Fragments From Floyd

Okay folks. I'm on my way outta here, headed to the still waters. If you're still coming around, which obviously you must be if your reading this, you might snoop around in the archives following this little ditty I submitted in a flailing effort to have it count as one of my four mandatory 'outside class' assignments. I went through the archives hastily and tried to extract those that spoke in some way about 'sense of place'. They are appended in the 'read more about...' at the end of this little bit below. Many of them have images from last summer which I enjoyed seeing again. Browse around, leave me some words to come back to in a few days, 'cause I'm sure I'll have some for you! Back in the saddle Thursday afternoon, bruised and sore and bug-bit with stories to tell.

Maps. I can sit with a map, even of some place that I have never been and will never go, and lose myself in its features and odd place names, imagining what it would be like to be just there, on that mountain top, or down below it in the broad floodplain of a meandering creek. But given a choice, give me a map of a place I know, or have known. Sit me down with a topo of Grayson Highlands State Park where I have not been for years and the memory of the topography finds a resonance in memory for lived moments in just those places between contour lines, and I am reliving time anchored to place.

People these days largely ignore their local geographies beyond the traffic lights and driveways it takes to get them between home, the mall, and work. Given the increasingly frenetic pace of our lives and the progressive pragmatic ugliness of our cities and highways, perhaps it is not unexpected that for so many of us, it is easier to just become numb to the physical setting of where we live. Home, office, mall. Put them anywhere. It doesn't matter. If we do leave home to explore other places, we expect them to dazzle us, entertain us, shock us with theme-park colors and thrills. It's okay if there are 'scenic vistas' along the way, but we are not part of them, those mountains there in the distance like the prop of a diorama. We are nostalgic for the virgin wilderness of our fathers, but only glance at the memory from a distance in a voyeuristic sort of way.

For almost a year, I have been celebrating place. For reasons not entirely known, I have felt compelled to declare what life is like in this place, with these hills and this forest and these two creeks, to chronicle the changes through seasons and birthdays and summer storms and snow. I am growing a collection of images in words and pixels called Fragments from Floyd. It is a journal, and so contains many odd bits of thought and observation and vision. I would submit to you, as an illustration of my own peculiar understanding of place, the following links to archived selections. Taken together as a small sample, they may tell the reader who I am and how I am related to this wonderful place I am blessed to live. I feel compelled to do this, even if not eloquently or fully, somehow in the way of an apology for all those who do not know where they live.

This excerpt from writer Barry Lopez, expresses my hope in this effort I enter each day...

If I were now to visit another country, I would ask my local companion, before I saw any museum of library, and factory or fabled town, to walk me in the country of his or her youth, to tell me the names of things and how, traditionally, they have been fitted together in a community. I would ask for the stories, the voice of memory over the land. I would ask about he history of storms there, the age at the trees, the winter color of the hills. Only then would i Ask to see the museum. I would want first the sense of a real place, to know that I was not inhabiting an idea. I would want to know the lay of the land first, the real geography, and take some measure of the love of it in my companion before I stood before the painting or read works of scholarship. I would want to have something real and remembered against which I might hope to measure their truth.
Barry Lopez, February 1990 Teacher Magazine

Our Town: In Floyd We Trust

Slow living

Summer of Our Discontent

Links in a Delicate Chain

Barn at Dusk

On Down the Crick

Varieties of Religious Experience

Worlds Apart

Someplace Cool and Green and Shady

Garden of Delights

The Season of Spiders

A Weed By Any Other Name

In the Shadow of the Buffalo

Every drought ends with a good rain

In Praise of August!

A Time to Fall

Charlotte's Web

Walk at Midnight

Gossamer Days

Trash Run: A Puppydog Tale

Goose Creek: First Night

The Thrill of the Hunt

Good Life, Fertile Soil

Water Music ~ Opus One

Epiphany

It's Beginning to Look

December Snow

Near the Source

From a High Place

Hope Runs Eternal ~ Part Three

Parallax

Winter Walk Revisited

You Say Potato, I Say Putayter

Fragment Found

Wind of Winter

Rivers Below

Seeds in Snow

Stars, Invisible by Day

Fragments, Well Seasoned

ICE: Figments and Formations

Night Vision

Where I Live

Honor of Wood

The Worth of a Picture

Field of Dreams

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Someday I'll tell the story of the old Crigger place. It was almost home, we dreamed of growing old there. The dream didn't come true, and we gave thanks for unanswered prayer. This old well under a high limestone bluff is one of the spots I would have loved most on the old place. Maybe I always have.

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This is too good to leave in my lonely email, from reader and neighbor Ron Bailey:

I enjoyed the "grits" post. It reminded me of an uncle who claimed that he had once ordered grits in a Baltimore restaurant, and when the waitress (with a VERY puzzled look on her face) asked him "hominy?", he simply said "a bowl full".

