 and 47 percent of the world's plants are endangered.

Current estimates put 13 percent of global flora at risk of extinction.

These are facts our next president should know, understand and take decisive actions to correct. Will your candidate make ecosystem protection an urgent goal, even though many of these threatened habitats and creatures are not on American soil, or might be in countries counted among the enemies of the state?

Your children's world and biological future is diminished daily. How long can we wait before we pull back from the brink? Will the next American administration be part of the problem or the solution?

Pardon My Dust

Got some major changes going on at Fragments over the weekend, so if you come around and there's nobody home here, we are under reconstruction.

Man. I've had to go over every post and every comment on this site back to June 2002 preparing for this move. There should be a law against so many pointless, silly posts. And I am overwhelmed when I see and remember all the folks I've met and "talked with" via comments and emails since this little project began. To be sure, the weblog has become a significant (and ongoing) era in my life, and I appreciate the community here so much.

I have a little news flash (a good announcement) to tell you about, first of next week. So if I disappear for a day or so, do check back because by then, Fragments will be sitting in a blogspam-free(ish) zone and open once again for more pointless, silly posts!

Let There Be Light

Email is down this morning, comments are out for who-knows how long, Fragments needs a new home, and I am uninspired. It is Friday, after all, and the blogging isn't easy.

I've always had this cycle of the Friday blahs, but they seem especially pernicious of late. The new is off the teaching job, and not much learning seems to be taking place; I'm saddened by the lack of discipline, ambition and determination to succeed that prevails in my class.

When I can't think of anything nice to say, I generally can find something nice to show. And thinking on those things, those images, almost always helps bring me back to the long list of good things I have to be thankful for, our abundant blessings.

So here's the last of the maple tree series this morning. May there be a ray of sunshine in your Friday.

Another Essential Download

Google will own us all soon. Now, a utility that should have been on all desktops all along: Google Desktop Search. My only disappointment so far (what am I saying: the software is still indexing my files for the very first time) is that it probably requires Microsoft Explorer to run, and I have happily left that MS buggy product for Firefox. MS has a similar desktop search scheduled for release in coming months but the Google folks beat'em to the punch. Get your download here.

A Pity

The Blue Ridge Parkway this time of year is spectacular, with wave after wave of Jacobs-coated forest ridge corrogated against brilliant blue sky, all the way to the Carolina border. Overhead, wispy stratus are often blushed with sun-dogs as moist fronts intervene between periods of crystal clarity.

But not yesterday. Another mood for this high strip of mountain escarpment is the brooding fog that piles up against the barrier of wooded highland. And this is what our new friends from England saw yesterday as they drove up into cloud and mist out of the piedmont. They might as well have been on the moors near home. The view ended just a few feet beyond the hood of the car. Make that the "bonnet."

In the short while they were here, we were able to get out and walk a bit, even though it was threatening to rain yet again. As they said, as Londoners, they learned a while back they shouldn't melt walking in the rain.

So this image, taken on my one trip out of the box this week, is for them. This is a small slice of parkway color. Do come back some day and try it again.

No Comment

Well, spammit, the blog comment trashers have done me in. Thanks to their latest effluence of wasted bandwidth to deliver and store their offal on Fragments, I'm over my paid limit of storage space with my host and have had to disable comments. I'll be hoping to relocate Fragments to another server (where perhaps there will actually be someone to answer my distress calls) and also upgrade to MT 3.11 which will circumvent the comment spammers. Don't know when this move/change might happen.

So for the time being, please share your thoughts via email (click "Email Fred" under my smiling face, right frame.) Regrets, and our technicians are working on the problem.

Slip-sliding Away

Do stop by Time Goes By today, where Ronni picks up the refrain of my recent lament of oldies receding into the mist of memory.

There is also the thread from my earlier post asking if there is any contemporary music worth remembering, with some pros and some cons. I'd be interested in knowing why and how it is that memory weaves itself into our lives--particularly our youth; and if it is any music, whatever the genre, tempo or aesthetic, or only particular types of music that either soaks into our core, or not. The bias of my age cohort, perhaps, is that the authentic, (relatively) unpretentious days of rock and roll and beat music are best. For others, is it hip-hop and metallica that they'll be transported by in thirty years? Is it the medium, or the message, or none of the above?

