Fragments From Floyd

In light of our current pet crisis, I found myself desparately looking for anything to do that would divert my attention to other less emotionally-draining matters. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was considering putting together a little 'memoir'... of loosly-connected fragments from Fragments, and yesterday, I made a good bit of progress toward that end, and thought I'd bring you up to date on where this stands.

I have about eighty 'selections' to consider. After categorizing them initially into about eight topic categories (Nature, Family, Coming of Age, Field and Forest, The Waters, Gardening Hopefully, Tall Tales, Speaking my Mind) in the end, yesterday, I sorted them all into five folders: one for each season, and 'unsortable' things for which there is no way to file by month/season. Now I will have to read through all of it at a sitting (yuk!) without editing the many things that need changing, just to get an overview of the feel for all of it, and decide on an overall structure, how to weave it together snugly, and be thinking about a beginning and ending 'chapter' that introduces the 'why' and the 'how' of the little book, while the story itself (told in fragments) will be more about the 'who' and the 'where'.

It was difficult to follow a train of thought in words yesterday with the dog declining in the next room, so I decided after months of procrastination to work on some possible images for the book project. The Epson Stylus Color 980 printer had sat unused in a closet for over a year. I was amazed that it worked perfectly with a simple head cleaning, and now I have a dozen 4 x 6 prints that will make a nice presentation for a local publisher, and I also have the digital images ready to ship off on CD if needed. I'm thinking of a final book of about 6 x 9, so images can't be in landscape format, so will have to square up some of the ones I have chosen or find others where the composition will tolerate a 4 x 4 framing; and have no idea at this point about many aspects of getting my images onto paper. So I will be learning a lot!

Trust me. I understand that this is not a high literary event happening here. Baby steps. Baby steps. And I am trying to enjoy the journey, as particularly in this case, the destination is most uncertain. And so I will bring you nice folks with me to help me keep my bearings in this voyage. Thanks for coming along!

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Not wanting the dog to suffer, and finding the non-steroidal antiinflamatory meds not doing anything for his pain, yesterday morning, I gave Buster a 20mg Prednisone (steroid). We wanted him to be as comfortable as possible until we could end his pain for good, and had planned to take him for his last ride this morning. The first pill had no effect, and he lay under the table, not lifting his head for four hours. I gave him the second Predisone early, and back under the table he went for another four hours. When he heard Ann drive up coming home from work in the late afternoon, he bound out from under the table steady on his feet and ran to the window, then to the door to go greet her, then down the driveway at a run, without a limp. The old Buster was back.

Which raises another dilemma and merely postpones a final decision. Can we maintain his quality of life by one of a number of possible regimens of steroid use... an end-stage measure to be sure, and not without negative consequences on its own... and prevent him from suffering while under the surface, his autoimmune condition (which is everyone's best guess as an etiology) continues to consume his joints? If he is appearing to feel no pain, can we in good conscience have him put to sleep?

And so we begin our well-intentioned experiment in the pharmacotherapy of canine hospice care, duration and course unknown. I hope we're doing the right thing.

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Thanks to those of you who have been where we are now with our 'best friend Buster'. I just gave him Prednisone. It may relieve his symptoms a bit and give some respite from the awful pain that is now preventing him from standing more than a few times a day. We have to lift him down the one step from the back porch to the yard, and then he just stands there, holding up one painful leg only because he cannot hold up all four. It is just pitiful to watch.

How and when we will be able to get him to his final rest I do not know. If we will get another dog I do not know. Why bad things happen to good dogs I do not know. That life will go on, I do know, just as it did after Zachary left us fifteen years ago. We still slip up and call Buster "Zach" from time to time, because the memories do not go away quickly, and this is both blessing and burden. There are many memories of Buster recorded in these pages, and some day I will be glad of that. And if we get another dog some day, he'd just better get used to living in a big black shadow for a long, long time. This I know.

I talk to him when I'm lonesome like; and I'm sure he understands. When he looks at me so attentively, and gently licks my hands; then he rubs his nose on my tailored clothes, but I never say naught thereat. For the good Lord knows I can buy more clothes, but never a friend like that. ~W. Dayton Wedgefarth

Dogs' lives are too short. Their only fault, really. ~Agnes Sligh Turnbull

Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole. ~Roger Caras

Labradors are lousy watchdogs. They usually bark when there is a stranger about, but it is an expression of unmitigated joy at the chance to meet somebody new, not a warning. ~Norman Strung

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I am writing around a lump in my throat. I just got up, for the second time. The first time was at 1:30 this morning, and I came in here and booted up the computer and worked half-heartedly in the eerie glow of the monitor, through some Photoshop 'lessons' just to divert my attention, maybe help me recenter my thoughts and maybe get some sleep again before Ann had to leave for work at 5:30.

In the global sense, a dog's comfort and well-being is a small matter. But if you search my stories and prose over the past year, our dog is a central character to our lives here. As the breed description says, "Black Labs want to be involved in all family activities", and so has Buster been, now for almost 4 and a half years. His joint pain that started in November, has now moved from his right front and back legs, to include also the left. The arthritis is either a symptom of or a comorbid condition of something else that the veterinarians cannot name. But the quality of his life is declining rapidly, and he is no longer well enough to be involved in any family activities. And he is in great pain. And when he groans and whimpers in the small hours of the night, I cannot sleep.

And we are at a point where we need to decide what is best for him. And we are damned if we do or if we don't. Some of you will understand.

So, life goes on. I have some things I need to work on outside, and maybe getting out of the house will be the best distraction just now. Except that if I put on my cap and my gloves, Buster will want to go, but cannot even lift his head to watch me leave. And so I will quietly slip out the front door in my sandals instead, and just walk somewhere. Alone.

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I just stepped out on the front porch in the crepuscular half-light to 'take the air', listen to the creek and the quiet. Suddenly, in my reverie, not 50 feet away, calling from the yuccas below the house: the ear-splitting call of a Whippoorwill. I could have tossed a rock underhand and gotten within 5 feet of the thing. Yes, these 'goatsuckers' as they are called are well camoflaged to blend in with their nesting places on the ever-loving ground, of all places. But then, they go and shout, over and over, all night long: Come Eat ME! Come Eat ME! I'm right HERE! I'm right HERE! Got no TEETH! Got no TEETH! Tell me how has this bird survived to this day with this self-promotional approach to survival? I am in awe.

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Apparently they do. In the age of emergent diseases, I regret to report that we now have a new strain of bloodsucking mutant gnats on Goose Creek, and I have the bright red smears on my lily-white legs to prove it. Ann scoffed and said my itchy bites must be mosquitoes (which she knows we very rarely see around here) but I saw the exsanguination in progress behind my knees and on my wrists, and they were definitely gnats, except more heavy bodied and wearing black leather, and with pierced antennae. And they bit like cats: sinking the teeth in first, then kick-kick-kicking mightily with their hindmost legs. And they got a piece of me, some white meat, some dark.

And speaking of gardening, go pay a visit to new blogger and some-day freestanding organic Farmer Hope, who just started her brand-spanking-new weblog, Taproots and Wheelbarrows. Rumor has it she may some day relocate from The BigCity to be our neighbor here in Floyd, if the right farming opportunity comes along. And Hope, if you come this way, yeah, we'll be happy for some tomatoes!

My momma taught me to share. From our garden, we have a surplus, available to the first inquiries. Only stipulation is you must come get it. We have, for immediate offer to a good garden home: rocks, assorted igneous, irregular shapes, up to loaf-of-bread size, quantity unlimited; also, purslane and gallinsoga seeds, pick your own from what was going to become the First Family garden, then seemed destined to become a hydroponic opportunity for the growing of sugar cane and/or rice or other submerged greenery, now baking under a sun that acts like it has some catching up to do. Oh yeah. You can have as many of our mutant gnats as you want... send some to someone you know who needs an adventure in gardening phlebotomy.

Addendum: Bogie, I am afraid you are right. I didn't really think they were gnats, which don't have the piercing-sucking mouthparts our new arrivals obviously do have. They fit the part of black flies, and we have never been bothered by them before... perhaps a combination of mild winter followed by uncommonly wet spring. We have deer flies, too, especially when walking in the woods... but this looks like a good solution to being divebombed by those sorry suckers. And I'm wondering if this isn't yet another use for DUCT TAPE!

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Our field of daisies (Chrysanthemum leucanthemum) is lovely, but the white petaled flowers with egg-yellow centers are mere intruders in a sea of grasses. The grass family (Poaceae) contains all of our grains, and they are of great nutritional and economic importance, to be sure. But the grasses are also worthy of attention for aesthetic reasons, but rarely photographed to this end, seen more often as images of pressed specimens on herbarium paper.

I have found it impossible to do justice to the form, color and habit of any of the native grass species that grow across the creek among the orchard grass and other members of the 'intentional community' planted in our field. Their colors are subtle and grass flowers generally lack showy components to attract insect pollinators since this family uses wind effectively as a means of getting pollen to the female parts elsewhere. A single grass plant is linear in form, not falling cooperatively in a single photographic plane, making it difficult or impossible to single out a single plant in focus and in good contrast from its neighbors.

I never took the time to key the grasses when I was a student. They lacked interest to me as I shuffled through the herbarium specimens, and their wirey forms and tiny indistinct glumes and lemmas and awns and such did not excite my curiosity the way the symmetry of petaled wildflowers did. And so my apologies to the grasses this morning, as I admire a field of nameless but beautiful plants that hold dew and sunlight so well in the early light, and the daisies get all the glory.

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Well, barring another stint of All War All the Time on WVTF, our local NPR station from Roanoke (a condition that prevailed back in March, pre-empting my next to last radio bit... hey, it could happen again...) I'll be telling one of our family tales for all the world to hear on Friday, June 27. Of course, afterward, my son-- the star of the broadcast feature -- may decide now to not put me in the nursing home I've requested... the one that has internet hookups in all the rooms... after all. Sorry sonny. Too good a tale not to share.

If for some bizarre reason you want to listen 'live', tune in here via Real Audio on Friday morning, at 6:50 a.m. or 8:50 a.m. EDT. Both times, the regular 4-5 minute Civil War piece airs first, followed by the Friday feature 'essay'.

This has been a good way to meet people via the blog, since the station is kind enough to give me a byline that mentions Fragments. Hoping again this week for a few new readers and commenters and emailers... heck, I ate lunch with a Fragments-friend a few weeks back that 'met me' via the radio essay back in November. And they say weblogging is not about building 'real' community!

And oh! I should mention... the station has moved into their new digs. Very impressive, and gratifying to see what listener contributions have helped to do. They even have very good ergonomic chairs, so win my Physical Therapy NPR Listener Award!

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Today marks the passing of a southern historical landmark of sorts... former governor Lester Maddox of Georgia.

I remembered, hearing this man's name for the first time in decades, carrying a sawed-off pick handle in the back floorboard of my red VW in high school... woodburned with the name and logo of Maddox's Pickrick Restaurant. The pick was a double-entrendre during those racially tense times... a violent icon and momento... and I have no idea how I came upon it or why it stayed in my car for so long, as I drove around racially volatile Birmingham in the 60's.

