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Pack up and fetch yourselves to the Second Annual FloydFest World Music Festival August 15, 16, and 17. This Jambase article is a good place to see it at a glance. Then swing over the Festival site for all the details. We'll see you there!
We walked along with our berry buckets tied at our waists. Ann reminded me how Buster used to love to go with us on these trips. While we were picking the high ones, he would be eating the lower ones right off the canes. Silly vegetarian dog. He gagged on bones and we had to throw them away, but he stood salivating while we fixed a salad, waiting for pieces of carrot or the big, thick stem of the broccoli. I still catch myself setting such favorite things aside for him. When I get out a new stick of butter, I half expect to see his ears perk up because he knew he would get to lick off the wrapper. Buster is still very much with us in our daily routine, not to mention his reminders in the eternal black hair that still turns up in our socks and lodges between the pavers out the back door. We'll get another dog soon, but there'll never be another Buster.
Or rewording the topic "How have vegetation, forests, and plant life of all forms contributed to your sense of place during your life?"
That's the subject this week at the Ecotone where writers about place congregate to explore the subject of WHERE.
Please consider writing on this biweekly topic, then submitting a link to your own blog on the Ecotone biweekly topic page for August 1.
It's really simple to do, though the format of the page, called a 'wiki' is a bit out of the mainstream. Anyone can participate without 'joining' or signing up or asking, just come over and jump in. Here's how. From the "Trees and Place" page, go to "edit the text of this page" at the bottom. Then in the edit window, enter your permalink and essay title. It will look something like this.
[http://www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com/archives/001382.html Roadside Weeds]
Note the link and title are within straight brackets with a space or more between the link and the title. After that, outside the right hand bracket, include the first paragraph from your essay or a similar short text introduction to the post, and if you're new to Ecotone, maybe a word about where you live, et cetera. If you don't get your post done by August 1, just add it to "Trees and Place" as soon as you get it completed on your journal or weblog. Look forward to meeting some new folks this time around!
Thanks, all, for your advice recently. Per your suggestions and recommendations I have...
My wife thinks it's time to start deciding what to get who for Christmas. I, on the other hand, have four and a half more months to procrastinate before mid-December. But should you want to start collecting ideas toward late December, let me offer you a consideration for 'that special person' who loves animals and loves things wooden.
Meet our friend, Peter. Peter is a master craftsman who created the most amazing designs for three-dimensional, interlocking animal puzzles. You really must see them to appreciate their intricacy and beauty, and Peter and Jenny now have the studio and staff and most importantly-- the growing zoo of puzzle creatures-- ready for you to visit. There's even a demo so you can see how the pieces fit together.
One of several strokes of creative genius you must know about in these puzzles: each has eaten something, and deep inside, you'll find a surprise. Can you guess what you might find inside the Iguana? the whale? or my favorite, the Piranha?
You'd be proud to give or delighted to receive one of these life-time creations,
and Santa would get major bonus points for such a discerning choice this holiday season. Order now. Or do what I do. Wait until the night before Christmas, when all through the house...
It seemed like a great idea, says Michael Pollan in this Orion article. "But once we had an official federal organic standard, small farmers lost control of the niche".
He is discussing the lamentable gap between the intention and the reality of the current word "organic". As he describes...
"There were three legs to the original organic dream. One was growing food in harmony with nature -- a non-industrial way of farming that treated animals humanely and did not use chemical pesticides. The second leg was that our system of food distribution should be different; food co-ops, farmer's markets, and community supported agriculture could replace the national agricultural system. And the third leg was the food itself. We shouldn't be eating red delicious apples; we should be eating ten different kinds of apples because biodiversity in the apple tart means biodiversity in the orchard".
Via the loopholes of language and bureaucracy, we now have such irrational choices as "an organic transcontinental strawberry: 5 calories of food energy that use 435 calories of fossil-fuel energy to get to a supermarket near you. This is organic food forced through the industrial system, shorn of its holism. What has been lost is that one key insight about organic: that everything is connected. The organic dream has been reduced to a farming method".
A way we can circumvent this good idea gone bad and strike a blow against the increasingly unwholesome and un-holistic agri-business way of doing things: buy food grown locally, shorten the food chain, and retain the good parts of the organic concept.