Now here's what I can't understand about grits. How can they take that white mushy stuff and turn it into sandpaper? I have a stack of various grades of sandpaper sitting on my porch right now where I'm working on some floor trim. Says right on it that it's 80 grit, 100 grit, 200 grit. How do they know how many grits they're pasting onto the paper backing? Do they do this by hand, one grit at a time?

And then there is that matter of "true grit" (thank you very much, Peggy, I think somehow that's a compliment). How do you tell true grits from false grits? Is there a test? It all boggles the mind, don't it?

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We had an emergency last night. The 'nothing was taken out to thaw and we were both fresh out of creative food ideas' kind of emergency. Our crisis meal is typically based on the incredible edible ovum. Tonight, with link sausage, and grits.

You know, I guess I never stopped to ponder that nature and origin of grits, even though as a bamaboy I've eaten my share of 'em. Some of you will have to confess that you've never had the priviledge, bless ya li'l hearts. Well let me tell you what you've missed: grits taste like, well, they taste like... whatever you put on them. Grits are a mere substrate to hold butter, cheese, that sort of thing, having no flavor of their own to speak of. I eat grits because it's a part of my suthun upbringing, but I can't say I really like them as much as the butter and cinnamon we put on them when grits are (is?) pretending to be a quasi-desert. But just what is a 'grit'?

Grits is (are?) a corn product. Take hard corn (field corn called flint or dent corn), strip it from the cob, soak it in baking soda, lime or wood ash. (Here's how to do it, I know you'll want to make your own!) The kernels swell up double or triple-size, creating a form of corn called hominy (which is another tasteless lumpy thing we ate grudgingly as children in my family). Dry the hominy kernels, remove the germ, grind the product into a coarse meal. And you got grits.

And below is very interesting piece of food history about the strange making of hominy. You have to marvel at the things man has done to produce and improve food through the years:

It's interesting that the alkaline soaking process also unbinds necessary niacin in the corn, and has an effect on the protein balance. Though the overall available protein is decreased, the relative availability of the lysine and tryptophan are increased. The alkaline process has been used for centuries where corn was a native food, but in areas where corn was introduced as a new staple, the process was not. Pellagra, a niacin and tryptophan deficiency, became common disease in areas where corn was the main source of food, as in the early South. One has to wonder how ancient civilizations discovered the process which made corn a more balanced source of nutrition.

And I know you'll want to make plans to attend the Gritfest in Warwick, Georgia on April 12, where they will celebrate the recent passage of a new law which states that "Grits are recognized as the official prepared food of the State of Georgia." And of course they will sing the official National Grits Festival song written by a five-year-old boy. (see Jimmy Carter standing with his hand over his heart during the Grits Anthem... brings a lump to your throat, don't it? In the South we do take our food most seriously.

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I have started to stack and cluster (wife says 'clutter') the upstairs with the necessities for three days cut off from all the amenities I will quickly miss and look forward to seeing again. It's been many years since I was gone camping and away from home for more than a single night, much less three. I recall almost instantly feeling torn between looking forward to being in that special place I was heading and anticipating my return and sleeping in my own soft bed, drinking coffee from the stainless steel pot, and the comfort of the known world inside my house.

I am remembering already how, while Ann says "Go! Have a good time!", she grows quiet and restless, easily impatient over silly things-- her typical indirect way of telling me she's already dreading being the only one to deal with all the nuisances of daily life, and punishing me unintentionally for being the one to leave.

And I have ambivalence about going myself. The world is so very unstable and so much can happen in three days, changing our lives forever in a day. I have some guilt about 'playing' with so much to be done with this school project, in the garden, with the daily drugery of mere existence. And for the first time, I worry about my equipment... the biological software this time, not the pack straps, boots or Whisperlite. Maybe I'll do okay and come back with the physical self confidence I used to have, plus just enough pain to bring back memories of moving through difficult terraine under my own power. I will be taking plenty of Ibuprofen to help me carry off this quest in relative comfort, and a few Valerian because my biological clock will go off, as usual, at 4:15 every morning and I will be faced with the option of getting up alone until sunrise with no campfire, or lying there in the relative warmth of my bag, growing stiffer by the minute, wide awake. Ah outdoor living. Such wonderful agony.

And... a new meaning for 'going to the can', and other rules of the swamp, from my traveling buddy:

A couple of things from the refuge literature on trips: 1. You are required to bring a portable toilet with disposable bags for waste disposal. A coffee can with a small trash bags and a lid will do. These are for during the day if you can't make it to the port a johns at the campsites. 2. Everything is subject to inspection before the trip. 3. No guns. 4. Trash must be packed out. 5. From sunset to sunrise you must remain at the campsite. 6. you must stay on your trails. (Marked canoe trails thru the swamp). 7. You must be on the trails each day by 10 am. What must be carried? flotation device for each person, portable toilet, compass and map (each canoe), flashlights, cookstove and fuel. recommended: extra batteries, trash bags, rope, first aid kit, food plus some extra, foul weather gear, duct tape, spare paddle in each boat, freestanding tents, bailer for each boat, spf 15 or better, 4-6 qts water per person per day.

