Fragments From Floyd

I wish you could step out onto the front porch with me this morning, that I could send you the sound of the creeks, the soft exchange between a towhee and a distant whippoorwill in the half-light; that you could feel the calmness, silhouettes painted against a dark pewter sky before dawn.

It is too early yet for the smell of pollen from the pasture grasses, but we’ve already had hints of the “mystery perfume” whose source we have yet to identify.

It is for me the most perfect of times, some wildflowers of spring still holding on, the rank overgrowth of summer yet to come. The garden lies fallow and full of promise like this white space before me filling with words never before seen above ground.

I’ll put in some lettuce this morning–a few weeks too late–to join the dozen strawberry plants a friend brought us, and the couple of dozen potato plants that was all we have room for this year.

I tilled the garden yesterday after unfouling the spark plug (thanks to a small-engineer neighbor for the problem-solving) and the term “from scratch” came to mind as I lurched along behind the Honda struggling to make a dent in the poorer soil on the shed end of the garden. Toward the house, a fill of topsoil gives us some depth and that’s where the potatos went. The rest of it will take a couple of years of cover crop, compost and sweat equity to bring to good tilth.

And in this world where almost never do goods come unadulterated with their own costs, my back is not doing very well since unloading a half ton of donkey doo from my truck. A recurrent muscle injury creeps in a day or two after this kind of moderate physical work these days to keep me humble.

There’s a fine line between humble and broken. But I’ve spent a lot of years teaching folks how to cope with physical disability, to adapt and problem solve. So I vow to be both resolute and reasonable and do what I can with the tools and time I have. All a body can do.

And regarding other crops: I sometimes consider an end to this long stream of verbiage and then I run across readers of various of my rambles who give me encouragement–two emails yesterday from Slow Road Home readers and in town, neighbors I’d never met–one who reads the blog and one who reads the Floyd Press columns. Thanks, all.

On mornings like this, the words come easily, and then the quiet moments I am heading toward just now with a third cup of coffee. Come with me. Listen.

Whoever called this spring-flowering tree redbud wasn’t even close, though not all are as pale pink as these growing along George’s Run yesterday. The lighting wasn’t ideal but I’ve meant to stop here in years past while the hillside was awash in this lovely “red” of spring. By the next time I pass that way, the buds will be gone and the heart-shaped leaves will have replaced them.

Redbud is a legume, a member of the bean family, and its roots I believe harbor rhizobia, the bacterial nodules that help put useable nitrogen in the soil. Redbud seems to strongly favor alkaline soils–such as that produced by the limestone bedrock that runs through Georges Run but ends not far north when you cross the Montgomery County line into Floyd.

We don’t have a single redbud on our property or the road in, for that matter. There are a couple more shots of this patch uploaded to the Flickr gallery.

Next week the story here will be the Fortress Garden. Post holes have been augured, concrete truck is coming soon, and by the middle of next week I’ll be able to post to the deer-world our challenge: Bring it on, Rats on Stilts!

This image was one of the very first digital images I ever took–in April 2002–with the Nikon Coolpix 950 newly arrived in my life then. It was love at first sight, swivel body and all.

This place is a mile down mountain from where our road meets the hardtop–which you can see snaking its way down towards Shawsville–with Goose Creek meandering around the rocky prominence upon which this old farmstead has stood for many years( and where some artist-friends currently live). It is one of the most picturesque places the most folks don’t realize is still in Floyd County–but not by much.

By the Ides of March–one very long month away–today’s monochrome, its olfactory emptiness and the affective flat nothingness of February will have passed. And good riddance to the most difficult month.

And even then, we’ll be stuck in time, forever in Neither-Nor. For the full nose and spectrum of Planet Earth, another month will pass. And then–mid April!

Ah, life at its fullest bouquet and palette and vocabulary of expectation.

Hurry!

I’m sorry, but for winter images I’ve gone back to February past. Today, we’re expecting temperatures in the low 70s. I had planned to cut firewood, but that seems unlikely. It will be too warm. The ticks will be out. The road is a muddy mess–turned to slop the way it usually does–in mid-March.

We’re talking with our contractor friend again today about getting up 10 foot posts and a bit of a tool shed toward what we hope will be our first successful gardening year following several years of planting a “Deer Salad Park”.

It promises to be a busy time by April. The “tweens” during which I had hoped to sandwich some actual accomplished work goals are disappearing. It is no longer winter. It is not quite spring.

I miss writing. I miss my camera. I miss the smell of garden soil. Its time to get the gears to mesh again, gain traction, steer wisely. Life is short.

I’d have  a picture of the creek here in this top spot, but I haven’t quite gotten that friendly with the Mac quite yet. 

UhOh. The winds have really picked up just at dusk, the ice still clinging to the trees at about 50% of the full coating from earlier in the day. I have the feeling we’ll be firing up the Alladin lamps later tonight.

Thankfully, neither of us had to leave the house today–at least by car–so we have been able to enjoy this weather phenom more than our usual.

But the prospects of reading by candle light later on are not cheery, and I expect to find a roadblock to my multiple computer fixes that will wait until line repairs some time tomorrow. Maybe the tree trimming they did this summer (by helicopter, you may remember) will pay off for us.

For the first time in six months, the noise of the creek is the first thing that gets your attention on stepping out the back door. The half inch of rain (in the form of ice initially) is rushing across the frozen surface of the pasture, not sinking in, headed for Goose Creek, the Roanoke River, and the Atlantic.

Even so, we’ll get a bit of recharge to the water table. Speaking of which…

The central topic for this year’s Earth Day event in Floyd may be “Water and Life–in Floyd”, so if anybody has any great tips on water related movies, material or speakers in our area (and this includes any of the dozens of water-connected topics) please let me know.

Romancing the camera

One final image, an abstraction of winter from one ephemeral half hour last week. It is this, and also it is for me a holographic fragment that holds all the information in the larger whole.

Wholeness. Will it ever exceed our grasp? The camera’s eye and memory and words are hands with which we grasp but cannot hold that larger Truth that speaks to some–but not all–in nature.

Are you a naturalist? Is there a regenerative and revelatory power in meadow or woods–cathedrals not made by hands, as John Muir would have it–that sustains and nurtures you?

And what do you think of the term “romantic” to capture the essence of the poetic versus the cold-objective term for those who wander and wonder in nature? Are you a Romantic Naturalist?

Join the discussion about the nature of naturalists at RomanticNaturalist.

And note the sidebar button to the Nature Blog Network. This list (I’m not included as I just added the script this morning) is likely to grow and morph over time. Consider this a site worth bookmarking.

That we still have water to walk on in winter is a small miracle, dry as it has been since last spring. But a few heavy, melting snows slowly giving back to the deep fractures in rock that will hold next year’s flow would be grudgingly welcomed–especially if they’d come when travel was optional.

No wind. No birds or insects call. Has molecular motion ceased? I question if my own heart beats it is so still on this winter morning.

That afternoon, I drove 460 into Salem.

My god, what noisome ugliness hath man wrought?

And I lament that I don’t get out much. Why should I care to leave this quiet?

There’s nothing so remarkable here to someone who doesn’t know this exact spot through the seasons.

It appears to be still water reflecting the grasses on the bank of Goose Creek. But those waters are never still, and only when the little creek freezes in just a certain way–and only for a short while–does clear, smooth ice mirror without a thousand ripples scattering the light.

Sometimes you take a picture for yourself, knowing no one else will see in it what your eyes and memory bring home.