Maddox was a contemporary of Alabama Governor, George Wallace, who was more outspoken a segretationist and less of a showman than Maddox. I remember getting out of school early to go downtown and here Wallace rant on the courthouse steps. As young teenagers, we knew it was an important time in the state's history, but not why, or what he stood for, really. We stood at the back of the noisy crowd of Wallace supporters and only barely understood how black and white his world view was.

A few years later, I was the loudmouth of the group (Auburn Chapter of the Nature Conservancy) and so was nominated as spokesman to present our proclamation. Somewhere, there is an 8 x 10 glossy of me with my mouth open, shaking hands, lecturing Governor Wallace in his office in the State Capitol about how he needed to resist the temptation to sell the state's natural resources whole-cloth to the big paper companies for clear-cutting.

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But the feet will have to go.

My son found out a thing about writing I am having to painfully learn for myself: that there is less joy and freshness and energy in the rewriting of something than the writing of it for the first time. What seemed to stand adequately well written fresh months ago now appears obviously flawed and in need of surgery... some only cosmetic, but for the most part, we're talking amputation here. And mostly it is toward the extremities... the endings... the formulaic conclusions added to a Fragments post because I had tired of writing about it and needed to wrap it up. It's just a weblog post, Fred. Don't anguish over it. Shave and a haircut-- two bits! Done!

Consequently, as I look back through possible entries to include in a little booklet out on the horizon through the haze, I find (and friend-editor Tom has corroborated most tenderly) more than a few of the concluding paragraphs are mushily effusive, mock-wise and cutesy. Bring in the orthopedic bone saw! Apply tourniquet. Lots of anesthetic, please. Today I am inclined to think the patient can be saved. Yesterday, I was ready to pull the plug. I wonder if Fragments has a DNR clause?

I've become somewhat sidetracked from the writing tasks at hand by the new Photoshop book I just brought home. I've learned that I can significantly reduce the size of images of adequate quality by using the "Save for Web" function in the software, so hopefully in the future I will not have to sacrifice quality to get images of small enough size to load quickly on your web browser and also not glut my limited server space. On the other hand, if I am going to include images in the 'book', I need to start printing some of them to paper to look at quality and have a lot to learn about publishing costs for full color images, how book paper affects an image, et cetera. Any experience with this? Anyone?

And oh, by the way, I've decided on a title for the book that I think will have great appeal: Harry Potter in the Enchanted Blue Ridge Forest.

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Crossing Nameless Creek ~ May 2002

There is a story in this image. I don't not know it yet.

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Field of Daisies I ~ Late June, 2003

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And stick it in your ear. Yeah, you heard me right. Ear candling. It's all the rage (take a look at the pictures). I thought this was a Saturday Night Live skit when I first heard about it a few years ago after moving to Floyd. Pick an orifice. Pick any possible thing inserted, ignited, ingested, instilled or inhaled, and somewhere, at some point in ages past, mankind has just had to try it. Imagine one moment in history:

"Hey. I got an idea. How 'bout we stick something... yeah! candles! in our, um... ears maybe, and light them!" (Remember this one at your next office party. Substitute your choice for the words in bold. Write a three hundred word report of your experience. Start a webpage to tell the world about it.)

No thanks. For my annual ear impaction experienced this week, I will be calling a boring ol' allopathic type to shoot a turkey baster full of some chemical concoction into my ear repeatedly with great force.

You know, on second thought, the candle idea might be worth a try. I think we got some in drawer somewhere that sparkle like fireworks. That ought to be good for some new aural experiences! But can one do this alone? And I quote:

"The metaphysical and spiritual aspects of ear candling are legion. You
may want to explore these later. For now, may I suggest that you do
this: If you can, practice ear candling with someone you love, each
helping the other. Before you get started, dim the lights and break
out some candles. If you have aromatherapy or scented candles, so
much the better. Play a little soft music. Sip a little wine. Be sure to
use facial massage. Relax, and let your senses fly. Some say it's
almost as good as. . . well, try it and see for yourself".

Hey. I can't hear too good outta my right ear. So if you send email today, speak up. Use bold font so I can hear what you're saying.

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This has been a wonderful day of sun, a respite welcomed on the eve of the summer solstice. A cold front has passed through and carried all the dank wet air so that edges are vibrant-razor-sharp. The greenness is so soothing today under an achingly blue sky. I had almost forgotten.

While the colors were remarkable, it was the sound of this day that made me take notice. Standing at the edge of the creek in the warm sun in the amphitheater formed by our little valley, sound reverberated in layers, bottom to top -- the creek rumbling below, a thousand incessant insects stridulating in the middle, while the northwest wind above played in the treble cleft.

The creeks are risen and clear; most of the water comes from underground. Recent rains have forced cold clear water from deep underground into the swollen stream-- enough water to call it a torrent, and it is raucous, in a hurry. If you could stand at the shore of the ocean and record the breakers, then take out pauses between waves--this is the sound that roars along the valley floor today. Breakers without a break, the bass undertones in this valley full of sound.

The seventeen-year cicadas wax and wane their nasal love songs relentlessly, with an occasional short pause when the singing males all seem to agree to stop together at once, just for a moment. They preen circumspectly before getting back to their seductive songs. I'm certain they expect at any moment a lured lady locust will climb up to their singing perch and make arthropodic whoopie. It must be a most orgasmic event-- to have waited seventeen years for this very moment. I wonder if you listened closely, could you hear the instant of those little whoops when the next generation of earth-sleeping insects is consummated, followed by a satisfied sigh, just days before death?

On top of the ridges the wind becomes visible as a million leaves race just ahead of it, like the standing wave that crowds perform in perfectly timed sequence at football games. Before me, a stadium filled with soft leaves rise in unison along the leading edge of the wind; they sit back down as it passes, only to stand and cheer again and again.

The cool, heavy air today feels full of energy and ozone. It has come here all the way from the tundra, never breathed before, save by a few caribou, and fewer wolves. The sound of wind in summer treetops brings a multitude of boreal voices, a soft rushing whisper devoid of the shrill whine inflicted in December by this wind's winter relatives traveling over Goose Creek though bare branches.

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Annie, here's your door.

I stopped by the old house this morning on the way to town. I've been saying every time we pass "It won't be here much longer". I was relieved to find it still standing this morning so I could take its picture. I had to shoo a half dozen cows away from the front porch, and they resisted moving out of the half shade to the sunny side of the old place.

Ann wanted-- really wanted-- the upstairs door to use in our farmhouse, back when we began restoring it. You can't really make that door out very well here, but it is a work of art, crafted, it appears, from chestnut, with stained glass panels. She snooped around, asked at the feed-&-seed, and found out who owned the house... an elderly gentleman who, like so many country farm children, didn't move far from the old homeplace, into a brick rancher just up the hill from where he was born and raised and his parents died.

He can't afford to keep the old house from decay, but he also can't bear to part with it. Even the front door. Believe me, he's had at least one empassioned offer to buy it. Soon, the beautiful door will crumble along with the gingerbread trim and double porches, and the old man and his memories will pass, and the memories of those who stood arm in arm on the old upstairs porch will go to dust.

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About Place. Then face to face. Two of our blogging group of Writers about Place have had the rare chance, across the expanse of much geography, to meet each other. Pica of Feathers of Hope and Cassandra of Cassandra Pages sit together and make an entry on the Ecotone pages. Maybe this will be the first of many contacts we will yet have, as we share first our words and thoughts about place, then someday, our very places in space!

And, speaking of 'place' writing, thanks, Boynton, for your kind pointer to the Ecotone essays, and personally, thanks for this link to THE FOREST AND THE TREES: Four Seasons From a Journal About Place and Poetry by Wesley McNair. Hmmmm. A book from a journal about the seasons, place. Very interesting.

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I don't know if it is a hypothesis that would stand up to scrutiny, but we were remarking in my 'Appalachian Writing and Culture' workshop earlier this month that modern times and changes in cities and towns and culture seems to be wiping out the 'characters' that small to medium towns tended to engender. Back in the days of sidewalks and front porches and town squares. You know. I'd be willing to bet that the town where you grew up had at least one of these notable, conspicuous oddballs. People who marched to the sound of a different drummer, heard voices we didn't, dressed to please themselves, kept 100 cats, wore tin foil hats...

When I was little, we were warned to run inside when the neighborhood oddballs walked down the sidewalk. Alice and Joe. They would walk past our house, usually about a half-block apart, but always talking as if they were in a crowd of enthusiastic listeners. We always tried to hear what they were saying, but were afraid to get too close, not knowing just what Alice might say. Would she offer us some candy? This would be a sure sign of imminent perversion and threat! Everybody knew they were 'dope fiends'. That's what neighborhood parents told us, so we reluctantly kept our distance. Well maybe they were (whatever a dope fiend is). They lived a few blocks away in an alley apartment. A bunch of us went up there once and peeked in their window, not knowing if 'dope fiends' ate little children. It was deliciously exciting. If they were there, their audience of listeners must not have been, because it was dark and silent.

In the small town not far from here where my kids did a good bit of their growing up, there was a character who, it was widely believed, lived in a dumpster, and his unkempt and subterranean appearance seemed to support that notion. He was known locally as "Coaldust Jones". I never saw him in anything other than overalls, and maybe that's all he could find that could comfortably cover a belly rotund and massive enough for its own zip code.

Coaldust... or locally, "th' Dust"... fancied himself destined to become a Nashville guitar picker, and local fund raising events would spotlight him playing and caterwauling an agonizingly bad bluegrass tune. The crowds ate it up, and he interpreted their wild whoops as proof he was Opry-bound, but in truth, his kudos were sadly derisive and mocking. It made me uncomfortable to watch. But he seemed to revel playing the fool and was preadapted by nature and nurture for the part. Coaldust found him a sad little gal (maybe she lived in a culvert, I don't remember) who agreed to marry him. It was an occasion of such import to marry off the local character that his wedding service was broadcast on the local AM radio station. When the ceremony was over, the radio personality was pleased to announce to Coaldust and Mrs. Dust that a benefactor had offered to send them for dinner anywhere they wanted to go. They went to Hardees. It was sad, really.

So. Tell us about your town character. If you've written about him or her, send us the link. If you don't have a weblog, send me your story and I'll post it here on Wednesday giving you the byline, however you want it to read. There have got to be a million of these stories out there. Tell us a few of 'em, won't you?

Are 'characters' disappearing? Have more of them ended up in shelters, sheltered workshops, or met dead-ends more noxious than 'dope'? Are we so much more cocooned in our houses without front porches and shopping malls that contain our modern sidewalks that we don't notice them? Or all we all becoming 'characters' so the old-fashioned eccentrics don't stand out? Hmmm. I wonder.

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Reminder to self: When cutting the grass during the peak of the gnat swarming season, if possible, cut in continuous clockwise or counter-clockwise circles. The back and forth mowing method carries the certain risk when turning at the end of the row of putting one's face (mouth, eyes, nose, ears) directly into the path of the multitude of whining gnats that are always a half step behind you from June to September. If using the 'back and forth' method, at least keep your mouth closed.