Gravity

A fall from a horse--not far. No worse than falling off the front porch. We all have fallen, risen, and gone on. But the Man of Steel fell in just such a way that the velocity, momentum and angle of force severed his spine below the neck, and only his head survived the blow, fully alive. In the end, it was a pressure sore and not kryptonite that got him: the ubiquitous, opportunistic bacteria invaded and thrived in that wound after years of exposure to an armamentarium of antibiotics in Mr. Reeve's inert body; and finally, it was their exotoxins or clumps of them that found their way into his system, to his heart, and killed him.

My patient was a man of steel. He could leap tall buildings in a single bound--he showed me the videotapes. More accurately, he could jump 12 tractor-trailor trucks off a ramp on his motorcycle, just like his protege, Mr. Knievel, with whom he traveled. It turns out he could not jump 13--the unlucky number.

A bit more of his spinal cord was left than Mr. Reeve's, and he could drive himself around the country in his modified van to pursue the multi-level marketing business that gave him a reason to go on. He could drive himself to the little hospital near the Smokies for his daily whirlpool and dressing change to deal with the deep debubitus that came from prolonged periods of driving that he was told by his physical therapist in no uncertain terms to avoid.

When I last saw him, his wound over the ischial tuberosity of his right hip took three full rolls of gauze to fill. When I last saw him, he was about to drive cross-country alone to see a client in California. I've always wondered what happened to him. When you deal so intimately and often with a person and his ravaged, once intact body and spirit, bonds do form.

Even so, I can't remember his name. But I must say, in Chris Reeve's passing, Motorcycle Man's memory has returned this week. I'd like to think he is living in the Caiman Islands off his rise to the top of the pyramid he so often spoke of. But knowing the way of things, this man's big fall and its consequences, in the end, were beyond all the king's horses to make right.

Black

Notice (y'all):

I am lucky to be able to post to Fragments today at all. It took the server fully five minutes to accept this mornings first (and apparently last) post. The server is rejecting ftp of images on an unpredictable basis. Reader comments may be refused. And I cannot use MT Blacklist to remove the increasing impaction of crap that now fills my front page, not to mention being spread throughout my archives.

Correction of this problem is out of my hands. So I will be cutting firewood if anybody needs me this morning. Send me a carrier pigeon with your message, and perhaps a fig newton.

Hymn

Day is Dying in the West
Text: Mary A. Lathbury, 1841-1913
Music: William F. Sherwin, 1826-1888

Day is dying in the west,
heaven is touching earth with rest;
wait and worship while the night
sets the evening lamps alight
through all the sky.

Refrain:

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts!
Heaven and earth are full of thee!
Heaven and earth are praising thee,
O Lord most high!

Lord of life, beneath the dome
of the universe, thy home,
gather us who seek thy face
to the fold of thy embrace,
for thou art nigh. (Refrain)

While the deepening shadows fall,
heart of love enfolding all,
through the glory and the grace
of the stars that veil thy face,
our hearts ascend. (Refrain)

When forever from our sight
pass the stars, the day, the night,
Lord of angels, on our eyes
let eternal morning rise
and shadows end. (Refrain)

Down the Lane

Here's the last of the front-yard, autumn-light, maple tree images, save for one final installment tomorrow. Just to get your bearings, I was standing in the same spot facing the opposite direction in this shot compared to the earlier "Bend in the Road", though both shots were taken at different times on the same morning and the lighting is not the same, as you may notice.

Streaming Semi-consciousness

This morning, first thing I read was a comment from Marsha (see sidebar), who inadvertently seeded the US with a Japanese song (Sukiyaki) that became an American hit in 1963, and one that I well remember, even if not a word of it was intelligible. (The same can be said of Bob Dylan's music from the same era.)

Her comment sent me back to Musical Markers--a post on Fragments from February, 2003. As central as the music of my youth (late 50s to early 70s) has been to me, I'm surprised I haven't written about it more often here. You can ask my family. As I confessed in that earlier post, I am an irrepressible Karaoke machine if the "oldies" are playing within earshot. And trust me: repression has been attempted often, succeeded never.