Okay. So far, a lot of astintions, and one vote NO to Outlook. I still can't find much in the way of unbiased discussion of the program as a PIM, except "use it mostly for the email and it's a yawner for everything else".
So what about Zone Alarm? How necessary, over and above what Norton System Works can do? And how prone to screw other things up will I be if I install the Preview version of Zone Alarm? Any experience?
Well, not exactly. More like transferring it from one PIM to another.
I have used EccoPro since 1994. It contains all my passwords, registration codes, addresses, tech support histories, brilliant ideas, urgent reminders and a partridge in a pear tree. Since starting to use WinXP, Ecco has shown some scary inconsistencies. It is a 32 bit program, and I've tried it default and in "compatibility mode" but still the idea of depending on this legacy software sort of has me spooked.
Until now, I've avoided Outlook... it has been too enormous a drain on RAM (which for present purposes I now have an adequate chunk of) and I have not needed it since Ecco has reliably provided almost all of the functionality of Outlook; and then there was the general Microsoftophobia, of course. But how stable can I expect Outlook to be? Will I transfer all my phonebook info etc only to have it become corrupt after a few months? If anyone can say why this man and this PIM should not be married, speak now. Or forever hold his peas.
They even make a similar whirring sound, since their wings beat at a rate and in a figure-8 manner necessary for hovering. No, this is not a genetically-reduced hummer but a "clearwing moth" or "hummingbird moth" that is visiting our butterfly bush just outside my window here. If you could get close enough, you'd notice the scales and antennae... even though the scales fall off the wings during the moth's first flight.
The most numerous visitor to the bush this year are several species of fast-flying skippers... a unique group of butterfly relatives that hold their wings together up over their back (so you can easily see both wings as in these examples) and they have clubbed antennae. They have relatively small, hard wings, and they lack the lazy flap-flap loopy flight of the much larger winged swallowtails... hence, perhaps the "skipping" that they do from flower to flower.
If you're just dying now to be able to amaze your friends and tell the difference between moths, butterflies and skippers, go here. And since I have you hyperventilating in an arthropodial frenzy, check out the Butterfly Flash Cards from eNature. Notice that when you click on one of these, it brings up the critter with a nice description, and also at the bottom, you can click on "Find species in your region" and get a very well done eNature list of all kinds of plants and animals specific to where you live. Learn just one new fellow-creature today; give it a name; know a new thing about the world.
Well I'll be danged. Didn't find my name in the list anywhere.
I looked for Utne Visionaries more recent than 1995, but Google didn't do it for me. I was hoping maybe I'd know more if of these folks if the list were more current, when probably the truth of it is that I'd recognise more if the list were ten years older instead.
How do you do at recognition meaning: "Yeah, I heard of him/her".
I knew 10 in the first group, 6 in the second and 3-4 in each of the rest of the groups of 20. Anybody here we really need to be aware of that you can point out?
What took me so long? We are now officially registered and soon will be able to sit completely through dinner without unsolicited marketing callers. Buh-Bye.
Sitting here in the cool stillness with my first cup of morning coffee, you may understand how hard it was not to spew it all over my monitor. Here's why:
I just now opened the umpteenth invoice I've received from Dell during the recent debacle of component replacements and final CPU death and exchange. First as I peruse the familiar invoice, I notice with some alarm that the total bottom line price for the system is almost a thousand dollars more than the price I was quoted when I tallied my components on the system I ordered in early July. Then-- even more interesting-- I scan down the itemized list that shows two rather suspicious charges that will bear yet one more agitated phone call to Sri Lanka for billing questions. It shows the following:
Microsoft Money 2002 OEM ...................$1,000
Microsoft Office Small Business ............. $1,000
No wonder Mr. Gates is doing so well. Mr. Dell, on the other hand, may need to find another line of work as his attention to detail seems to be wandering of late.
I'll share a story I found and have passed along to the Ecotone group; thought one or two of you might also be interested.
LONDON - Financier Chistopher Ondaatje announced he's funding a new Commonwealth literary award open to all genres of books.The Sri-Lankan born philanthropist - and brother of Canadian author Michael Ondaatje - has given a $450,000 endowment to the Royal Society of Literature for the annual $22,000 prize.
The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize will reward writing that "evokes the spirit of a place".