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Did you ever have one of those nights when you couldn't find a comfortable place for your arms? Like they were somehow the only part of your body of which you are aware, and they are on backwards and no way you lay them... beside you, across your chest, back behind your head... nothing seems to make them happy? I just had one of those nights.

This cycle of brachial unrest started because the mommabear was anxious at bedtime. When she's anxious and not sleeping well she tends to want to spoon excessively. Close formation nested sleeping patterns do not suit me well, because as the nestee, there is then one less degree of freedom, one less choice about where to rest the arm on the side now taken up by the nestor. The nestee lies there with his eyes open, staring at the dark ceiling, listening to the refrigerator defrost, wide awake. While the nestor is thus comforted in this manner and sleeping soundly.

Later: Finally. Asleep. From sheer exhaustion. A deep REM sleep. A pox on the arms, at last I am getting some rest now.

And then: if you've never experienced abject night horror, this will provide the experience. Ask your spouse, in the darkest part of night while you are lying there with your eyes flickering across the back of your eyelids lost in dreams, to do the following: right next to your sleeping head, unfasten a three-strap velcro wrist brace really fast.

There's nothing quite like that sound. Nothing in my repertoire of expected night sounds, the usual bumps in the night, that match this ungodly sound of something being rent asunder near my head. The fear is truly quite invigorating. I find my blood still is surging with adrenalin, and I might actually get a lot done this morning with addition of a little caffeine. If it weren't for wasting your time with details of the dark side of life from the edge of civilization.

(I aced my mid-term so am treating myself to this little indulgence of writing the trivial this morning. Play time's over, schoolboy. Go check those footnotes against the MLA requirements. After you post, of course.)

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I confess. I'm a weenie when it comes to parting with my blood. I can watch surgeries and debride burns myself -- no problems. But let that needle start pulling out my own vital humour, and there goes the neighborhood: ears ring, everything goes white.

They only took about 15cc's today to test for rheumatoid arthritis. Might as well have stuck me like a pig at butchering time. When it was done, seeing as how I was not able to stand up and walk away, I hung my head between my knees, got a little better and sat back up for a few seconds, then right back down, repeating this maneuver four of five times, without being able to shake the feeling of being disappeared.... you know the feeling. Technically speaking, what I had experienced was vasovagal syncope, which sounds a lot more serious than "fainting". How embaraskin'.

Then I remembered this Readers Digest tip I posted a few weeks back. Well friggity frog... it works! Did it once, and walked right outta there.

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So, I finally get this monkey off my back and toss in this term paper thingy and get done with the class in early May. What does the boy do? He turns around and signs up for a 'writers workshop' for the first half of June for more self-inflicted pain.

Never been to anything like this. Not one of your higher powered affairs, exactly, but I expect it to be more fun than a sharp stick in the eye. Ever gone to anything of this sort, you writerly types? What should I expect?

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This is Coltsfoot, a non-native wildflower that has been 'naturalized' all over the place. I'll have lots to say about it later, when I have lots to say about things in general again.

Happened to see this single flower (actual size about 1" across) nicely illuminated against the shadow of a rock wall just out the back door. I picked it just for you.

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The muse is wearing khaki, and frankly, it doesn't do a thing for me.

I much prefer the gossamer gowns.

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Three Mile Island
March 28, 1979

After three days of backpacking in the Cohutta Wilderness in north Georgia... three days of flooding rains... we turned on the radio when we got back to our cars and listened with our mouths open, as we learned of the worst nuclear power plant disaster in U.S. history.

Somehow, this sense of bewilderment that the world could have changed so drastically while were isolated from the shocks of civilization... it comes back to me, and I wonder: what kind of world will I return to next week? This could be the stuff of fiction...

"The four wet adventurers threw their canoes wearily on top of their cars, and collapsed in the front seats to catch up on what they had, thankfully, missed during their three days sequestered in the midst of the serene and massive swamp. Fred turned on the ignition, then the radio. There was nothing but silence. AM. FM. The entire spectrum was empty. Maybe it was the radio... a short in a fuse, perhaps. Mark turned on his radio to the same, eerie black silence. And they knew the world they left was not the world they would go home to."

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I'm going. To Okefenokee.

Blogging may be irregular or missing from here over the next couple of weeks. My daily gushings seem somehow irreverent, as well as irrelevant as the traffic shift suggests. Between getting organized for the trip and bearing down on this blankety-blank class project (which has become the writing albatross around my neck) I have lost my blogging momentum. I've entered the blog bog.