But you know, something has changed. I only realized this in the past few weeks, and it makes me sad, as if I have lost a good friend. It came to me as I drove along alone, singing at the top of my voice to some Drifters beach music that I think reminded me of Panama City on spring break; but I'm not sure: As the decades have intervened between the now and those musical moments in real-time, until lately, the songs have been able to reconnect me with the spirit of that age; with specific people, events, eras in my life--even the moods evoked by certain perfumes or the smells of places where specific things happened. I still remember all the words (or most, and make up the ones I don't remember or never really understood in the first place). But I am less and less able to squint my eyes and see the where of it, the who, even the when. It is becoming music that still finds--will always find--a welcome place in my heart, but my mind less and less can tell me why.

Time passes. And it sweeps with it some our most precious memories. There is nothing to it but to make new ones.

Bend in the road

With apologies, one more shot of the climbing tree, the gravel road, and our larger "yard" as the season creeps down over our valley. Most of the leaves pictured clinging to the maples a week ago have joined fallen brethren on the gravel and have been churned to brittle brown flakes by the few passing cars that use what most of the time seems like our private driveway.

A slow, quiet Saturday morning might be a good occasion to talk a bit about my taste and philosophy of photographic treatment. As is frequently the case, for any given picture I post, I get two kinds of responses. There may be emails and comments saying how pleasing and captivating a certain picture was that day. Less frequently, for that same picture, there will be emails or comments that dislike my choice of expression, objecting to my "mucking with" the straight image by using Photoshop tools. For them, the straight unaltered shot is necessarily the better choice.

In making this decision about how an image would be best displayed for the web, I am at a disadvantage in a sense, because the first thing I see is the full-resolution image full of detail, texture, depth. Then I shrink that image to a tenth or less of its full size to fit the webpage and reduce it in quality to make a smaller, faster-loading file. Especially for landscapes, there is considerable loss in both of these reductions, and the tiny image loses much of the appeal of the larger one.

Secondly, what I enjoy in photography is creative expression. I hope not so much for reportage with a strong need for accuracy and clarity and detail as for the gathering and sharing of impressions, interpretations and stories from the images. The picture posted today is not an unaltered image. I've tried to bring out the reality of the contrast between the shaded roadway and the grassy area beyond, under a hazy-bright morning sky. I've used "accent edges" filter to bring out some of the lines in the tree branches and to bring some texture to the leaves along the road. And as I said in a recent post, for me, autumn is suffused with this soft light of nostalgia, and a painterly portrayal seems to suit. For this reason, you'll see our maples--like this one in this series of recent shots-- shown in a more impressionistic way.

My camera lens saw it the way the scene, in fact, was on that October morning. So often the straight documentary display through the clear, objective, non-distorting glass of the lens fails to show what I have seen through the lens of imagination. This image appeared to me as it was rendered in this posted picture. I didn't see just the objects in the viewfinder. I saw the storybook qualities of light that were so extraordinary as they illumined an ordinary scene, and this is what I wanted viewers to see, to share with me.

Of course there is always the risk of TammyFaye-ing a picture too far. Too much makeup can hide what potential beauty might have been underneath. Most of the time, and within the constraints of web image size and quality, I present what I think does the best job of showing the scene as I saw-felt-experienced it. But then, sometimes, my mascara will run. Thanks for caring.

Seasons

Often early on a morning like this, I will pull up an image, put it against a white screen, and simply stare, waiting on its message. If there was a point to taking the image in the first place (and I'd like to think at least most of my pictures have a raison d'etre) then something else, something more, may come from a picture pondered and not merely taken.

Why do I like this image? What story does it tell? What doesn't work about it? What can I see on close examination of the two-dimensional rendering that I could not see in the context of standing at that vantage point and pressing the shutter? What part of being there at that moment is lost when the scene is reduced to pixels of light and color?

This morning, from the several I thought I might post, the barn scene seemed best for the day and season. It is a slice of time. Taken before the last hurricane and its floods, the creek bank between the base of the big walnut and the bottom of the image is gone now, missing all the way to the little cleft you see that marks our foot crossing on the pine plank (now also on its way to the Atlantic.) The world has changed since I took this picture two weeks ago, and not just the contour of the creek bank. Everything in the image is different--every leaf, every tree. Even the barn is victim to time. We can't always see it, but time flows through every object frozen in these eye-blinks that become digital moments. An image catches an instant in a world that will never be exactly that way again. And this passing of the now seems especially evident to me in the fall.