Where has the summer gone! Soon, there will be signs that we have begun the transition into Autumn, and I am making a point to appreciate the floral accessories of summer now, just before they pack to leave us again. The roadside wildflowers that are so abundant that they might be easily taken for granted are at the peak of diversity now, with the early fall occupants already standing in the wings, waiting their turn for just another week or two. Very soon they will steal all the attention and the earlier tenants will move on, leaving behind spreading roots and a million seeds to insure another too-short seasonal visit about ten months from now.
Queen Anne's Lace (or Wild Carrot) is perhaps the dominant summer resident by both number, visibility and height until the towering Joe Pye Weed with its whorled leaves and mauve flowertops takes over the meadows. Chickory's sky blue almost always shows up in the understory of the white lace, and there are here and there vast fallow hillside pastures carpeted with blue and white that move in summer Hozannas under cathedrals of cumulus. Soon, the white and blue asters, purple Ironweed, and yellow or orange Spotted Jewelweed will constitute the pallette. They too will in their turn peak, pale and pass on in the grand procession of the unplanted garden of county roads.
I set out yesterday to commit these roadside boquets to digital record so that I could look back on them in a few months when winter drains the world of motion, color and roadside embellishment. There could hardly be a better place for photographing these 'weeds' than the quiet back roads of Floyd County on a sleepy Saturday morning, I thought. But I discovered that it is one thing to admire the blur of form and color at 35 or even 20 miles an hour from a moving car, and quite another matter to stop, find a place to pull safely off the road, and walk back conspicously a tenth of a mile to photograph a well-lit composition of sweetpea and milkweed growing pleasantly next to someone's mailbox or pasture gate. And there is another problem: the eyes take in the scene in panorama and in general form while the camera unforgivingly captures the particular, in all its busy-ness and clutter and depth of field. The mind does a much better job of vignetting the beauty of roadside gardens than the camera.
Has anybody used any of these purported "Internet Speed Boosters" with Windows XP? Do they make any appreciable difference; are they safe? reliable? Maybe XP has maximized MTU and all those registry settings that Win98 left at the slower default settings, I dunno. I'm not gonna mess with anything at this point that will set me back to reinstalling the OS for the FOURTH TIME in two weeks! (BTW I am using an external USR modem).
Here is a page of FREE tips to increase dialup speeds. I set hardware flow control and increased max speed to the next notch up from 115K and it seems to have made an noticable difference. YMMV.
In my traditional Friday morning chat with my Maternal Unit, somehow the conversation took one of those quirky sideroads and we ended up discussing "warts we have known". Mom says she had them on her hands before I was born, but after birth, hers went away. I know where they went.
Mine were surgically excised and frozen off with liquid nitrogen in elementary school years.
If I'd had the choice, I think I might have preferred the more successful and way less traumatic means of Duct Tape Wart Removal instead. It worked 85% of the time, and within 28 days, the warts were gone... better than cryotherapy, and for the cost of a few inches of tape... and the stigma of having a silver patch on your forehead for a month. Around here, nobody would even notice.
Of course, you also could rub a new penny on your favorite wart; or rub an old rag on it and bury the rag during a full moon. In either case, they typically disappear more often than not after all manner of autosuggestive "treatments". There's an awfully lot we don't understand going on between the human psyche and the soma, and the late Dr. Lewis Thomas (in the Medusa and the Snail) declared we should declare a national War on Warts, and thereby come to understand the world better perhaps than by putting a man on the moon (my phraseology, not his).
The new computer transition that started on July 14 is finally ... knock on wood... complete, and the computer system and all its peripheral parts seem to be working as I expected they were going to almost two weeks of anguish ago. And yes, next time I will consider a Macintosh.
Today I am looking forward to getting some roadside wildflower pictures before they are gone by. I've been doing a lot of botanical rubbernecking for a couple of weeks now as I drive through the countyside (much to the consternation of poor passengers who'd rather I watch asphalt than asters) and will set out this morning around 9:00 while there is likely to be some nice backlighting, perhaps a bit of fog and dew as well. I'll combine photography with the obligatory run to the Post Office to deliver a package. We receive and send our mail from the P.O. in Check, VA (which always brings to my mind the phrase "the Check's in the mail".) If I get any keeper images, of course, I'll share in the next few days.