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In the same way that there is disappointingly less in the words than there was, or is, in the thing spoken of, images almost always let me down in the end when it is my purpose to share them with you by this medium. While they may be worth a thousand words, this is of little comfort knowing it would have taken just the perfect finely-ordered ten thousand to begin to say it all.

I'll look back at this image years from now and see it in full-color stereoscopic memory that will pull together all the senses associated with being there. I will remember this place in context of space and time: the barn crossing was just behind me, the steep rocky bluff covered with ferns was to the left. I had come here just at 3:15 knowing that the sun would be pouring only then down the cleft cut by Goose Creek, and the water would glory in a dazzling animated brilliance that I longed to remember, if I could capture it in a picture. I will see this image and know that a week before, floods had scoured the creek to bedrock in places just ahead, tossed around massive boulders, and undercut the bank in front of me. And the next week, I found Hepatica and Trout Lily blooming on the high banks to the right, just there.

The viewer, on the other hand, must imagine depth, must infer the 360 degree context of being there when the shutter was pressed; cannot know the intentions behind the lens, or the expectations, what was hoped for it. In the image, you will only see pixels, while I will remember being.

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I'm sorry. I know these folks are putting their lives on the line (while simultaneously becoming, some of them, instant celebs) but every time I hear the term "embedded journalist" it puts me to mind of phrases like "impacted colon".

I try to think: If Gary Larsen where here, what could he do with this figure of speech? Hmmmm... I see A Bob-ish member of the press corp pressed between a mattress and box springs (with some characteristic bipedal talking animals standing in the foreground) saying...what? Nah. Too tame. I dunno.

Can you think of any other instances of use of this word to describe a person in any setting? Embedded accountant. Embedded secretary (not gonna go there). Embedded mortician. I think we've added a brand new use to the jargon of the 21st Century. Not that it's any big JDAM deal.

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Interesting. In the face of things beyond... so very far beyond... our ability to comprehend, much less to control, Ann and I are following different paths this morning, each within our own peculiar domain of coping.

She is reorganizing the pantry, putting everything in its place, ordering this one small corner of our tiny realm. Placing like with like, casting off, collecting, structuring according to a vision for how things should be just here within these walls.

I am watching the lighting change moment by moment, waiting for sun to fall on the Resurrection Fern on the bluffs above the creek. I've had an image in mind all during the Winter, and now this variable fern is opening up, and lives again. I will do something creative, come out of time and enter a period of moments of full mindfulness on a thing made without hands, innately beautiful, symmetrical, intricate.

These are the forms our thoughts and energies take, the ways we strive to resist being overcome by the cares of this world, ways to be in the world, but not of it, to rejoice in all things.

And while getting my camera gear ready for this morning's excursion, I find myself humming...

This world is not my home, I'm just a-passing through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue
The angels beckon me from heaven's open door
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore.

This World is Not My Home
J R Baxter, Jr.
1946, Stamps-Baxter Music and Printing Co. in Sentimental Songs.

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Or: From the Blog to the Bog?

The fourth paddler can't go on the Okefenokee trip. There is an empty place for the trip. I have a few hours to make up my list of pro's and con's. Do I have or can I somehow scrounge the gear for three days on the water (read: is there enough of my stuff intact from Nathan's peregrinations with all of it across the globe over the past three years?). And hunkered down in a canoe, paddling in slack water every foot of the 28 miles of the trip, sleeping on the ground (say, where is that Thermarest, Nate?)... can these old bones handle that? And there is the fact that I have this major class project in mid-air. And heck, I'd have to spend 2 and a half days without listening to the news from 'embedded journalists'. Hmmmm. I think I just made up my mind.

Not really. This is quite a conflict of 'goods' and deciding won't be easy. But I confess: I am leaning toward grabbing the golden ring here. Will have to see how it feels after a couple cups of coffee and with the sun shining. To get away with three other guys who are all biology types (I've been told that field guides are mandatory!) and spend time with that other me I'd put away for so long, in a place so alien and awesome (if I may reclaim the non-military use of the word).... There are reasons to give this some careful thought.

What a neat place it is. Check it out.

Inhabited by Indians more than 4,000 years ago, The Okefenokee is one of the most outstanding examples of an ecologically intact swamp in North America. The Okefenokee is a vast peat bog of ancient geologic origin. Once part of the ocean floor, it now ranges in elevation from 103 to 128 feet above sea level. Islands are formed by layers of peat and become the foundation for grasses, shrubs and trees. When stepped on, these islands move a bit, which is why the Indians called the swamp "trembling earth," or "Okefenokee".

Cypress trees over 500 years old, terrestrial orchids and lilies, islands, prairies and wildlife are abundant. Endangered species including red-cockaded woodpecker, wood storks, and the threatened indigo snake can be seen in the swamp. The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge is the largest national wildlife refuge in the eastern United States. It contains approximately 396,000 acres of the magnificent 496,000-acre Okefenokee Swamp.