Gardening trick (stolen from an anonymous garden between home and town, yesterday). Regarding tomato stakes: They should be approximately six feet long, so that when hammered into the garden soil, at least five feet remains for the plants. Ever tried hefting a sledge hammer to the top of a six foot stake, huh? Solution: take a three foot section of treated 1 x 3 that you can easily hammer in a foot or so. Then, attach the top three foot section (of 1 x 3 treated wood if you have it) to the bottom section (drill matching holes through both pieces, fix with screws, or wire, or both). All of this can be used over and over, for many years. And I suggest putting some notches into the sides of the 'stakes' too, to better hold your tie-ups (I use old nylon bailing cord I always find around the dumpsters... works fine, and the price is right).

Yesterday was the first time I've been able to work in the garden in weeks. I managed to get the tiller across the creek, and was busily turning under the parts of the garden that hadn't been worked since all this rain set in over a month ago. Ann comes along and says "I see you tilled up that section where you planted the beans. Why?" Well crap. I hadn't marked the rows and the cool weather had slowed their growth so much I didn't see them barely poking up out of the soil after two weeks. She made matters worse by asking "What were you going to plant there where you tilled?"

"Beans".

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Funny. I wrote the "Conundrum" post Wednesday night, after meeting with the publisher that afternoon. All day Thursday, I worked on Fragments archive, extracting, sorting, wondering how to approach the possibility of 'doing something' with what I have or might yet write in the manner of daily observations and stories per the weblog since 6/02. All day long Thursday... not a single response to the Conundrums post. Fine, I thought. I had said I didn't expect a referendum on this very personal decision and effort. Fine.

Friday I went to Fragments to remind myself just exactly what I had said in that post (especially since I had already sent Beth there in partial response to her question "What do you see yourself doing with your writing?")... and guess what. In my narrow and intense focus on this new project, I'd forgotten to post Conundrums on Thursday. So Friday's vigorous and positive response in comments and emails was therefore even more welcomed and appreciated. I must tell you your support and encouragement is a shot in the arm, a real boost during a time of honest ambivalence.

In a sense, a few of you readers know me better than my coworkers, neighbors and most all of my relatives. If you've stuck with this small dog and pony show with any regularity since last summer, I've pretty well hung my old laundry out to dry in broad daylight, right next to the road, and what I have, you know about it-- faded, full of holes and ragged as it may be. And even so, you are kind enough to say there might be something worth sharing with a wider audience. And three days into the idea, and especially with a wee bit of encouragement from you folks, I'm still sort of hopeful of some tangible thing to hold in my hands in a year or so. We'll see. We'll see.

And I certainly want to continue with the weblog, as many of you suggested, posting snippets and summaries and snapshots of what I am writing and doing for the 'book'. The next year may not allow me the luxury of following my first rambling thoughts upon sitting down to the keyboard every morning, at least not every day. And it will likely happen I'll miss a day now and then. I'm hanging tight, Lord willing, and look forward to telling you about life on Goose Creek for at least another year. Stay tuned! And Thanks, y'all.

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We are about to reach the peak of the Cicada emergence around here, and down in the valley, we don't have anything like the number of these critters up on the ridges. But even down here, they are making quite a racquet. Their WeeeOhhhh WeeeeOhhhh sort of gets into your head like a commercial jingle or silly song and it's hard to not hear them.

Maybe that's why I came up with this cicada-centric photo op. I can't find enough of the cast off shells the new cicadas emerge from to make this picture myself, so somebody else will have to er, put legs on this one. Just send me a copy and credit me with the idea. No, on second thought, just send the picture.

Here's the image. Background: the shoulder and arm of a man sitting outdoors at a patio table drinking a beer. In the foreground, a snack bowl full of what appear at first to be Fried Pork Skins. But on closer examination, it is a bowl full of cicada exoskeltons.

I'm sorry. It just occurred to me while I was out cutting the grass (and oh maybe thinking how good a delicious malt beverage might taste later) that they look like fried pork skins on legs. And since perhaps the majority of you are not acquainted with either the southern snack items of Real Beer Drinking Men or the insect that resembles them (the snacks, not the men, mostly) just forget I said anything about this. Really.

Posted by fred1st at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Hear me out. Look over my shoulder as I think out loud. The dog won't listen to me this morning, and I need to talk.

An old bromide says that "if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got". I need to do something different, even though I am most grateful for 'what I've got' over the past year of sitting on this side of Fragments front page.

Before I started writing in the weblog every day, I wrote nothing. I amused myself with thoughts about what I might write if there were anyone to hear, but did not write at all. Fragments for the first time gave me an audience. My small audience gave me some degree of accountability to write something remotely worth reading (not to claim I have delivered such) and this daily routine, if nothing else, has taught me discipline in the craft.

I can see some changes in my writing, a year and many thousands of words later. Now I have a better idea of what I think because I see what I say. There is less hesitancy to just write, gagging the infernal editor, and words come more easily having eliminated to some degree the 'middle-man' between feeling and reason and the words that represent them on the page. When I started, I could write a fairly tight paragraph, and no more. A year later, I have a few 800-1000 word 'essays' that I am not ashamed of, and some degree of confidence that I can go beyond this length to something of more bulk if not substance, and maybe consider 'doing something' with writing.

And herein lies the conundrum. I can't imagine not writing to the weblog. Writing something that will just sit in binary fashion hidden on my hard drive perhaps for months or years is a difficult concept for me, frankly. But on the other hand, if I don't spend more of my time writing for purposes beyond the weblog, I'll get what I've always got.

I feel the need to move out of my comfort zone. And so yesterday, I met with a local publisher to examine options for getting a couple of things in print, in maybe a year. This is something I would have to grow toward. Having a clear idea of some larger purpose may help me to reprioritize my time and energies in a way that will challenge me to do more than I am doing. I don't yet know how important this impulse really is, and I'm hot one minute, cold and discouraged the next. Have you been there?

There are the options of self publication, co-publication and standard publication with greater proportional investment on the part of the publisher with more confidence that a market exists for the work. All of that needs to be looked at carefully.

Here's my thoughts, for both of you who are still reading this.

1) Consider that there may be a market of readers in the two million visitors that travel throught Floyd County and southwest Virginia on the Blue Ridge Parkway every year. Can I put together a small book (Volume One) consisting of basically an improved form of the prose poems, nature essays, granpa tales and dirt road discourse as appears from time to time in Fragments that would give interested travelers a 'slice of life' from Floyd County? I envision a 5 x 7 softbound book of maybe 75-100 pages, with a half dozen small inset color images (some of which have been seen in Fragments past) and cover art also from my images. Expectations: break even. Then after that, from what I have learned, go on the the next thing, or find another mountain to climb.

2) Work to facilitate getting my son's book in marketable form. Consider co-authoring the book, with me writing the parent's perspective of his travel by foot from Maine to Virginia, and telling the details of life of parents who 'simply waited' here on Goose Creek for Nate's adventure come to a happy ending; or just work with the publisher (since son will be up to his elbows in academic alligators for the next several years) to get the book in print. Expectations: this book could actually go somewhere if put together cleverly; it's a great story, I think.

I'm not necessarily expecting a referendum on this. I've learned that the a weblog, at least my weblog, is not a place to engage in gut-level dialogue. This is more monologue, made public, with my apologies. I'm just wondering what to do with my days here. While the pay stinks, writing seems to be the thing for which I have passion, but it seems more should come of my efforts than the short, superficial pieces that fill the archives of Fragments From Floyd. And I'm wondering: what will I do when I grow up?

If you've read this far, I really don't know what to say about you. People are strange except for thee and me, and sometimes I wonder about thee...

Thanks for listening. Mom.

Posted by fred1st at 7:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

We've exceeded 150% of normal rainfall so far this year. Most of that excess has come since the end of April. When spring officially ends tomorrow, we could have the wettest season on record for southwest Virginia, at least. The water table, dangerously low and causing many, many wells to fail in the county last year, is above the long term normal, and that is a very good thing. But we are not acclimated to Vancouver's and Seattle's sustained rains, and everybody you talk to lately admits to having their spirits 'dampened'... a word not chosen at random from our vocabulary of emotional states.

Cancelled this spring on account of rain: lying on the walkway in the warm sun of late spring while the maples put on their last leaves to complete our canopy of shade; walking through the valley the day after pasture cutting among the huge shredded-wheat rolls of hay pretending we were on a park lawn strolling among big round alien toadstools; seeing the summer constellations from the little bridge across the branch while fireflies rise from the field and woods by the thousands. And of course, it has not been a good year for gardens.

Yesterday afternoon, the sun shined and the sky cleared for the first time in weeks. Being outdoors for more than a quick sortee between the eternal showers and storms seemed unfamiliar, foreign, having been so long since I last enjoyed enough time under the sky to actually set about a task and finish it before the rains came again. We've gotten to where we just accept getting wet, and our back porch has been decorated for days at a time over that past six weeks with wet clothes that refuse to dry and are heavily flecked with pasture pollen and chaff and unfit for the dryer... looking for all the world like the signal flags on a sailing ship, the house like an Ark floating in a sea of heavy grass and mud. We are most happy to finally see that darned dove with the olive branch.

I squished around in rubber boots in what will have to pass for a garden this year, already almost a month behind in a short growing year. With another few days of drying, I will till under the bolting Buttercrunch patch I broadcast last fall before putting the garden to rest, put in more peas, a second block of corn, summer squash, and put up the piece of fence for the cucumbers to climb on, if it's not already too late for them. The tiller is across the creek in the barn and the water will be too high for days for me to walk it oh-so-slowly across the two planks over the creek to the garden. Maybe I'll just swingblade the tops off the weeds, till in a week if we get dry weather, and leave half of our small garden fallow this year with maybe a cover crop and hope for a better gardening year next time around.

Seasonal bonus: windfall firewood. Sitting here at the desk a few days ago with the windows open from the top enough to let in some outdoor air and outdoor sounds and keep out the blowing rains, I heard what I at first thought was a big orange DOT truck crunching down our gravel road. No, after a second I realized it was more of a breaking, tearing, ripping sound and it went on and on, and finally, the finale of an enormous THUD. A tree falling in the forest. A tree falling in a valley in a heavy rain is ventriloquial in it's ability to throw its voice, and I had no idea from the sound where the tree had crashed; but I've had my eye on a half dozen, thinking "It won't be long" and also thinking what a mess it could make if a particular tree fell a particular direction instead of another. I've even calculated, based on weak places in the tree or roots, the lean angle, and the weight distribution, where those several trees will fall when they inevitably do.

I'd had had my eye on this week's windfall for some time, knew its days were numbered, but it seems I cast too pessimistic a prediction on its inevitable fall that took place with me to hear it happen. A tall maple, it perched on the high side of the creek about half way up the pasture, clinging to the rocky bluff, its roots some ten feet up on the precipitous creek bank exposed and clutching the air. Every time we'd wander down this way, I'd tell Ann "You know, I think it's leaning more than it was a while back". She'd always tell me my imagination was playing tricks on me, and I know better than to argue with this woman, mostly.

So. This week, with a great fanfare, after weeks of rain that softened its tenuous hold on earth, the great tree fell. Perfectly. Breaking incompletely near the base in a splintering tear, it's roots did not come with it as I had predicted, and it is not blocking the creek as I had feared, instead it hangs suspended ten feet above the water, like a bridge. It did not lodge in the locust tree on the low side of the creek (as I had predicted) but it's 50 foot top fell precisely in the only small cleared space between treetops. And even better, it fell in a spot that I can easily access this fall with the truck, when maybe I can recruit a neighbor with tractor to help me sever the trunk from the roots, and drag the long straight trunk up to the edge of the pasture where I will buck it up into stovewood for the winter of '05. There'll be maybe a third to half a cord in it, and when I finally use it to warm us winter after next, each piece will tell this story.