The new computer really zips in Photoshop (where my old system used to groan) and XP's display and printing and other photo functions are a real plus to a FoTog like me. And of course, now I have (what seems at this point to be) oodles more storage space for images, and have the luxury of setting my default image size up a notch. Speaking of which... I cannot understand why the vast majority of publications still do not even consider accepting high-resolution digital images for their magazines, etc. The resolution of a 2+ megapixel image is going to exceed the dpi of their printers at most image sizes, so why the resistance to accepting digital images? Not to mention the convenience, vs keeping up with a submitted print.
So. I am feeling a bit more connected today than I have for a few weeks, with all the pet woes, house guests and technical problems that have floated under the bridge on troubled waters recently. Maybe, he said in his blissful ignorance, there will be a period of calm before the next crisis. At any rate, my threshold for posting to the blog here is obviously quite low this morning. Anything goes. Obviously.
...where a family reunion is a good place to find a bride. (via Cut on the Bias)
And, via Rebecca's Pocket, the daily goings-on at the World Summit of Sustainable Development (they were all out to lunch when I checked in there earlier. Or, maybe in the third day of a two week meeting, they've already packed and gone home?)
And Fran at Northwest Notes has a graphic-rich journal of a bike trip across town in Seattle.
Imagine: you've just blown your budget on the car of your dreams, a purchase necessitated when your former ol' reliable buggy fell apart unexpectedly one day on the freeway. And so after much deliberation, you're on your way home from the dealership with your new purchase, beaming proudly, when a wheel comes off and bumps off into the median strip. You fix it and start home again, somewhat subdued but still happy about the new machine, overall. A few minutes later, the electrical system fails. After considerable kicking and cussing, it miraculously begins to work again. By this point you are having some serious concerns, but nevertheless, you're getting closer to home and continue on the way. Finally, just blocks before turning proudly into your driveway with what at least looks like a new, flawless machine, you barely escape as it bursts into flames and becomes a molten mass of plastic and metal as you watch helplessly.
The dealership, after your fifty-seventh phonecall, agrees to totally replace your purchase... exact same machine that failed so miserably on you the first time. Your drive from the dealership to the house on the second time around is simply a matter of recovering your losses and getting on with life. The newness and novelty and joy of ownership went up in flames with the first lemon you brought home.
I am up and running again on the Dell CPU replacement (the shipping of which was expedited... from "3 to 6 weeks" to overnight delivery) after insisting in an uncharacteristically forceful way that OH YES I was going to talk to a manager!) And so, joyless, I seem to be up and running again on my last Machine from the Pit of Dell.
I have had two 'authorities' advise me in identical paths toward finding a format, layout, font, paper, graphics to text relationship, and general feel for the little book I'd like to put together.
These two experts have recommended that I go to a big bookstore and browse within books that might have one or more of these characteristics I'm looking for, and buy them to show as examples to help hone my focus on a finished product that will be what I want the book to look and feel like, not some combination that a disinterested typesetter might cobble together for me.
My first attempt to do this was not terribly successful and I'm having doubts about the use of color (up to 4" x 6" images, banners, faint-image color in margins, possibly spilling a theme that would wrap across two pages, etc) in a book that is 5 1/2 x 8 (which is one of the default sizes that doesn't waste paper, which in this case would need to be a finished surface that would do justice to the images). Of course, most books that want to show off color images to good effect are large format, with heavy high-finish paper, and the cost is out of sight. I may have to give up the idea of incorporating images entirely, but so much of what I would include in the text is visually focused, the pictures would be a nice element to include. We'll see.
I'm open for suggestions.
Meanwhile, I return from time to time to the other possible forms of self-publication, and CafePress is a new player. If nothing else, check out the free pdf converter they lead a potential publisher to. The price is right.
Call me sheltered. I admit it. It takes little to amaze me, less perhaps to weird me out. And too, I think I am ready for my membership ceremony to induct me officially into "the other generation" now playing the back nine of the technological turf. My occasional encounters with 'civilization' alway incite at least one or two minor rants.
Standing pensively in the "computer media" aisle at Office Monster last week, I was trying to decide if I really needed a five-pack of DVD-RW disks, or would I be getting them just to say I had them? A staff person walked past me, and said something. I turned to reply, but she was obviously not speaking to me, although she continued the conversation, looking through me. I had a question about my intended purchase, but she was not in my personal space after all, though I could have reached out and touched her. This identical experience repeated over in Pens and Markers. I began to feel invisible.