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Consider: Shock and Terror. Shock and Fear. Or Shock and Dread.

Awe, n. [OE. a[yogh]e, aghe, fr. Icel. agi; akin to AS. ege, [=o]ga, Goth. agis

The emotion inspired by something dreadful and sublime; an undefined sense of the dreadful and the sublime; reverential fear, or solemn wonder; profound reverence.

Please, sirs, give us back the word awe whose darker meaning can indeed speak of dread, and power and overwhelming forboding.

Give us back its meaning that describes that which makes the heart tremble with respect, makes the mind soar fearfully toward the sublime and causes the spirit to ponder, be still and know.

Awe is the heart of wonder, and wonder the beginning of wisdom.

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Can't get enough of it? These journalists have weblogs.

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The radio piece that would have aired this morning was pre-empted by war coverage. Ah well.

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Well, not the arms--yet. Mostly, the wrists and thumbs. I've passed through the 'ignore it and maybe it'll go away' phase, and have been in the 'work through the pain' period for many months. We've just entered the 'go get an estimate' portion of the rheumatological disorder timeline.

After putting it off as long as I possibly could (ignorance being bliss) I have an appointment with our GP next week. She'll do the blood test for rheumatoid factor, which of course, with a strong family history of RA, I hope very much that this comes back negative. I'll have X-rays, which will show some degenerative changes (osteoarthritis, most likely) in the joints, probably with some osteophyte formation (calcific changes) at the junction of the wrist and thumb.

She'll put me on some anti-inflammatory meds for the tendinitis component, which I will take only intermittently for a short course, and she will probably suggest physical therapy. (I was a therapist in a clinic adjoining her office a few years ago, and she knows I'll walk in having made my own diagnosis and with some very specific requests for referral, if needed).

PT heal thyself: A short course of iontophoresis with dexamethasone sodium phosphate to the right radiocarpal joint (minimum of five treatments) can be done to see if it produces symptomatic reduction at the worst point of pain. If not, the best medical advice I'll get is 'live with it' and 'that'll be $400 with a $20 co-pay'. All the interventions like joint protection, ergonomic changes (in keyboard use, etc) and task rotation ... been there, done that. Without this, my problem would be even worse.

There will be some significant lifestyle changes ahead. I know. I have sat with so many patients facing their own limitations and disabilities, pain and loss of significant life functions due to an injury or impairment. Now, I'm the patient. Now, I'm facing the possibility... the certainty, given enough time... that I'll have to seriously limit and then give up gardening; and cutting my own firewood... these will be major lifestyle losses, to be sure.

To everything there is a season. When the time comes, maybe I'll be ready to let it go.

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Won't be long before the spring wildflowers start showing up. In our valley, Hepatica (Liverleaf) and Toothwort are among the first, followed by Bloodroot, seen here (in the one image that survived my hard drive crash; hundreds of other wildflower images didn't fare so well). The flowers of this poppy relative tend to bloom and drop petals quickly when the single leaf is still very small or not yet emerged. After the petals fall off, the sculpted leaf persists and grows large, soaking in the sun and making more roots to fuel the early Spring bloom of the following year.

Break the thick root and it 'bleeds'... quite convincingly. I've seen folks with weak stomachs have to look away from a broken bloodroot. Makes a nice face paint, too, that will last through a couple of washings. The Indians used it for "war paint". How timely.

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I don't know if I will ever reach the point where I am not half-embarassed to reveal my eccentric way of looking at things and by the form this takes in what I write about the mundane features of a life on the periphery. But this reluctance obviously doesn't stop me from laying it out every day in Fragments, and once again, I've 'gone public' and will be reading another 'reflection' on the Roanoke Public Radio station this Friday. You can listen here via ReadAudio, at 6:50 and 8:50 on Friday morning, March 21. (All the more humbling, by contrast, my little bit follows the regular Friday Civil War piece by Virginia Tech's Dr. James Robertson, of "Gods and Generals" fame.)

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Why do the birds go on singing Why do the stars glow above Don't they know it's the end of the world It ended when I lost your love

I wake up in the morning and I wonder
Why everything's the same as it was
I can't understand, no, I can't understand
How life goes on the way it does

Skeeter Davis didn't have the 'recent unpleasantness' in mind with these lyrics, but they have always spoken to me of moments of great loss and the utterly private bereavement that is so bewildering because it is not reflected in things outside us. It seems the world should pause for a moment of silent sorrow because of the emptiness and loss inside.

But the sun will come up, rain will fall in the same way, green grass will appear down along the branch with the warmer days, and birds will sing and build nests. As if they do not know it is the end of a world I used to live in. Meaning and consequence are two uniquely human understandings, both a blessing and a curse, and they lead to moments of profound separation between our private lives and nature outside us. There is no moratorium on the patterns of life beyond and above the affairs of men. The stars still shine tonight and so too should light continue in our small lives here, even in a time of overwhelming darkness.