Oh. And the best part about the fallen tree: I get to tell Ann "See. I told you so!"

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He has been the little man in your brain that you identify as your 'self'. Others have seen him as the 'tiny preformed human' inside the head of a sperm that will become the new person in the mother's womb. He has been many things, and the homunculus too is the distorted representation of the brain's terrain that is spent in sending signals to and receiving them from the body, and not all parts get equal billing as you can see. The 'sensory motor homunculus' is everyman, out of proportion, to one degree or another.

I think this is true. Aren't we all homunculi of this latter type? Do any of us have our lives in balance such that one part of each of us is not grotesquely out of balance and enormous, while other parts remain tiny, underdeveloped, withered, hidden? We are often not aware our own homunculus.

Too much of work, friends, making money; of fiction, gadgets, fitness, food, writing, reading, foozeball, weblogs, fishing... any one part of our lives that takes too much of our time while other worthy parts of us lie fallow... creates creatures less comely than we could be, unbalanced.

I have too much of some good things, too little of others within my grasp to have. I'm weary of the huge lips and monstrous hands of my homunculus. The plastic surgery needed to make me well proportioned: clear purpose, setting and persistence in well thought-out priorities and budgeting of time and energy, discipline, and unswerving determination. Life is short.

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.... and an early morning scam.

My credit card has been used to purchase more than $700 worth of merchandise at Best Buy, says the "FRAUD ALERT" email this morning, giving me a URL to contact. The link leads to a dead page. Something is verrry speeecious here, Lucy.

I had to get the straight scoop from The Times of India, wasting valuable minutes when I could have been writing on some totally absurd topic pretending to contain real meaning and purpose. Now tell me, how and where does one report that kind of FRAUD!

Posted by fred1st at 4:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The "Writing about Place" group is coming together. We would love to have visitors, but you may be hesitant to visit something called a 'wiki' (no, it is not a creature from Star Wars II). So, I'm going to post a couple of simple links to the main pages where stuff is happening, and will come back and update this post as warranted by changes at the front page of our "Place" called the Ecotone (which I define at the end of this post).

Come and just read. Then, if you want, as we develope the site further, you can submit links, urls, excerpts and make comments. Ease into it, just go over now for a few minutes and take a look, won't you?

How I Started Thinking About Place - And Why I Started Writing About It Read a dozen or so essays from around the world on this subject.

Here is the discussion recorded so far in response to the essays named above.

That should do for starters. We are still at work making the page more friendly and more comfortable for visitors. Please send comments or emails, we would appreciate feedback so much!

Ecotone: (noun) term from ecology. A place where landscapes meet-- like field with forest, or grassland with desert. The ecotone is an area of increased richness and diversity where the two communities commingle. Here too are creatures unique to the ecotone... the so-called 'edge effect'. Here in the online Ecotone for Writers about Place, we hope to create an edge effect, bringing distinct and different places and communities together to enrich our world. Enjoy your visit.

Posted by fred1st at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

Some notable updates in the mass exodus from Blogspot to Moveable Type, and changes to the blogroll soon to come...

Bigwig of Silflay Hraka has his own domain, although not his archives retrieved from his former abode at blogger.com at this writing.

Boynton, down under, also has recently moved and offers a small sign that Fragments don't always fall on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, Terry Oglesby of Possumblog ain't gone nowhere, but is telling jokes.

And Fragments has suddenly become visible to Technorati. I was beginning to believe that I was a figment of my imagination. And BeneDiction sent me a heads-up yesterday saying he and I were side by side, barely squeaking under the 500 barrier in NZBear's ecosystem, having attained the status of Crawly Rodents. Ah, a year ago... seems like only yesterday I lay in the primordial ooze, an Insignficant Microbe. UPDATE: checking just now to verify my facts, today I have sunk to the level of Floppy Bird at #525. Sick Gloria Monday. I'd trade it all plus th' gal down th' road for Grandma's featherbed.

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There is a plane slimmer than a molecule that separates worlds. Passing through that shimmering foil of liquid light is to slip down, drift down like a maple leaf in autumn, settling and sinking into murky mystery where anything can happen. Passing down below that terrible boundary that divides terrestrial from aquatic realities is to tether hands and mind to the terror and elation of the unknown, where a sudden jerk can pull a fisherman across dimensions of time, stir up even in the oldest of us a childhood thrill, each crank of the reel carrying the threat or promise of pulling in a creature unknown, a mermaid, a gilled genie, or an old shoe.

I always knew, when I reached those golden years when everything I wore would look old and worn and comfortable, like the old men I'd see down on Lake Purdy alone in wooden boats that were green like the water only where old paint held over blue, and barn red-- in those days of aged and indifferent ease, I'd be a fisherman full time. What better life could one imagine as a boy, growing up in Alabama surrounded by water, at every turn confronted pleasantly by that thin plane between the known and the liquid world of possibility.

Somewhere in the days when the world was too large to comprehend, an age when grownups knees were head high, and everything in a new life was over your head-- in some place, I remember high on a cinderblock wall a tangle of knobby-jointed cane poles hung up near the rafters, wrapped and twisted with thready lines, dark woven string, before the terrible deception of monofilament. I recall those cobwebby poles, a ringed coffee can of dark earth and wrigglers, and quill floaters on each line poised to write an up and down script like a telegraph key saying 'they have come!'-- poles held out over dark tepid water smelling of Spirogyra on an Alabama summer day.

I remember the drooping tips of cane poles held inattentively by young hands over still water, watching tiny sunfish, facedown watching them through the slats in the pier, jeweled slivers levitating lazily in shafts of light under their dark striped sky. The underwater world was a child's story self-told, telling of a place in my imagination where I would always be alien-- but too, holding a certain magic of a vast domain below sky that might contain anything imagined and everything hoped for. Many days I wished that I could go there, stay there under that shimmering plane, live womb-like down deep in filtered light among bright fish swimming overhead like floating birds, in silent liquid peace.

Posted by fred1st at 5:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Make plans now to attend the The 3rd Annual Nigerian E-Mail Conference. (Thanks to Chris O'Donnell for the heads-up).

This is too good an opportunity to pass up. Learn all there is to know about the Nigerian email industry. You'll come away with an understanding of the art and skill necessary to write compelling emails IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS; know exactly how many typographical and grammatical errors are optimal; learn of other countries now exploiting the millions-a-day method that has been so successful for Nigerians such as MR. IBRAHIM AHMED, inventor of the uppercase method.

(Let me know if you're going, we can travel over together. And don't forget to bring all the information about your bank accounts; there will be many opportunities there for large deposits IMMEDIATELY!) Some helpful quotes from previous attendees:

• "My business has increased by 45%, and I am now experiencing an 89.4% ROI" - Mariam Abacha
• "It was a genuine pleasure to meet other honorable business persons such as myself." - Isa Ahmed
• "The presentation on P.T. Barnum was especially helpful." - Farouk Bakoh

Posted by fred1st at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, populus, I reckon, since it was only one reader's whose eyes were having trouble resolved the 11 point font previously featured here. This any better, Lisa? Thanks for the consumer tip. And I'm sure others of you, over and beyond the difficulty reading imposed by the garbled mind of the author, may have squinted to see... much less understand... the stuff on Fragments past. I get fewer entries on the front page with 12 point, but some may consider that an added benefit.

Now. Would all those objecting to the new larger font size get in line at the complaint window. It will be opening on June 31.

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"Well Jiminy H Cricket"! I muttered to nobody (which was just exactly the number of folks within a mile of the house) as I extracted Occupant's Junk Mail from our green metal mailbox at the edge of our dirt road. "What kindofa world is it where folks get their jollies by shooting a person's mailbox!?" I had just that moment discovered a jagged hole in the middle of the left side, and sure enough, another exit hole on the opposite side of the box, just above the red flag that sat in 'no outgoing mail' position.

"Well crap. I'll have to get the needlenose pliers and some duct tape and see if I can undo the mischief some crazy-eyed moonshine-swilling yayhoo has done here" I thought. I considered calling the law right there and then, just to register my complaints about the fallen nature of man in general, knowing there wouldn't be a blamed thing they could do to find the redneck bumpkin that let daylight into my mailbox.

Just the facts, m'am. Just the facts. I assessed the situation with both the cool head of the sleuth and the anxious paranoia of the victim. Hmmm. Looking through the bullethole nearest the road, I could sight through the dark inside of the mailbox to see the trajectory, and hmmm... it would appear that the bullet would have passed through the box and struck somewhere on the front porch. I roped off the scene with copious ribbons of yellow crime tape.

Nope. Nothing there, no holes in the siding, no broken glass, no lipstick-smudged slender cigarette butts. But now: there is that little pine tree between the mailbox and the porch, right in the pathway of the bullet, so that I could not see the mailbox from the porch through the pine's branches. Hmmm, I thought.

Wait just a minute! I KNOW who did it! I am hot on the heels of the perpetrator and even now, I know he can feel me breathing the hot breath of the law down his scrawny neck. What if... could it be? that instead of the bullet coming up from the road, it came down into the mailbox... FROM THE PORCH! That's right, you connivin' slimy bug-lover. You have nowhere to hide now, you despicable treehugger.

I build my case: Is it not true that just the other day you bragged to your wife that you shot at and hit the Phoebee that has built four foul (fowl?) nests on your front porch? Admit it! You went so far as to tell her that the bird had been sitting WHERE? That's right: in the pine tree there off the front porch, the one just this side of the mailbox. Stay right there you sleazy word freak, while I check out one final nail in your sorry coffin.

Just as I thought! The exit hole has left a flap of green aluminum on the side of the mailbox AWAY FROM THE HOUSE, proving that the bullet did indeed come from the house, and it was you... YOU who shot a hole in your own mailbox while plinking small perching birds from the porch! Oh this is contemptible... that you would try to hang the wrap on your toothless brethren who drive past your house in the dark of night.

The dirt road detective recited in his most monotone Joe Friday voice: You have the right to remain silent (but looking at your weblog of the past year, this is not bloody likely)....

I slapped the handcuffs on the criminal's wrists and wisked me away, sobbing. I am incarcerated now in the white clapboard house near the damaged mailbox, and will be serving a sentence of three hundred thousand words to life. I am counting on early parole for good adverbs. Please send e-cards (and if you could slip a small file in as an attachment, it'd be muchly appreciated.)

Posted by fred1st at 5:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I guess even rocket scientists make mistakes, as in this series of five Hubble images. Pity. If you click ahead to image #2, it should be called the "Celestial Dragonfly" and #4, of course, should be called "The Unblinking Eye of God". But then, they did not consult me, this time.

Posted by fred1st at 8:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

It's raining. Always. Still. I expect one of these drippy mornings to wake up and find that our framhouse is a lakehouse and our front porch is now a fishing pier. You know, I think maybe I got a fish tale on th' line. Swim back here in a day or two and we'lll see if a big 'un has took the bait.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after. ~Henry David Thoreau

There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot. ~Steven Wright

An angler is a man who spends rainy days sitting around on the muddy banks of rivers doing nothing because his wife won't let him do it at home. ~Author Unknown

Nothing makes a fish bigger than almost being caught. ~Author Unknown

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A poem inspired by gardening pests and other irritants that hound us.