It was only when I got to checkout that I could see the very tiny earpiece, and finally spotted the weeny mouthpiece that hung on a thin wire at the side of the clerk's jaw. As I walked back with a Airborne package a few minutes later, I made a point to look, and every one of the staff could talk at any instant to any other of the staff and management via these headsets. Not a shocking bit of technological discovery, granted. But my mind zoomed ahead maybe 10 years, and I imagined a time when the hardware was microscopic, perhaps implanted. And humanity had become a single technological organism, a syncytium... a merged colony of social insects bound together cordlessly across the planet. Just one of my little daydreams....
From there I drove a short way to the Express Lube, where I had been once or twice, the lastest visit several oil chnages ago. As I got out of the car, the young man called me by name in a cheery voice. The second asked "How is life out on Goose Creek?"
There is no way these guys, especially two of them, could have remembered me from those distant visits. Do they have a license plate recognition camera at the entrance that instantly pulls up my name and address as I drive onto their lot, so they can seem 'up close and personal'? After encountering the ant colony in Office Monster, the familiarity of the Lube Brothers took on somewhat sinister overtones, in a Twilight Zone sort of way.
Dave Trowbridge of Redwood Dragon relates new details (from Information Week) of what we already know... only Dave understands the 'how'...about the fine line we walk each day when we boot up our computers, expecting to connect to the world... a world that unfortunately contains more than a few who would love to bring down the World Trade Center called the internet. It sounds rather too easy, don't you think?
The rarity of the event second only to the Grand Alignment of the Planets, today an actual living three-dimensional protoplasmic blogger will be driving down our state-maintained pothole pathway (with grass growing in the middle of the single lane without turnouts). If he is an uncommonly skilled navigator, finds our road, then does not become fainthearted and turn back after the second or third impulse to do so, Chaz Hill of Oklahoma's Dustbury will become the fourth Real Live Blogger to visit Goose Creek.
As some of you may know, Chaz is now about midway in his third World Tour, which he narrates day by day along his summer sojourns. He'll be driving down today from Beckley, West Virginia. I was first introduced to Chaz last summer by Susanna Cornett, and if I'm remembering correctly, Chaz and Susanna met in Jersey for a meal (Susanna, Meryl Yourish and Kurt Brobeck of what is now known as "the Coffee Sutras" are the first three corporeal bloggers to honor us with a visit).
If you're not familiar with Dustbury, there may be civil penalties in your state, but it's not too late to set the situation right. In addition to his wideranging daily tongue-in-check observations, opinions and insights, don't miss the alternative world that resides in his sidebar, including Vital Features.
If he gets here in time, we'll DO FLOYD. Buddies, that'll set his head t'spinnin'. Dazzled is what he'll be. Not sure what all we'll get into, but for sure, I'll point out The Traffic Light that we're so proud of in the county. We may wonder up onto the Parkway, tour the Chatteau Morrisette Winery. Heck, we may hear the "Route 66" theme song and just head for the open road and lives of reckless adventure, throw the top down on the Dakota pickup, and cruise the East Coast for a few months. Chaz has his laptop, so we'll check in from time to time. We are two wild and crazy guys.
Yesterday, we drove sixty miles in a driving rainstorm to a place that makes Goose Creek seem absolutely suburban. The point: chose one from among eleven yellow lab puppies. They are only four weeks old, and Virginia law requires them to be at least seven before they leave their siblings and momma-dog, so we couldn't pick one up yet; nor could we pick one out. They are too young yet to show a great deal of difference in coat color, size or personality. They were all about equally clumsy, cute and cocky; all were alternately ferocious, affectionate or simple sat for brief seconds wondering what this world was all about. There are seven males; we get second pick.