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If we sent mothers to Bagdad as inspectors... via Redwood Dragon from a anonymous source.

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Got a call last night from an old Auburn friend (living down the road now in Wytheville) I hadn't heard from in years. Mark is one the masses of Wildlife or Zoology majors now doing something totally unrelated to his training. Eating becomes a habit and we go off and sell ourselves to the non-biological folks who pay us. But Mark, like me, still loves the natural world, though neither one of us gets into it very much anymore for extended periods.

Mark's got a canoe trip planned to the Okeefenokee, called me out of the blue as a possible 4th man backup in case anybody defaults. Man, I'd be tempted. It should be early enough that the no-see-ums and black flies and mosquitoes wouldn't be too awful bad, and the rattlesnakes cool enough not to be up to full speed. The male alligators should be bellowing during early mating season. Ah, the night sounds of frog and insect chorus; the smell of brackish backwaters and the organic mustiness of peat and Spanish moss and the sweet fragrance of water hyacinth and pond lilies. I feel a Walter Mitty coming on...

Meanwhile, I'm finding any possible excuse (the weblog is excellent in this way!) to avoid doing what I ought to be doing: working on my research project, where now I am in the process of describing a working definition of the word CULTURE so I can discuss cultural tourism's role in Floyd County's collective identity. YAWN. I'd rather be canoeing.

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Where and when did you first encounter "Windows" for the first time? I came in at 3.1 in October, 1992. It was a gutsy thing to say "let's move away from DOS" into the GUI world, but we gambled that DOS was on its way out. Boy were we right. Check out this timeline of the evolution of Windows, with thanks for the link to Wylieblog, who, rumour has it, will be hosting this week's Carnival of the Vanities. Go see.

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Ancient Mesopotamia, modern Iraq: once again, bombing and looting threaten the cradle of civilization
By Melinda Liu and Anne Underwood / NEWSWEEK

In the process of turning Iraq into a sea of glass in the coming weeks/months, consider what will be lost from the "cradle of civilization" in what was ancient Mesopotania.

...In January scholars gave Defense Department officials the names of archeological sites they hoped to spare. ”[The military] had a list of 150,” says McGuire Gibson, professor of Mesopotamian archeology at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. “We gave them over 4,000 more—- but that only covers the 10 to 15 percent of the country we’ve studied.”

...in the featureless plains of southern Iraq, the only high ground consists of the ruins of ancient cities. If the Iraqis make a stand, these mounds, which can be as much as four miles around and 80 feet high, are the natural places to do it.

... Last week on eBay, sellers were offering 4,000-year-old cuneiform-tablet fragments (“Be sure to bid on this fantastic piece of history!”) and a Sumerian silver necklace from 2500 B.C. “There are Iraqi antiquities everywhere you look”...

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I remember as a child
finding at the beach
now and then among the fragments
of conchs and periwinkles and clams
a rounded red-ocre treasure
that was not shell but stone.

I held in my hand
the heart of a handmade brick
made with straw
buffeted in the rocky streambeds
of spring floods polished smooth
tumbling hundreds of miles
in at least as many years
to rest here at the edge of the ocean.

The old chimneys came down
And I tossed the ragged bricks
into our stream crossing years ago.
We find them now well downstream
after the flood of years and finally
it all comes down to the sea.

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When we first moved from Alabama to Virginia in 1975, we were little acquainted with blue grass music and fully ignorant of 'mountain music' or what my new musical friends called "old time". During my first few months in Wytheville, a couple of my students invited me to a farm house on the edge of town where college kids had gathered, along with a dozen very country-looking older men in overalls and their wives. This was obviously a crowd that knew each other well, like an extended family. I was the only person there who didn't have an instrument and I felt truly conspicuous as an outsider, like a voyeur.

There I found myself in a strange crowd who enthusiastically played an unfamiliar reel that sounded just like the last one they had just played: a short verse sung by a single voice followed a long sequence of variations on the theme. They went on and on so that the rhythm and patterns of quickly changing chords soaked into your inner soul, over and over like a word repeated in prayer. And that was my first experience with old time traditional Appalachian music...'old-time' music popular from around 1900 through 1930, a blend of the tradition with parlor and vaudeville music, African-American styles, and Minstrel Show tunes.

The above is the first two paragraphs of a short assignment from class. I was just wondering if "old time" music was popular where you live. It quickly became our musical foundation when we first moved to southwest Virginia almost 30 years ago. Born of earlier music, it combined the anglo fiddle with the African instrument, the banjo, and in turn, gave rise to Blue Grass. Let Mike Seeger explain it to you in this article, What is Old Time Music?