Posted by fred1st at 5:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

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The Ecotone: Writing about Place is opening it's doors, and invites you to come read our initial responses to a 'group blogging topic', adressing the questions below. We'll be offering more, and making a few more changes, perhaps, to our 'front page'; but we're eager to have you come by this week. Be thinking about posts or images that you have written or will write 'about place'. Come, read, look around, and get a feel for what 'place' means to some of us, and offer your own thoughts as well.

The 'wiki' is a little different at first, but basically you can click around and read any posts, and add your own comments or make changes to any page by clicking 'edit this page' at the top or bottom of each page. It has been a great format for pulling together our group and 'home page' which we are called The Ecotone... a new word for many, but it has a definition that suits what we hope to discover among those who come there, to share and grow.

BiWeekly Blogging topic for June 15: "How did you start thinking about 'place", and why did you start writing (or blogging) about it?"
___________________

Thinking and Writing About Place
by Fred First
June 2003

Sometimes the most difficult ground to see is that which is under our own feet. Knowing how to answer these simple questions should be easy, now that I've been writing and thinking about place for more than a year. But what started the 'thinking' and what compels me to write about place? That terrain is not as apparent as I would have thought, and I'll ponder it as you look over my shoulder.

Short answer: I live in a unique and beautiful world and enjoy creating images of it in words and pictures. I want others to know this place and share the experience of living here. But I'd like to look deeper than this. Maybe the trail to an answer can be followed, at least for a mile or two, using two metaphorical tools: maps and lenses. Let me see if I can explain.

In college I discovered the magic of maps. When I began to travel on my own across the south to backpack or canoe, I discovered that maps were almost magical in the way they could condense into a single page of lines and symbols the rivers, roads and trails where I had never been, portraying a truth on paper about a larger truth some real place on the ground. They provided landmarks from which to orient, so that I could find my way in a strange and unfamiliar land. At larger scales, as if going higher above the unknown, maps oriented and connected my tiny square of ground where ever I happened to live or be, to a round, spinning planet, and gave me an appreciation of connectedness, of belonging somewhere, some place, within the Whole Earth. Maps made me aware of places and of my place. I have made sure both my kids understand the value of maps, because I want them to be able to find their way in places they have not been, to know where they are in this world, and to come to understand their own 'place'.

It was by studying maps and traveling through them that I began to comprehend the uniqueness of the Southern Highlands of North America, the Appalachian Mountains-- where I have lived all my life. From my maps I learned that this terrain is unique in all the world, sharing a common orogeny, having in common the rock underground, wearing the same forest and inhabited by a common cast of creature-residents. These mountains unite us, imposing common hardships and blessing with a bounty of good things on the people who have settled here since the days of the Wilderness Road. These old mountains are uniquely different from the beaches, prairies, or rain forests where others live, as we are different from the people that inhabit those places. Across the world, we are all different within and because of place, and we are the same depending on the resolution of the maps we construct and the landmarks we chose to place on them. I have only recently begun to appreciate the uniqueness of my vantage point in space and time and am a novice in this exploration. I consult my maps often and am happy for fellow travelers.

I started writing about place a year ago because I see things here that I want to tell about. I see my part of the world through a lens that is uniquely my own.

In my life, the real lenses of the camera (and the microscope, during my biologist life) have made me more acutely aware of the beauty and form of 'ordinary' things, given me a different appreciation of things than I might have had without looking closely and with interest and awe through these wonderful devices that focus the mind on detail. Photography is an important part of my exploration of place, and in some ways, the images that I share from time to time are as important as the words, bringing my place immediately into yours, bridging both distance and the otherness that separates strangers. Through my lens, you can see through my eyes, share my sight, insight, and vision.

Lenses are real, and they are metaphors for anything that lets us or makes us see the world differently. Each of us has a 'philosophical lens' that molds our thinking and our writing. It clarifies, magnifies, distorts, and colors our perceptions and understanding of the reality around us. When I write about my particular place here on Goose Creek, I portray it through a refracting lens that bends and molds my view of life in a way that is unique, even from my neighbor's. Yours lens, too, is as distinct as your thumbprint, and when focused on that ground under your feet, your words about what you see, and your pictures offer us worlds about you in your place we would never have known.

When we write about place we explore particular coordinates of geography and landform and private experience, guided by our own life maps, seen through lenses that can bind me to your world across the globe's wide curve. And doing so connects us person to person, territory to territory. It puts real places on the representational map that is the internet. Can this writing about place bring us into each other's world and build "real" community? I trust we will see.

I write about place to invite strangers to know and understand my world, perhaps to see their world differently having come here. I'd like to think they may have new and useful landmarks on their maps when they leave here. So perhaps I write, too, as an open page of hospitality, a way of saying "my house is your house, and my creek and valley, likewise". Maybe I think and write about place because, as I believe Wendell Berry has suggested, if you don't know where you're from, you won't know where you're going. In some small or great way, it may be possible in writing on this topic to help each other know where we're going by better understanding the places from which we have come.

Posted by fred1st at 6:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)

How I wish I could. Sweat. Like other folks. How I envied the boys on my "Y" basketball team who would come in at half time with their shirts dark and heavy with sweat. While it's true that I, in fact, had been sitting on a plank rather than running anywhere during the first half, if I had been playing (and I did, once) my shirt would have been bright, dry blue-- just like before the game.

If I had played as hard as my team mates, I, personally would not sweat. Ever. My body, programmed in error at the factory, instead tries to pull heat from my legs, torso, chest, and shoulders up and out of my face alone. It's a bad plan, really. My body above the neck radiates palpable heat, grows coney island red -- almost purple; cheeks and temples and orbits bloat and puff, looking as if the thing needs to be poked a few times with a barbeque fork. A horrified onlooker might expect at any moment to witness sharp blasts of steam from the ears, an obvious valve for pent up pressure and heat.

Next time you perspire, sweat or 'glow', thank your lucky stars. You could come in from the garden like I just did, looking like a Ball Park Frank on a stick.

The worst part of inheriting the sweatless gene is that, lacking an effective way of shedding heat as it accumulates to dangerous, brain-poaching levels, my body has no choice but to reach up just above my ears and pull the emergency brake. In the middle of winning the best two out of three in racquetball, for instance, I have been known to inexplicably drop my racquet and walk off the court. Of course, one look at my face, it was apparent that something was dreadfully wrong. While my opponents basked in the cooling effects of sweaty bodies in motion on the court, I became a hissing crimson teapot, wearing a pained pressure-cooked expression, and they knew I was doomed to concede victory to those who were blessedly able to prespire. To the sweater go the spoils.

I can only thank my lucky stars that I was not born in an age where fight-or-flight responses meant the difference between life and death. Woa! Stop right there, Mr. Sabertooth. I'm overheated and I don't wanna play any more. Ball Park Frank, indeed. You have to wonder why this gene from the shallow end of the pool wasn't eliminated a long time ago -- by snarling, sweating predators who loved a hot meal.

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I emerged from sleep, struggling heavily, climbing up toward the edge of a soft concavity of dreams, this odd sound playing over and over above me, somewhere beyond the edge of oblivion. It was familiar, but alien. Then I realized my 'good ear' had been buried deep in the feather pillow, the bad one-- victim of years of chainsaw abuse-- was hearing only the lower frequencies (WhipPa..... WhipPa) muffling the 'oorwill part of each bird breath... WhipPoorWill, WhipPoorWill, WhipPoorWill I heard when I rolled over, remembering that I had intentionally smothered the repetitive namedropping in my pillow, awake well before I was willing to come up out of that soft feathery pit of sleep. Turning a deaf ear is a handy trick, even in the dark.

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I donta speaka de language. Help. I'm wondering why 1) I get very few search engine visits each day and 2) Google's first listing for "Fragments from Floyd" carries you to my long-defunct host of six months ago.

I submitted the site to all the major search engines in January when I first got my domain name. They seem to have forgotten me.

Is there somewhere in my templates I should put keywords, etc, to become more search engine visible? Are there meta-tag thingies I should add somewhere in MT? Huh?

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Well, it just shows ta go ya... Mr. Murphy was right. If you explain something so clearly that no one will misunderstand, someone will. Despite disclaimers giving credit to another Fred for "Prayer to the Mountains", at least three bloggers attributed it to this Fred. Sorry, Mr. Chappell. I am responsible for the poem below, and hope for the sake of your credibility as a prominent and established poet, that my lines don't get blamed on you. Perish the thought.

I am still growing thoughts on poetry. It remains a foreign language, and I know just enough of it to ask 'where's the mens room?'

"Let these peaks have happened"... the first line in the Fred Chappell poem (June 12, below) crystalized thoughts I have had over the seasons that might say "Let this valley, this quiet place, have happened" and particularly, it is a 'prayer' to not forget what I have seen, felt, known here. Young readers will appreciate this imperative to remember less than those of us who are further along the trail. These things remembered are mine, I have shared them with readers, sometimes with images... 'in clear glass'... as heartfelt expressions of awe and blessing. You may recognize some snatches of lines from the few poems or poetic prose I've put out for public view on the weblog. For what it's worth, here's the poem.

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Michael... that's him up there with the binocs in his banner... is back. The Curious Frog is reborn, er hatched. Go say hello and welcome back.

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Hunting around for a lined pad to use for my little class, I found this image, cut from a magazine long ago, on the pasteboard back of the pad. I think I remember doing this, and at the time, I was working in a Pain Center in the midst of North Carolina's Furniture Belt. Oh the stories I could tell.

And now I look at this image and bristle a bit from the message it contains. I've lost the context of it from it's source, but it portrays 'trailer trash' southern whites who are uneducated, uncouth, unclean and uncool. How many stereotypes can you pick out? (I see at least a dozen. See below.) And where is Waldo?

1. Shotgun at the ready
2. camoflage outfit standard issue
3. all are 'big boned'
4. bus seat in the front yard
5. no grass in the front yard
6. 1950's model 'trailer home' up on cinderblocks
7. big ugly dog that can do 35 mph. Can you?
8. biker dude with long dirty hair (dirt-hippie)
9. th' two boys there got hats on
10. (all th' boys is brothers, and Charlene there is Spider's woman)
11. Easy Charlene (works at Dinky Diner) with big hair in a too-tight dress
12. at least one bondo-enhanced auto up on cinderblocks
13. redneck tans
14. barefoot hick with missing teeth in overhauls

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New discovery: The WikiPedia. Useful already and up on my links bar, along with google and the hyperDictionary. Go ahead. Try it out. It's not exhaustive, but it's QUICK!... which, after all, is where the term 'wiki' comes from... Hawaiian for QUICK!

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More on "Poems that shouldn't be writ"...(6/11/03)

Okay. I wrote one. It is modeled, I guess. I read the first line of Fred Chappell's 'prayer' (below) and the rest came from deep places and brought forth a poem I called "In Living Memory", pulling from some of these 'fragments' written over the past year. One of the premier critics of Appalachian poetry (poetry from Appalachian writers) will hand it back to me by tomorrow. If it isn't shot all to heck, I'll try to overcome my reluctance and post it here. Shoot. Now that you've seen my wedding pictures, why keep secrets.