It is fall-ness that comes to me from this picture, and the essence of it is not in the color in the leaves. It is the light itself. It In mid-October, more striking and vivid colors than this are everywhere. It is the light here in this treatment of the image, the soft rendering as if from a haze of memory and nostalgia that seems right to me. Fall is a time of looking back. What speaks to me of fall here is the angle in the light--so different from summer--diffused, just striking the top of the barn roof as the sun rises, finally, over the eastern ridge. But even in the middle of the day now, the pitch of light is different, and of course, it would be, the sun rising less and less in the southern sky, casting longer shadows across the dulling color of dying leaves. There are hints of the passing of a thousand different greens, the coming of browns and grays.

What do you see here? Your eyes are different from mine. Your memories of fall tell another story. Can you tell it?

The Climbing Tree

There were children here once. Small children. We found two ancient rubber ducks buried in the brook that runs alongside the house. We know nothing about those children--no names, no faces; but the crude ladder nailed to the big maple out front always reminds me that someone grew up here. This place has been home, will be home to others before us, and after.

The ladder on the maple is not much good for climbing. Even when it was solid 2 x 4s, it was a rough job--probably done by the bigger kids. The branches above the ladder are tight-crotched and not terribly welcoming to a climber save for one sitting branch that hangs out over the gravel road below. The stairway seems to climb up just so far, and then leaves the rest to imagination. The maple appears often in pictures taken from the front of the house and the ladder, I think, adds whimsy and a bit of nostalgia.

Radio Reader: October 2004

It has been almost two years since Ann first told me "You know, you really ought to send something in." And in our family, the matriarch's oughts carry strong overtones of "must." I knew there would be no shirking it: I would send something in to the local NPR station to be considered for their Friday essay spot because I ought. The first one, to my amazement, was accepted. I made arrangements to go down the mountain to Roanoke to record it at the station in mid-October, 2002.

I was so nervous that I left the house without my copy of the essay I was going to read and had to turn around before I got to the hardtop to fetch it. I was late to the recording and totally frazzled. But Dutchie, the radio staff person in charge of the essay segment, was so laid back and easy to work with that I settled into the studio swivel chair like it was my comfy chair at home, adjusted the headphones, launched into my 650-word story and... stammered; stuttered; lost my breathing. I had to start over and was mortified. Dutchie was totally unruffled. I could start over all I wanted, she said. She'd just edit out the trembling voice, the breathy pauses between paragraphs, the flubs. By the end of that first session, I was having fun. It showed in my voice in the final reading. It was a keeper.

"So, what do you want us to give as a bi-line?" Dutchie asked. Most of you didn't know me then. I was in a state of metamorphosis and didn't know exactly who I was. I had something of an idea of what I wanted to become, so with great trepidation and seeming self-delusion, I told her. "Let's say this: Fred First is a writer and photographer who lives in Floyd County. He writes every day to his weblog, Fragments from Floyd dot com." I might as well have told her to say "Fred First is King of Tralfamador and lives in a giant dirigible off the coast of the Ivory Coast." But I know you have to project a future for yourself, then work to grow into it. So I let the bi-line stand.

The essay that will air tomorrow (Friday, Oct 8, 2004) will be number twelve (if you count the one that was cancelled for the war du jour, back in March of 2003.) It has been wonderful how the spoken word has reached people driving down the interstate; just doing their house or barn chores; at work and between onerous bureaucratic tasks. They email to say the essay made them pause; smile; sigh; remember; wonder. Someone asked me once if I got paid for these little recordings. Yes. But not in dollars.

If you want to try to hear the upcoming 3 minute bit tomorrow, here are the details. See you there.

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

Or if you're local: WVTF 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 October 8, 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

Near Home

I think this image is fitting for the day. Our front porch: about as far away from the computer and class preparation as I get these days. In the days ahead, you can expect a little series of "from the mailbox" images, not unlike what you've seen here before. I confess (and it will be no surprise to you): I never tire of the nuances of light, never the same, on the same maple trees, the same portrait-weary barn, the glimmerings off the creek, the valley fog.

Fall is about done, right around the house. The five maples, planted by wise folk some while back for their shade and cooling, stagger when they turn, when they drop their leaves. But the first to fall has fallen, its branches empty now against the west sky. The climbing tree off the front porch will be dropping its yellow-gold leaves soon, and when it does, so close to the house, I'll be hoping for north wind. From the south, they'll swirl and drop over the metal roof, slide down and pile up in the gutters--about three feet higher than my aluminum ladder will reach or I'm prepared to climb.