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Cody Clark is lamenting his name, now 'faux-trendy'.

I'd have died for a name like Cody. or Clark.

Think of what it must have been growing up with a name like mine.

For a while (maybe a whole week vs the single day Cody tried it) I tried to be called by my other name... Blair. At least it didn't alliterate with my last name, I mean, First. But soon to my so-called friends, I became "Blair Fourth" and gave up the identity change.

They say a weird name will either make you or break you. Here in the Fragments front office, the jury is still out on that one.

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... And I don't know, friends, to this day what it was that they was a'doin' down thar! But I have studied about it. And I think that it's some kindly of a contest where they see which bunchful of them men can take that punkin' and run from one end of that cow pasture to the other, without either gettin' knocked down... or steppin' in somethin'!

It has been before my mind lately (influenced in no small degree by the Appalachian Identities course I'm taking) how southerners, Appalachians, rural folks in general... have been portrayed in the media as inbred bumpkins, simpletons, hicks, hillbillies. In this frame of mind, it came to me yesterday that Andy Griffith has certainly played a significant role in influencing American impressions about the rural south, going back to the early 50's. Matter of fact, he got his first big break into national attention with a satire he wrote from the perspective of a naive backwoods boy come to town, witnessing a football game for the first time. The piece was called "What it was, was football". (You can hear an very short clip of it here). And here, a Mad Magazine recount of the whole thing, with all the original script... what a hoot! Take a look.

In 1958, Griffith starred in "No Time for Sergeants" where Don Knotts appeared briefly for the first time with Griffith, and out of which spun the "Gomer Pile" show (and that's too bad, really, don't you think?)

Anywho... I uz a thinkin' it uz about time that we cum up with a new skit featurin' a politician who don't know nuthin 'bout nuthin, and see, he wanders into that United Nations building where thars lots more just like him, and commences to studyin' what it wuz that they wuzza doin' in thar. We cud call it "What it was, was International Diplomacy". I'm starting on the screenplay, now.

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Buster has a new blogging buddy over at Ron Bailey's River-keeping place. Go see the glamour shot.
Ron, Buster wants to know if Roxie might like to come out to Goose Creek. He says he has found this great place up the valley where he could show her some turkey poop that he rolled in yesterday. There's plenty left if she'd like to join him (although I think maybe this is a guy-thing). Or, there's still a little of that deer carcass buried at the edge of the pasture that he would share with her.

At his request, I'm making Buster a pin-up of Roxie to hang next to his bed.

(He did ask me to ask you if you have any photos of her without her collar on. Of course, I was appalled at the idea, and he later apologized for his impure thoughts. Even so, makes me think maybe I should look under his mattress, if you know what I mean.)

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I am cutting some old fallen trees from the side of a hill so steep that, when I put my saw down, it either rolls or slides down the hill. I considered tying a rope at the top of the hill and repelling down with my saw. Good thing, though: the sections of wood tend to tumble and roll right on down to the creek soon as it is cut free.

Making a hard job even harder, the hillside is covered with greenbrier. Genus: Smilax. Favorite common name: "Wait-a-minute vine". So called because when passing through a wooded spot where these devil-weeds grow, somebody before long's gonna be saying "Hey. Wait a minute" while they disentangle themselves from this green beast. The vines seem to have the tensile strength of bailing wire and the thorns are tough and sharp. There's no sense trying to hurry through a thick stand of this stuff.

Where I'm cutting, its hard to say if snipping them at the root is a help or a hindrance. Once freed from its roots, a vine seems to be able somehow to attach itself to my shirt or jacket or jeans and trail behind me as I slide awkwardly along the steep pitch, barely able to stand up, even without this extra bedevilment.

Another common name for members of this species is "Catbrier". I didn't understand where this name came from, until, coming in after wrestling with this horrible stuff the other afternoon, my arms looked for all the world like I'd been fighting off a score of mad cats and the cats had won. I'd even been cat-scratched through my jeans.

I have to go back at it, over on the brier-infested hillside, for another couple loads this week. If I wait much longer and it warms up any, I'll be wishing the briers were the worst of it. The cussed yellow jackets will be active, and they seem to be attracted to any movement in the woods that disturbs the leaf litter and exposes fresh soil.

When the wood's all in, it'll be time to think about repairing the deer-damage to the electric fence (there were four in there last night when we came home) and time to get in a gardening frame of mind. It's been a long dang winter.

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The downtown Floyd enterprise currently known as the Floyd Country Store is a local landmark little changed, visibly, since its construction in 1913. Situated a hundred yards from the county's only traffic light, it served for a half-century or more as a dry-goods general store, selling everything from horse shoe nails to wringer washers and scrub boards. In 1983, the building was purchased by a local farmer and businessman, Freeman Cochran, and the name was changed to Cochrans Store and bore that name for twenty five years. Mr. Cochran, himself a musician and a self-promoting businessman, had a vision for turning the country store into a paying enterprise capitalizing on the local musical talent in the county.