Poetry is so personal, idiosyncratic, and potentially obscure-- unless and even if you are good at it. I see the place for poetry in my lilliputian literary efforts now better than I have, and expect I will be reading our regional poets more, having been introduced to them for the first time, and using the form on purpose in coming months. My few past poems were accidents, poetic prose chopped into terse lines, after the fact. If nothing else, even if they remain unpublished, hidden but in the mind of the poet-creator, poems are wonderful exercises in words and the sound of words, the shape of ideas and exploration of inner space. (You got any you'd be willing to share? Huh? Dare ya...)

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Overworked! Underpaid! You go, Matt! This week's Carnival of the Vanities has spread into at least TWO BiG ToPs and six rings of entertainment at Overtaken By Events. There is something for all this week, provided you are Monty Pythonic. Go read. Plan to stay a while. And thank Matt for his hospitality on your way out, and please wipe the sawdust from your feet before returning to your homes. Thank you. That is all.

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Who are these people, and why are they so young?

This was the only time in my life my knees shook. I could barely stand up. Til death to you part is a long time. As we know much better now than on this day in 1970. For better or for worse, indeed.

We left the church for a two day honeymoon before I started grad school. She bawled, half way there, basically saying "What have I done?" She still wonders.

We saw each other for a few minutes this morning before she left for work. I'll be gone when she gets home. And life goes on. Happy Anni, Annie.

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Oh the amazing propensity of our species to create. There is even a play about this man, a fin-de-siecle 'fartiste' stage named "La Pentomane". This would be an interesting story even if it weren't true!

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Assignment for today's writing class: create two poems closely modeled on the poetry you've read from your assigned readings.

Sigh. Though I more often am comfortable with poetic prose, a few poems have come to these pages over the last year, come out of deep emotion, had to come out because I would burst if they didn't.

I feel doomed to failure in this assignment... a poem created by artificial insemination, followed closely by conception, 10 minutes of gestion and immediate birth, full grown. Agghhh! The HORROR! The HORROR!

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Twelve Years, Nine Months, and Seven Days by Barbara Dockery --
A Brief Review by Fred First

This is another 'prize winner' among student essays. It hits hard. You may have a day in your life that could be set out in a chronology in this manner. Do you think the writing out of this day lead to any 'laying to rest', any resolution for the author?

The most immediate impression of this tale is that it is taking place in real, moment by moment time at a particular day in the life struggles of one man dying and those he is leaving behind. The narrative is from the bewildered point of view of a twelve year old confronting adult matters as grave as death, yet told through memory of an adult and in adult sentences and the introspection of a grown-up looking back at their childhood selves.

The author interweaves the mundane details of that day in time with the profundities of anticipated loss. Ordinary items are seen through this lens of after-death altered reality, and hence they take on added significance-- the oval placemat, for instance. The ordinary becomes a pale solace, routine a thin vapor of consolation.

The father briefly appears in real time, going about ordinary life in a slice of the past, then returns in the story to his deathbed. Both father and family try to be for each other what they know is needed in this time. Both fail. Both 'are strong, yet weak'. Both father and narrating daughter-child are in transition-- he from life to death, she from child to adult.

The thread of time and its impact on the author, the life lessons learned compressed by emotional weight into a fixed circle of the clock, is a literary tool the essayist wields with great skill, creating an intensity that builds in this chronology that ends in death, while life ticks on.

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In this week's class, only two days old, we have been critiquing poems and essays by Appalachian writers, including some undergraduate essays from Mountain Empire Community College where our week's writer-leader teaches. I thought this one called "Mama Laundered Her Money" was especially quirky and poignant, epecially coming from a novice writer. It's a good read. See if you agree. If you want my spin on it (and I'm sure you'll insist I share it) ... you can have it, no charge. Read on...

Mama Laundered Her Money

Mama was, mama did, mama didn't, mama said...

The author's list of maternal quirkiness seems at first to be merely a laundry list of the woman's idiosyncratic and peculiar ways of dealing with the world. One would almost think her behavior borders on neurosis… compulsive attention to detail, obsessive fears of not doing the right thing, having the right condiments at the ready, guilty of the sins of both omission and commission at every turn.

It is not until we learn that "mama was afraid" that the reader begins to see past the odd personality to the underlying personal pain. Mama's father and her first failed marriage help us understand that the woman is oppressed by her failures. She sees herself in the eye of an angry Old Testament God, and is working out her salvation in agonized propriety, neatness, and control of all details of her life… to blot out her failures like the name blotted from the family Bible.

The author does not enter her story other than to say "I saw" or "I heard" until mama finally told her of the first husband and the unspeakable divorce. Then the significance of the author's love for a divorced man takes on the full weight of significance.

It strikes me that the author utilizes a very simple vocabulary in the telling of this story, no words that a sixth grader would not understand, no excess of adjectives in her more than adequate descriptions.

Knowing about mama's past, the courage it took to cope with it, even if in odd and misunderstood ways makes the courage of her final days more heroic. The chlorox stains on her apricot wrap-around are the field decorations on the uniform of a Christian soldier.

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As I got out of my truck in front of the house this afternoon, I was regaled by a flurry of dozens of wispy yellow and black butterfly wings. I've heard about releasing butterflies, ordered at no small expense, for weddings, anniversaries and the like, but never would I have expected for someone to arrange for such a celebration simply because one weary bumpkin arrives home from a rather ordinary day. I suppose my wife has beat me to the punch and honored me with a butterfly welcome. Wednesday is our 33rd wedding anniversary, and last year we both missed it. But more about that later.

Truth is, we have these congregations regularly around here. Today it was maybe twenty five tiger swallowtails, and two or three spicebush swallowtails. There is some substance necessary to butterfly metabolism at the places they chose to aggregate in impressive numbers, and often there are countless black bees taking part in the frenzy as well. Which element they come for I couldn't say, but for sure, it must be present in puppy pee. Every one of the dog's favorite unwatering holes is a butterfly gathering spot that looks like a local pub with dandys in a tight circle around the bar. I wondered at one time if maybe Buster the dog was diabetic and was losing sugar in his urine that made it attractive to bees and such.

In the way of an aside (I know. This is highly unusual for me...) do you know that there are two common forms of diabetes, a term that means 'to flow through': Insipidus and mellitus. Sugar diabetes is the latter. Diabetes mellitus means basically "honey flavored urine". And of course, insipid means tasteless. You got it. Docs of old used taste to tell the difference. Free story. No extra charge.

So, yessir, a year ago on the 11th, Ann and I both forgot it was our anniversary. One forgetting would have been a disaster, but two? Offsetting penalties! Whew! Close call. And now, this year we have both remembered, ahead of time even. But because of our schedules, neither one of us is 'available' to celebrate. I wrote about it last year, and called the tale "You Don't Bring Me Flowers Any More". If you're married it's worth the read... a story, with a moral. It could happen to you!

Later this week, when Ann and I walk up on a milling mass of yellow and blue and black butterflies, I think I'll claim I sent off to California for them and wish her a happy 33rd Anniversary. You think there's maybe the tiniest chance she'll pretend to believe me?

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Bryan is posting 'favorite lyrics' starting today. And who should be first but yours truly, Fredrico Primo... Fred First of Fragments. Usually, as the Bible says, the Firsts shall be last. But hey, we're used to it. Go over to Arguing with Signposts and check out this week's blogger lyrics entries, the first of weeks more of the same.

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What is that smell? As we walked down the road along the creek, it never changed, never stronger, never fainter. It is as if the air uniformly were filled with an atomized oily essence that is 'everywhere and nowhere present', as strong in the woods as along the edge of the pasture. Breathing normal shallow breaths, we weren't aware of it. We breathed more deeply as we walked, and the fragrance became impossible to ignore.

Sweet. It is a sweet, almost cloyingly sweet smell. Honey-like, but more like honey than honey. If it were a taste, a small bite would be exquisite, more than that nauseating. It is an aroma to which the nose does not habituate. The vast majority of the smells of humanity are of the awful variety which mankind, in our long and squalid pre-hygienic history, has been compelled to endure in homes and stockyards and marketplaces. It is a mercy, then, that usually, with prolonged exposure to a 'smellant', the nerve-endings of smell eventually tire out, and the stench of first encounter seems to disappear; we 'get used to' it. But this oily-sweet smell in our air does not seem to abate over time, adding to the impression that the mysterious smell borders on obnoxious. But then again, it is oddly pleasant.

My best guess is that we are smelling the copious pollen of pasture grasses, now weeks overdue to be cut for hay. The yellow powder coats every surface, and the cats paws leave little cloverleaf tracks where she pads across the porch. In literally thousands of acres in Southwest Virginia, pasture grasses have grown heavy with gray-green flowering tops going to seed. The tall grasses have been wet time after time in the every-other-day rains we've had since early April and now lay bent and matted in the fields. It all seems doomed to 'go to the bad', to be cut down eventually when we get a few dry days in a row, to be baled wet and spoilt or simply cut and dozed over to the edge of fields to decay. We'll hope for better fortune come time for the second cutting.

Our walk was cut short by unexpected thunder. As we hurried back in the direction of home, but not too much hurry, the sky took on that eerie orange glow that often presages or closely follows towering thunderheads. By the time we reached the house and stood together in the lazy rain on the front porch steps, a full 180 degree rainbow arched over our pasture, with one end cocked akimbo up on our ridge. Our day was ending with rains, a rainbow, and the inescapable saccharine perfume of early June. As the last page of a long hard week and beginning lines of another full of promise and new worlds of words, this all seems just about right. Just exactly right.

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(UN.dur.lohd sin.drum, -drohm) n. Ill health or depression caused by a lack of challenges or stimulation at work.

"Boredom has exactly the same effect on the body as stress," says Dr Martyn Dyer-Smith, a psychologist at the University of Northumbria. "People who are normally busy can become ill when they don't have enough to do, because it sends their levels of stress hormones shooting up." ...

Read More...

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There is too much going on, not too little, accounting for posts less frequent over the past week in Fragments, as many of you understand. The writing workshop changes gears, as a new author steps in tomorrow... one whose primary works are in the realm of poetry, about which I know little. I have reading to do before class tomorrow, and I am being inundated by a flood of topics I want to write about at length.

And I have come to a decision: Fragments will soon be hiring. More about that later. Now, with less than four hours of sleep since returning from the Carter Fold trip early this moring, Ann is wisking me off to church. I will, of course, be carrying along a helmet to prevent pew-related traumatic brain injury.

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• No tears for the writer, no tears for the reader
• Write every day without hope and without despair
• Each age must write its own book
• You should show rather than tell your readers
• An educated man is one who is never bored under any circumstances
• Follow your bliss, follow your pain
• Dive down, but come back up. Dive, dont fall.
• Write your guts out.

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I don't have the energy to put this in a more creative way, so: today, after the end of the first week of the writer's workshop, I am simultaneously over-stimulated, overwhelmed, exhausted and invigorated. I feel like I should take a day or two to debrief, going over everything that my mind has touched on lightly since Monday, recording every author, literary and philosophical term, each named book and spin-off thoughts from all that.