Answer: Bobby, shellac is formed by thousands and thousands of little insects called Lac who live on "lac host trees" and produce a sticky secretion called "lac resin". Shellac has been utilised in the manufacture of many products over the years. In fact 78rpm records were made from it and this was formerly the largest single outlet for shellac. It used to colour Indian solders' uniforms and is still used to dye oriental carpets. Today shellac is used in paint and varnish, as a hat stiffener, a glaze for fruit, coffee beans and nuts, a coating for tablets, as a leather dressing, as a component in rubber compounds, as a sealing wax, to make gasket cement, as a mould for dental plates, as printing ink, in cosmetics such as hair lacquer, in confectionery such as chocolate, as a food colouring, as a sealant or as a glossy silky finish on superior quality playing cards. In America large quantities of bleached shellac are used for floor polishes especially the No-Rub polishes.
This time Dr. Science is telling is straight! Read this interesting page and be the star at your next cocktail party conversation. Guaranteed!
I am sitting on the front porch and my mind wanders. I have the power over time and by an act of will, I call on the century-old maple tree to repeat before my eyes in five minutes in reverse history a hundred years of growth, stopping at the moment it entered the ground as a winged seed. Then in the next five minutes, grow from seed to shade tree again. Repeat until saturated with the details of how a tree twists and lurches and spreads as it grows old, and the converse as it grows young. Repeat on a variety of tree species up the valley noting differences in the choreography.
Fireflies, in addition to emitting pulses of light, also give out tiny throbs of percussive sound, each a barely perceptible drum beat, and collectively their language reverberates between indigo hillsides at midnight. Is there a rhythm there? Can I hear a pattern that my eyes cannot see?
The soil in our pasture and woods becomes at once transparent, while it continues to provide shelter and substance for myriad insects and burrowing creatures visible, suspended underfoot. Each kind of creature has a characteristic bioluminescence, and I walk spellbound on the surface of invisible ground, suspended above countless thousands of subterranean beings I have never known that swim or float, visible as if under depth of water.
Walking in the Nameless Creek across the road, I bend and pick up one rock, then another-- rounded gray granite or pink quartz; angular shale or or sheety slate-- and for each stone I can see it in its context, can go back to its life within it's parent rock at any point back til the Very Beginning. I can trace it to its source that may have been many thousand miles and millions of millions of years from here, and I would know if you can teach a stone to talk, as Ms. Dillard has hinted.
Sap rising in every living plant emits a pulsating hum as it ebbs and flows in thin columns from the tips of rootlets to the tips of the tops of trees; creek noise slowed down and filtered produces intelligible and wise words, and laughter; I can become any insect I chose and have their senses of sight and orientation and thought, and change between a honeybee and a bush cricket at will, and go where they go, and I see this bizarre appendaged creature that is me sitting on the front porch through an insect's vision.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Indeed. And more than in our dreams.
I first visited Gatlinburg in the mid fifties, about the time the famous SkyLift was first constructed. It took an awful lot of prodding to get my granny on the thing, because she warned us that this infernal contraption could get stuck with folks stranded hanging in a puny little chair where they would starve to death and be picked apart by crows and ravens.
Well sir, she was right. Witness sixty folks hanging in the air for several hours. Hope they all had big bladders. Go see. Via Jane at Daily Rant from Fletch at Smokey Mt Journal who has a great picture of the debacle.
Early morning berry picking, east ridge, July 2003
Lots of interesting pointers over at Gospel According to Mark. Go to the main page and scroll down to Historical Artwork & UFOs; also via BeneDiction, I was going to post the Blue Marble this morning, so taking the lazy way out, you can read about it at GAM in his entry called Our Planet Rules. I'm dial-up impaired, so the full Earth images are a bit rich for my blood, but you can tell me about them. 'kay?
I get letters. Read this entry from last July where IT IS OBVIOUS I have nothing at all to do with the company, I just like eating the company's food and was trying to tell readers about it. I musta done too good a job.
Now be sure and read the comments. Where are these people from? Did they read my silly entry and somehow jump to the conclusion I was on the Board of Directors?
I've toyed with putting in a bold disclaimer, or deleting the entry entirely. But it's been too much fun being the CEO, writing personal letters of response to my satisfied customers. I may even want to start a few new products-- like maybe Savory Possum Gravy or Pickled Rubard Chutney and see how they do. This may be the new career I've been looking for! Stay tuned. And BUY G____ FOODS, y'all.
The search goes on. We've been picking up local newspapers, asking friends and coworkers, exploring any source that might help us find our next pup-dog. And whaddaya know: right in our own back yard, a PIT BULL FARM. They have dogs for sale here if you're brave enough to back in there; I think they are free-range / pick-your-own, and certified bad-to-the-bone.