I'll be scurrying home right after class today. The chimney sweep is coming at 1:00 (I'd hoped he'd delay a month until all the maple leaves had fallen and see if, for a bit extra, he'd clean out my gutters. He works every day at heights above my tolerance and has ladders twice the length of mine.) Also today, our neighbor with the dump truck and backhoe will be bring a couple loads of rock to rebuild the crossing by the barn that Jeanne carried seaward last week. I have wood cut down the valley, but can't get it to the house til we rebuild the ford across the creek. I guess I can trust the fellas to know I don't want to damn the creek, just build back the bank a bit. I lay awake worrying about that last night. I'm getting good at wee-hour conflict resolution. This used to be solely the wife's domain.

We're having the first fire in the woodstove this morning. We were told to expect frost "in the colder valleys" (and that certainly includes us) so I built the fire last night, getting ready, because Herself will be home today and she's always "chilly". Turns out, it didn't get below 40, but I fired it up anyway, just to hear it tick and pop. With the first fire of the season, the stove-black I put on the stove to protect it through the moist summer burns off, giving the air a paint-smell; it burns my eyes. Better done now, when we can open windows and let the fumes out with some of the heated air.

Well, there's my break. I almost have test two ready to go. Time to make out the answer template, answer sheets and this week's labs. Treading water, I am; bobbing, gulping water. Dog-paddling on hump day. And just this minute, the backhoe pulled up in front of a truckful of granite rock. I gotta go.

Tethered

Does it make you like the image less to know that while this leaf is, in a sense, falling, it is without motion save for a gentle spinning about its stem? Can you accept that, while it will soon reach the ground, at the moment this picture was frozen in time, the single maple leaf was suspended between its past and future, in mid-air, in mid-fall?

You have seen them, surely: leaves that are let go by the tree only to be snared at the last instant by an invisible lifeline of spider silk.

You would think me the better photographer, perhaps, to have caught this leaf in its tumbling descent, face-on against the foggy ridge. But I am hoping that, like me, you see here the beauty of one leaf held by magic lines in the air, still tethered lightly to this beautiful, mysterious world.

Sinking. Swimming.

I knew that I was sinking. Bubbles of lost breaths rose like quicksilver creatures alive before my blurred eyes. The dappled surface of the water, pale green and yellow, receded far above me; and farther. There was no fear in the sifting, sinking, settling--only resignation to my end. I had stopped fighting to stay afloat, thinking, for a moment, to let go, to remember calm acceptance of being. And I was going down, down.

Then I awoke. It was very early, not long after lurching to fitful sleep and I had been dreaming, and it was like waking.

I struggle to stay afloat, swim against relentless current, dog-paddle. Because I must. I am without buoyancy, am made heavier by each unfinished task, stay just where the breaths can come and eyes glimpse the surface, barely.

Then, I relent, give in to the delicious, tempting thought that, just for an hour, I'll drift. And I do.

And I feel the sinking, the going under, then the frenzied clawing to get back only to where I had been. Never up on dry land. Never closer to firm and constant footing. Dreams are metaphors. These are my dreams.

The Lost Mine

I had heard years ago when we first looked at this piece of land, that there was a long-abandoned arsenic mine not far from where we now live, as the crow flies. On Friday after my lab, I went to the Lick Ridge Arsenic Mine with my new friend and colleague, Dr. G., and three of her upperclass students.

It was a delight to be around students who asked to spend time in the field out of their own drive and curiosity. I enjoyed watching their interaction with their professor--a wise teacher who exhibits the best mentoring-motherly care of and for her students as one could ask for. What parent wouldn't feel that their child-student was in good hands when their professor referred caringly to them as "honey?"

They asked questions and genuinely were interested in the answers. They were amazed by the same small wonders that amaze me, and so I was in rare company among kindred spirits for an afternoon. Even though, at 4:00 on a Friday afternoon, we were all into our energy and motivation reserves, the outting was a good alternative to coming home to an empty house and going right to work on class notes and grading papers.

The image above is from the old site that still retains the flotsam of human industry overgrown now wherever nature can eek out a living in the mine tailings--like the royal fern that thrives, even in its colorful autumn decline, along the margins of the seepage from the mine.