And, I should write a 'mission statement' that reflects all of the ideas for how my writing energies could, should be redirected after this landmark event, not let the vision or the energy die, get something on paper about where the next year could take me. But I won't do it today. Nor will I work in the garden, or paint the upstair bath, or pay bills... things I've deferred for a the past week in total immersion of the workshop.

And there is the sense of loss. It isn't often you meet someone you feel like you've known all your life. After class yesterday, I told Dr. Higgs "Jack, it's a bitter blessing to have met an old friend for the first time on Monday, and then say goodbye to him on Friday. I hope our paths cross again". And maybe they will.

No, I'll not chip away at my list today. Soon, I'll be going with the Appalachian Studies faculty and a few more students to the Carter Fold, home of the original Singing Carter Family. It is likely to rain bullfrogs all day. If I am exhausted now, my brain will be a veritable mush by the time we return to the college at about 2:00 tomorrow morning. And I'll be that much further behind in my duties and self-assigned projects and resolution writing, not to mention writing for its own sake, including some reflections on the trip to Hiltons. This is a wonderful opportunity, and I'm glad I'm going, but I confess, it's a bit of struggle to keep on the sunny side.

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Is there room in the world for Consumptive Man in his billions and a Self-regulating Nature? Probably not, says Bill McKibben... one of the vast number of authors who was pointed out to me by Dr. Higgs upon reading such pieces of mine as "Sunset and Clouds". The End of Nature goes on the long, long list of books to buy and sit in the queue on my heavy shelves of the to-be-read. An excerpt from an MIT review:

McKibben shows how tightly bound up the destruction of the planet is in our lives. Our cars, our houses, plastics, and pesticides are as much a part of the world we know as are the trees, waters, and hills that we live among. McKibben sets forth plainly that the human race will need to decide between our material world -- houses, cars, clothes -- and the natural world. "One world or the other will have to change." McKibben envisions a "humbler world" where our material excesses will seem absurd. In this world, he thinks, human beings could take a less dominant relation to nature, and nature might once again establish itself as independent, constant.

The ending is rather optimistic, considering that McKibben does not describe in any detail how we will go from our current situation of continued and increasing environmental destruction to either of his two possible worlds. The book does not present a doomsday picture -- nor does it present real solutions. Instead, the book exposes the nature of the environmental crisis and leaves the reader with a lot to think about.

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The region of the map and of the collective mind called Appalachia has the soft edges of a remembered dream, real and substantial somehow in the way that a character in a radio play heard often enough takes on an imagined existence we cannot thereafter unthink or unknow. We that live here in the midst of this shadow land of Appalachia are the players written into it by color writers and matrons of mercy from more than a century ago. We have been content to play our assigned parts with too little regard for what our audience has come to think they know about us. We have too long believed the caricatures about ourselves and our place in it, so that the good that we could say, write, paint, sing, and do in and for the larger world has fallen on ears believing that no really good thing can come from Nazareth.

I have recently seen vital signs that the victim is recovering from her long period of catatonic self-delusion. Our children, even from this county boasting only a single traffic light, are succeeding. The local newspaper in Floyd County, Virginia, recently devoted several full pages, as they do every year, to pictures of each graduating senior with a short description of their plans for after high school. I have been inclined to quickly look away from these pages in years past, here and in other Appalachian places I have lived. I find it disheartening to read across the rows and columns of graduates going into 'undecided' futures; or worse, "entering the world of work"... a phrase that, rightly or wrongly, makes me imagine young worker bees going forever into the foggy future of amorphous and undistinguished servitude in exchange for food.

Not so this year's graduates in my county. The vast majority are going to college. Not only that, they can declare with some precision what it is they want to do with their lives. Many will be going into communication arts, fine arts and the sciences. And a significant number will be staying within the Appalachian region for college because they can get a quality education in this 'backwater' world and even, hopefully, find jobs back in their home towns when their next graduation day comes around in four years. Success is the sweetest revenge, it is said. If we are to rewrite Appalachia's future, we must acknowledge and proclaim outside our own walls the successes that happen every day in our communities, schools and by the arts and artifacts that typify the real Appalachia.

If we can give voice to our successes in education and the arts, and confidently tell the larger world who we really are, perhaps we will grow unwilling to be mere characters in a quaint American play, watching ourselves selling our birthright for a bowl of porridge.

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ASSIGNMENT: Write a piece based on this week's reading. I chose to write this tale based oh-so-loosely on a poem, Brier Sermon, by Jim Wayne Miller, which is about a street evangelist. Here are my true lies from memory... a time seen through the eyes of a ten year old boy in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950's and told in his voice.

I like my accordion. It's new and smells like new shoes. My momma let me get the one with blue sparkles in the sharps and flat keys when I was ten years old. And when they hear me playing it out on the sidewalk and come around, the kids from the project always want mostly to push on the sparkly keys. I pull the bellows back and forth to make some air come out, cause if I don't they wont be able to hear the notes. I don't like it that their hands are dirty. My momma makes me come here. On Thursdays we pick up Miss Sharp. She comes with us and she smells like a room full of roses. Our car smells like her on Friday. She dudn't have a car or any kids. When I play and the kids come, it's like they belong to her. She seems happy to be here.

While Miss Sharp sets up the easel, momma says to me "Play Way Down Upon the Suwanee River". It's really hot and the accordion makes me sweat and itch. When the kids come, it's dusty 'cause they wore off all the grass. I don't want to play loud cause I feel silly; but momma tells me "Play louder". The first time, not many of them came. Now, they know 'bout us. I put down a jelly samwich one time and watched the big black ants come to it. When I play "Pop Goes the Weasel" the kids come from all around and I think they look like ants. First they bunch up and mash the keys on my accordion. Then they sit down in a circle, except it's not a jelly sandwich they come for. It's Miss Sharp. She's nice to them and tells stories.

This iddn't a nice place. Momma says the people who live here are 'less fortunate than ourselves'. That means they fight a lot and make noise in their houses, all in lots of long buildings that have fans in the windows. There is broken glass and we have to be careful. I have shoes but some of the kids who come got no shoes. After I'm done playin', we get in a sort of circle and sing "If you're happy and you know it" and sometimes "There's within my heart a melody". Miss Sharp's throat goes up and down when she sings and she throws her head way back like a chicken. Momma says we shouldn't be ashamed of our faith. Miss Sharp iddn't ashamed. She's in Childy Vangelism.

I get to play with the flannel pieces in the back seat when momma drives us over to Elyton Village. One time Miss Sharp brought David and Goliath. It sure took a big piece of flannel to make Goliath. There are some other people in the story made of flannel, soft and bright, but I don't know who they are. And there is a sword. And David's sling. I don't know rightly what a sling is. When we're sitting in the dust in a circle with the broken glass and the fans going in the windows and the people inside yelling and the insects making noise and Miss Sharp smiling and talking to us kids, I listen to the part in the story about the sling. She says it is made of string and a pouch thing. You can throw a rock hard and kill a giant with a sling. I like throwing rocks. When we're done with the story, we sing "The B I B L E, yes that's the book for me". We take Miss Sharp and her flannel board home. And it smells nice in the car. I am real glad to get home. We have grass and it's quiet there.

When I got home, I wanted to make me a sling to throw rocks. I got me some string from the kitchen drawer and a blue jeans patch from the round tin of sewing stuff in the hall closet. I made me a sling. It looked like the little piece of flannel in the story. I didn't know how to make it work. I couldn't wait to ask my Sunday School teacher and he told me how. I went home and spun a rock round and round and let go! But it didn't go where I wanted it went backwards and hit the house. My momma came outside to see what happened, and she saw my sling. She said "Where did you get that!" and I told her Miss Sharp told me how to make it and Mr. Eisel my Sunday School teacher told me how to use it. She said the devil had got hold of my ears and I should hear the Christian parts of the stories.

When us kids went back to school in the fall, we stopped going to the projects. I was glad 'cause I was running out of songs to play. And it didn't look like Miss Sharp was gonna tell us about any other neat smoting stories about spears and stuff. A few years later, I made a sling out of leather. I could make a rock go where I wanted, twice as far as the other boys could thow. Pretty soon the colored boys was making slings too. And me and some boys that lived on my block had rock fights with the nigra boys on the power company land that summer. It was 1963 and the growed-up white folk and the colored in Birmingham were unhappy with each other about something. But us kids, we were just having a friendly rock fight using our slings, just like the one in the flannel board stories.

You know, I think Miss Sharp'd be happy if she knew how much I'd learned from her that summer. But Momma says I shouldn't say nothing about it.

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One of the things I told Dr. Higgs was 'how I got interested in writing'. That tale has to include my sidelines involvement as advisor and coach in my son's writing. He wasn't home long enough to get this going like I had envisioned, but we did get a couple of installments of his 'book' up on Blogspot.

Some of you know this: He walked home to Floyd County from Bar Harbor, Maine in 2000. He stayed with strangers he met along the way. Here is one of my favorites from early in his journey. Thought I'd let somebody else in the family supply the reading material today. Hope you enjoy CHAPTER THREE: FRANK KINGSLEY. (Scroll down. Blogspot links not working. Now I remember why I left Blogger.com).

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I write best when my mind is not oppressed by too many ideas. This morning I am wonderfully oppressed, and mute. Suffice it to tell you that Dr. Robert "Jack" Higgs and I had dinner together last night after class. I have seldom... I'd be willing to say never... had an evening of conversation that at once covered such breadth and dove so deeply into the lives and passions and hopes of two men. I feel I have sat at the feet of giants. Dr. Jack would refuse to be so described, but the writers through history, many of whom have been friends of this man over the past forty years, were with us at that table last night and participated in our conversation. They talked to me through Dr. Higgs about the terror and ecstacy of the writing life. And this rumpled avuncular Man of Letters sat with me, like a father with son, gently drawing, kindly chiding, willing to nudge me, in the fullness of time, over the too-comfortable edge of my nest. It is on the way to the ground that I may find out 'what it is that I should do with my life as a writer' and this man has helped me be willing to try my feathers.

About this I could write volumes. Some day. But now: I have homework.

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That's right. The AT (Annie Trail) is closed along the Eastern Pasture Branch due to the water hazard created by tall uncut hay grasses sprawling across the footpath. We regret this inconvenience, but due to no period of more than 36 hours without rain in the past three weeks, the grasses have set heads and lodged over into the trail and may not be usable as feed in the coming weeks.

Admittedly, the worst thing that could happen is a traveler could get wet. How wet? One tall skinny bearded walker was observed earlier this morning after returning to the trail head along the Eastern Pasture Branch. He was soaking wet on his fore-side, and was seen pouring water out of both is rubber boots.

The maintenance crew apologizes for any inconvenience this trail closure might cause you. Please feel free to take any of the other trails that remain open; and if you find any berries on your walk, please put them in the fridge. We're out of bananas and need fruit for cereal.

Thank you.

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Well dear hearts, I was pure wrung out by the time I drug in at 10:00 last night. But not sleepy... oh no! I was surging with adrenalin and buzzing with all the events of the day to tell Ann when I got home. The lights were on in the house when I drove up; but she was fast asleep. Even the dog had checked out, didn't even lift his head to say "would you kindly be quiet, we didn't wait up for ya". Yes, I see that.