A group of middle-aged country gentlemen were already playing together regularly but privately next door to the store in the back space of the Southern States Feed and Seed. Soon they moved to the larger store for their practice. Most any time business was slow, there was music and a small crowd gathered around the Warm Morning stove with their banjos and fiddles. This regular gathering of amateurs soon went public, encouraged in large part by Mr. Cochran's interests, both musical and financial. Best as anyone can recollect, it was along about 1986 when the Friday Night Cochran's Store Jamboree first became a regular feature in downtown Floyd.

Some things have changed in the store's appearance since it was a general store. The interior of the store is now mostly bare of merchandise, except for some dusty remnants that are more like props of 'authentic' rural economy lining the walls -- old bonnets and small farm implements, a few handmade baskets, and Prince Albert in a can -- and you can still get a decent hotdog, 'made fresh daily' but only on Friday and Saturday nights when the store opens to the public. The shelves that used to cover the main floor have been removed, and there is now an empty space that will accommodate 150 folding metal chairs, row jam packed on row, and most seats filled come Friday nights. Push a few of the front rows to the side, and there is a 100 square foot section of resonant wood flooring that bears the marks of a million heel clicks from ten thousand cloggers on a thousand Floyd Friday nights.

Many of those middle-aged men who jammed with Freeman Cochran in the back of the Feed and Seed are now in their middle and late 70's. They still come every Friday night (and a few women-folk musicians with them) although they mostly leave early. They would no more think of missing a meeting than of neglecting the gathering of themselves together at the Baptist Church on Sunday mornings. The Jamboree, in a sense, is Friday night praise and worship, and the faithful of an earlier generation always turn out. With them and their instruments, they bring that old time religion in their demeanor, by their barely audible banter with the audience. And of course, they unashamedly spread the good news prominently in their music. The crowd is quieted by the telling of a couple of 'good clean jokes' and then hushed with bowed heads, led in prayer for God's blessing in the offering of the musical faith of their fathers, played on the very instruments their fathers played. As much a social gathering as musical, the Jamboree attracts visitors from all over the region and the world. They come to be part of an Appalachian cultural experience that in it's unchanging quality stands in contrast to the fast-moving impermanence of the larger America outside the Floyd city limits.

The Country Store changed ownership last in 1999, and is now owned by two music-loving, enterprising attorneys from North Carolina. They have maintained continuity of the old traditions by virtue of Mr. Roberson's participation as the general manager. He was one of the original owners and has played music in the store since before it became a public event. He has carried over everything as it always has been on Friday nights, even if there are now some benign structural changes to serve the growing crowds of visitors. And now, Saturday nights too, the store is open for music, for a higher ticket price and to a generally younger audience. On a Saturday night, guests from all over the southeast have come to hear out-of-town musical groups with well-known names who will play from the stage, where the night before, the diety was invoked to bless a less refined but unmistakably genuine joyful noise from a former chapter in Floyd's long history of music and community.

Read the piece about the Country Store from the Washington Post, Friday, November 2, 2001

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On the weekends (heck. Any day, really) the visits to Fragments are rare enough that new sitemeter records that someone has visited are welcome as rain in May. I noticed this morning that someone had come to Fragments by way of an MSN Search.

"Ann" I hollered into the kitchen" somebody came here from a search for 'bucollic scene' ".

"Isn't that some kind of plague carried by fleas?" she retorted.

If there's anything I hate in response to a silly and pointless statement, it's a witty retort. Very funny.

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The End of Homework : How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning
by Etta Kralovec (Author), John Buell (Author)

Have you heard this debate? Homework is oppressing America's children and their parents and should be abolished.

Certainly a case can be made that homework should not replace excellent classroom instruction or be a form of punishment, and it should be metered out in moderation, balanced against "assignments" that lead a child learner in directions of their intellectual curiosity and in line with a larger vocational and avocational hopes.

There are arguments on both sides of this debate, and homework works greater hardships on some lower-income single-parent families, it is true. Chief among arguments opposed is that homework is taking away American families' quality time together, and usurping time when the student would rather be reading and otherwise exploring material of their own choosing. As I listened to this issue on public radio the other day, I kept waiting for someone to mention perhaps that if children would cut way back on TV watching and computer play, there would be ample time for well-chosen and moderate amounts of homework. This was never mentioned.

Consider these facts from the Center for Media Education:

• Most children watch an average of 3 to 4 hours of TV per day, approximately 28 hours each week.


• Watching TV is the #1 after-school activity for 6 to 17 year olds.


• Each year most children spend about 1500 hours in front of the TV and 900 hours in the classroom.


• By age 70, most people will have spent about 10 years watching TV.

Should