I appreciated the invitation to tag along and am sorry the group didn't have time to stop by the house--just a short ride from the mine--because Ann had cleaned the house and made them cookies, just in case. Seriously.

Deer Diary...

We are doing our part to insure the local wildlife--especially the whitetailed stilt-rats--have a healthy and balanced diet of both leafy green veggies. Rather than have the nimble hordes leap into the garden and then bust their way out through the wire as they have done the past two years--AFTER the gardening season, not during (go figure)--this year I decided to leave the electric fence off and open at the gate.

I'd hoped they would find that ease of access thoroughly unchallenging and seek forage elsewhere in the thousand acres of the valley. But no. They've accepted the invitation and have trampled down the kale and mustard greens (that the looper larvae had not already filigreed into green-rimmed holes). They have eaten the chard and spinach quite down to the ground. And now, they go into the garden just to hang out--it's become sort of like a wire-enclosed clubhouse for Thoroughly Satiated Ungulates.

Not content that their diet be missing one of the major food groups, Ann has decided that they must also have fruit (for strong vegetable-shredding teeth and fence-jumping bones, you understand.) So yesterday, we planted two pear trees for their future enjoyment and nutritional edification. Never mind my caveats that the only free place we had for them is in a frost pocket under a maple tree on the south side where they will bloom too early and get zapped by spring frost. Oh no!

She-Who-Must-Be-Fruitful insisted we WERE going to have fruit trees, so into the rocky ground they went. The entire time we were on our knees grubbing in the clay and rock, I had the strangest sensation that beady black eyes were watching from the forest, lips were being licked, even as the secretary of the group flipped ahead to April--"Delicious tiny fruit available east of house. Bring wire cutters" while another set the location on their GPS device.

Resistance is futile. We are being assimlilated.

Deer Bowling: New Season

(The following is a rerun from the summer of 2002. Buster is deer bowling in heaven. Tsuga has learned the rules of the sport. And we've learned that a yellow lab makes for much easier viewing than a black one. It's the kind of entertainment you really have to see to appreciate. But as a tribute to Buster and to celebrate a new season of deer-wrangling, here's the play-by-play.)

Ah yes, it is that time of year once again when we play one of our favorite games here on Goose Creek: Deer Bowling.

Appropriate attire: rubber knee-high 'barn boots'; cap to keep the deerflies off your head; everything else is up to you.

Time: nightly, seasonally adjusted to about 20 minutes before 'real dark'. Must be able to see 2-300 yards, at least the color WHITE.

Teams:
Team 1) Buster, the goofy Black Lab, plus participant-observers
Team 2) Deer. Team size varies from 2 to 6 typically; more than 6 is permissable, less than 2 is hardly worth the effort.

Team 2 Rules: Team 2 must be allowed to graze peacefully over in the pasture for at least 15 minutes...enough time to lower their vigilance, concentrate on the timothy and clover. Further, Team 2 is to remain in set positions that are established at the time Team One appears. Although they may snort threateningly, they may not move until Buster of Team 1 is within 100 yards.

Team 1 Rules: Participant-observers (from 1 to 3 participants, usually me and the wife) must excercise stealth in their approach to the playing field. Talking is forbidden and Fred is restricted from whistling, no matter what. All members of Team 1 cross the creek together. Buster of Team 1 begins his challenge exactly here.

Play: Buster sneaks up to the corner of the barn, lifting each paw slowly, creeping around the barn to the bend in the pasture beyond which Team 2 becomes visible. Running may commence at this point, although the generally slower participant-observers of Team 1 are clumsily just crossing the creek in their clunky rubber boots at this point. That is tuff, play has already commenced.

Scoring: Buster rounds the corner at a high rate of accelleration, reaching terminal velocity by the first quarter of the pasture length. Deer continue to graze. A mid field, one or two deer look up in a bored fashion. At three-quarters of the length of the field, the action starts. All deer wheel and jump in every direction, sometimes only the white tails are visible in the dusk, and the impression is one of bowling pins richocheting left and right, or of popcorn popping.

The score is always the same: Buster gets close enough to feel like a great hunter; the deer move off just into the brush, snorting, aggravated for long enough for Team 1 to get about half way back to the house at which time Team 2 returns, to consume the playing field; and participant-observers laugh at the whole scene, thinking: Dang! THIS is a great game!