I'd been at it since early in the morning in preparation for this long day. I knew what it was that I must do before Tuesday's class: go through an entire year of this weblog and extract scribblings such as might not draw too many snickers, samples that might show a shred of promise and might allow an interested reader (yes! I might have one or two) at a glance (well, what I ended up with was about 50 pages, so it would have to be a longish glance) to be able to offer opinions as to just how to characterize the 'genre' or voice or audience of my collected writings. This portfolio, if I may glorify this bric-a-brac as such, I hole-punched and put in a very used three-ring binder, on the cover of which there was a clear acetate panel inviting a 'front cover'. Now: If I could just find an image to go there that depicts a rural setting. Duh. So, I set off with this tome, knowing that Dr. Higgs has specifically asked for our 'writing samples' for his perusal on Thursday after class.

Yesterday, we began by going around the circle, reading pieces of our work. Herein lies a long and separate post for later, perhaps. Suffice it to say that we did, at last, learn a good bit about each other this way. And thankfully, there was not a lot of wincing going on, as the material was generally worthy of positive criticism. Anywho: at the first break, I captured the prof before he could even stand up and stretch.

"You're not going to be with us long enough for me to be shy, so I'm gonna ask you something, and you can say no, but I felt I need to take advantage of you as resource, so... since I've been writing for a year and have already accumulated my 'writing samples' (for some of my classmates this is not the case) and have them with me today, could I get you to take a look at them sooner than Thursday. I'd really appreciate your ideas about"... et cetera.

Sure, he'd be most happy to. And so my little bundle is being scrutinized by a prefessor emeritus Pulitzer Prize nominee this morning. Gulp.

After class, and before Dr. Higgs reading last night, we had dutch treat dinner at an Italian restaurant, where the four beer drinkers sat together in the middle of the table (including Dr. Higgs who manned the pitcher and never let a glass get past half empty), there were often four highly interesting conversations going on at once in different quadrants of the table. I am accustomed to neither conversation or beverage with any, not to mention, so many interesting souls. It was a good day, and I could say much, much more of the good that may come of it. Later.

Out of my little book, and as the last reader of the day, I had to chose one short piece to read. I chose a sample that I felt illustrated several things we had talked about associated with writing themes or writers: 1) apparent defeat can be resolved with a victory; 2) some of the best writing comes from writers in periods of suffering; and 3) "If the author doesn't laugh (or cry) the reader's not going to."

The piece I read was written exactly one year ago, when I was bitter and confused and bereaved from a disappointing 'bad breakup' in my profession, totally without a map of what I might do with myself, and struggling to appreciate the blessing of solitude and beauty in the midst of this life tragedy. It is the first piece in this journal that, written, made me think there may be some redemption and solace and meaning for me in writing. And so this is what I read. (Because the version read yesterday is a later and better edit of the weblog version, I'll append it to the "read more" page...)

June, in the Summer of our Discontent

The animals have been tended, my wife and son have left for work, and I am alone watching the first rays of a humid, empty day through the windows of our worn but familiar farmhouse. I am in my slippers, merely waiting, and pointless, early into my second month "between jobs". Waiting… on epiphanies, promised calls, revelation, solace, inspiration.

There are few places I would rather be today than in our placid and remote valley in Floyd County, this land that envelops us, this country that is more like home than anywhere we have ever lived. I drink the last of the morning coffee in the midst of a sanctuary of harmony and light that my eyes and internal rhythms are just now adjusting to, and it feels to me as if a healing is taking place. Solitude, health, natural beauty, time empty waiting to be filled and a smattering of expectation... blessings brought home to me in the dark, last night.

It is late, and I am last to bed, past the usual time. I step out onto the front porch into the cool and sweet air of Early June, and sit on the top step quietly as if not to disturb the wildlife, whose nocturnal day I am entering.

The pasture grasses just beyond the maples are in full flower and their pollen smells like midnight bread baking, while Goose Creek sends up wafts of spearmint, wet mud and turbulence.

My eyes soon learn to see in darkness and I am aware of soundless flashes of summer lightning, and stars overhead. My night vision comes and goes with each flash and pause and flash. Rising from the dark field on the fragrance of grasses are tens of thousands of 'lightening bugs'. Put them in a jar and shake and watch them illumined with the cold, translucence of memory. They pulse and rise above the field in counterpoint to the tempo of the clouds, signaling ancient syllables that we could understand, if we were more often still, less guilty, and lived more in our own fields.

Gravity pulls me down and I lie on my back, on cool stone, horizontal, facing out not up, into a mock-infinity of space, wondering what is my place in this world of men and of words. Do I deserve to be so blessed among Earth's anthill of humanity? What must I do in the warmth this gentle epiphany that is revealed to me tonight, and how should I then live? Maybe I will try to find the words in the morning, after the house is quiet again and the fireflies have gone to bed and the world smells of heat and ozone and toast.

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Go here.

Read this.

I'm off to see the wizard. Have a nice day.

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What can I say about my 'writing conference' after only the first day? This futility would be of no more use than predicting the last paragraph of the last chapter in a complex book after reading the dust jacket. Who are these strangers and will we know more than names with faces when the two weeks are done; and will we, will I, have any better sense of what or how or where to write than I do now in my isolation from almost everything but Nature and God in my green hermetic retreat in Floyd County? I cannot help but travel hopefully after our first three hours together, because already, I've been reunited with old friends I had somehow forgotten in years apart: Authors, books and ideas.

It is the world of ideas that woke me in the middle of the night... the tiny window of thought opened this first day of class by the recollection of books read in my former life (before my pragmatic choice to become a technician of joints and muscles). Thoreau, Dickenson, Whitman; Mortimer Adler, Ernst Becker, Arthur Koestler, Wendell Berry, Rudolph Otto's Idea of the Holy; and on and on... in our wide-ranging introduction to the world of words. It is more than I can bear. It feels like coming home, even among strangers who may yet become my friends if only because they too feel this same gratitude... that we are made to share the mind of God by our naming of things.

"I see, smell, taste, hear, feel that everlasting Something to which we are allied, at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very Selves; the one historic truth, the most remarkable fact which can become the distinct and uninvited subject of our thought, the actual glory of the universe; the only fact which a human being cannot avoid recognizing, or in some way forget to dispense with". -- H.D. Thoreau

I can't predict the last paragraph, two weeks from now. But know I will enjoy turning the pages to the end. I'll read aloud, here, when I am able.

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Bryan at Arguing with Signposts is convening a little lyrics-fest at his place. He'll tell you the rules, might be interesting to see who sends in what, and why. Deadline June 6, so don't delay. Void where prohibited by law.

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Yesterday, and oh my especially today, the ol' boy seems to have shaken the lethargy that accompanies his arthritic pain episodes. He is back to his old ornery self, finding socks here and towels there and bringing them to us with an "I sure am bad. Pay me attention" expression on his face.

Wish somebody'd been here with a camera. Scene: This morning I am sitting in a lawn chair in a sunny patch of the yard, towel wrapped around my neck held together with a clothes pin below my neck. In a hair emergency, Ann is cutting my shaggy mane before I go off to my little workshop at noon. Buster, to demonstrate his full return to obnoxiousness, was determined to remove the towel and had his front paws on my shoulders pinning me to the chair with my arms caught under the towel, defenseless, and his wet mouth going after the clothes pin for all he's worth.

B-dog, you are 91 pounds of aggravation, and I sure missed you while you were being the under-the-weather dog. Welcome back, buddy.

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Please, oh please: note and by all means go visit the new arrivals... way long past due... to Fragments blogroll. TEN OF THEM!... including the last nine (at this point in time); and replacing Curious Frog who is unfortunately gone out of business... find TravelerTrish. Tell'em Fragmented Fred sent ya.

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With the long days of summer, the garden coming on, flowers blooming and insects whirring, there will be plenty enough fodder for Fragments' daily photo-ops and soliloquys. Add to this, the steady stream of dialogue now underway regarding the 'Place Portal' that seems destined to happen this summer, and now, starting today, a two week writing workshop. I can't say what will happen with the daily blog, but it seems likely to, well, shift focus a bit. But not much, perhaps.

I have the 'first day of class' euphoria and terror. Today, just maybe, I'll meet people and ideas that will change me forever. Maybe meet one person, unlikely more than that, whose path has been converging with mine for... well, we won't say how long... and we will become part of each other's lives for the rest of the journey, friends. Unlikely. But possible. Could be that in these two intensive weeks, materializing on the invisible bones of a lifetime of being, will come the flesh of a purpose with my words... a unifying theme that will give the gentle push needed to sustain a longer thought and story than what I am now comfortable with after one full year in my early morning rambles that end up, most of the time, right here.

This will be the twenty-sixth Annual Highland Summer Conference on Appalachian Writing and Culture at Radford University. We'll meet three hours every day for two weeks. Readings from the guest authors who will conduct the workshop (and some external guests as well, and readings perhaps from the participants) will happen on Tuesday and Thursday nights. This coming Saturday, we leave campus at 2:00 pm and arrive back at 2:30 am, after visiting the Carter Fold, home of the singing Carter Family, in Hiltons, Virginia.

The two author-leaders I was not familiar with. I think after spending fifteen class hours or more (and perhaps a dinner or two as well) with each of them, I will be able to say much more about them soon. We'll be using their books as supplemental reading material, and I expect to tell you about some of that as well. One required book that seems especially germane to what's going on in my pea-brain will be Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers.

Seems likely that I may be able at the very least to excerpt to Fragments some of what I am assigned to write in this little workshop, since it's subject coincides rather nicely with what I write about most of the time anyway! So: If posts in the next two weeks seem to diverge from the usual blue plate special served here, I can only hope it might eventually lead to, at the very least, some new plates to serve this stuff on. Hang with me, y'uns.

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We have a winner! Several of you recognized the critter living in the little cage, header-left, as an insect from a group called "periodical cicadas", and this one is of the 17-year variety, sometimes erroneously called "17 year locusts" (locusts are actually grasshoppers). Can you believe that the larval form has been growing slowly underground since 1986! I remember them that year, from their cacophanous and unremitting weeee-oh, weeee-oh, weeee-oh, weeee-oh lovesong that the males sing to attract a female. They live in the dirt for 17 years sucking sap, then one day quite to their surprise, climb up into the light of day, sing a song, have sex, and die. (Life lesson here?) Watch for the brown branchtips in oaks and other trees, caused by the female laying eggs in the terminal stems, which kills a few leaves right at the tip. No harm done, except to young trees. So locals, time your fruit and ornamental tree plantings to avoid 2020!

The other new banner image on the right shows the pasture and ridges on either side, across from the house, and the view I see now looking out my window from my desk chair. The gravel road (heck, let's be honest: dirt road) and Goose Creek lie just behind the vantage point from which this picture was taken. The grasses are now chest high, and last night, just about exactly in the middle of this image foreground, a deer head barely poked up out of the sea of waving gray-green stems. The day of the picture, cloud shadows raced across field then up and over ridge. So even though there is no specific subject in the picture (which generally is a mistake, leaving the eye wandering around looking for something to settle on), the full image that covers my monitor will remind me in January of standing in a wide space under sailing clouds on a jewel of a day in May. What does it look like where you live?

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