Just kidding (although the sign did show up last year on the side of the road, not far from here. I grabbed the picture and got outta there!) We are going Tuesday to look at some yellow lab pups that will be ready the middle of August. If one of them calls out to us with it's sad puppy eyes and expectant smile (and what do you think the odds of that are?) we will probably choose one to bring home in a few weeks.
Favorite Things About Summer...
Getting out of bed wearing boxer shorts, period. Not two pair of socks, silk longjohns, sweatpants, T-shirt, sweatshirt and fleece sweater...the typical Winter straight-out-of-bed garb.
Getting out of bed and going straight to the coffee pot. I don't have to go out on the porch where it is obscenely dark and obscenely cold in all the garb mentioned above to get kindling to start the fire. No crumpling newspaper, wiping soot off the sleeve of my fleece sweater. In summer I don't bang my knuckles on the woodstove door pulling singed digits back from a smouldering fire that all of a sudden leaps into a conflagration, the July sun, up close and personal.
Sitting on the front porch in my boxers with a cup of coffee in the mornings. Maybe two cups.
Listening to the quiet sounds not made by man, while sitting in my boxer shorts, on my front porch, with a cup of coffee, straight out of bed.
The warmth of the morning sun on my bare legs, while sitting on the front porch, listening to the quiet sounds of nature, holding a good book in my hands which are not covered in soot.
The warmth of the morning sun on a vine-ripened tomato eaten whole in the garden, just after my first cup of morning coffee.
The smells that rise from the warm earth, wafting on the morning sun, the smell of pollen and petals, lilacs, yellow sweet clover, spearmint along the creek, damp loam...the smell of coffee and of ripe tomatos.
Seeing the orderly rows of stacked firewood seasoning behind the house, waiting for a time when the sun's scorching heat is only a uncomfortable memory, its pleasant warmth a fleeting rarity; in the heat, the sour smell of oak, the medicinal smell of walnut, and the sweet smell of cherry. Each piece in the stack from woodlot to face cord has been handled over and over by these hands that will in a few long months crumple newspaper and offer each piece into the stove like an sacrament, while my mind thinks back on how nice it was to be warm, to smell the earth, to live in my skin alone, to have experienced Summer.
This entry shamelessly borrowed from last year (July 9 Fragments), since the topic of boxers had materialized recently. And yes, these are the very pair that traumatized me!
At the risk of being Chicken Little, I think it's safe to say we are very close to telling Mr. Dell that his little empire is falling apart one XPS at a time, and there may very soon be one on its way back home to Austin from Goose Creek. The latest hoop (and the very last) that I am jumping through is going to Creative and downloading drivers to reinstall. Uh, hello. Does this system not ship with the latest drivers, or have they changed since I started juicing this lemon on Monday morning?
And so dear hearts... if not Dell, then WHO should I trust to put a reliable system on my desk in the PDQ? I am truly at a loss... of five days of my life, to name one... and a loss of confidence in this particular machine and it's vendor as well. However, the monitor is very nice and the Great Gumball of Technical Support has been kind, and Jason is a nice, knowledgeable and sympathetic guy who just happens to work for a Monolith of Technology.
And dang it all, I had a half dozen things I wanted to tell you about today, not to mention a buncha pix I'm dying to post. Well, they way things are is the way things are, as the little mice would say to Babe, the pig. Can't argue with that wisdom.
I'm assuming I'll be able to access the net during this transitional phase (that seems to go on and on and on...) so let me hear if you have hot tips about trusty computers you have known. See ya 'round.
"Consider the lily of the fields; they toil not, neither do they spin. But Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these".
It has been a difficult month. We have lost a good friend in the passing of Buster. (And I am realizing what a good listener he was to me). Lightning blasted our television receiver. My computer died. The new, expensive replacement computer died. My joints are not happy.
In every earthly beauty and good, there is the possibility... the inevitability... of their opposite. We live in a world where things fall apart and any human goodness or joy is not destined to be pure. Only God is Good.
The hillsides during this trying month have been cloaked in dazzling display of Rhododendrons, adding color and light to the dark summer forest. Now, the ground is littered with fallen petals, their glory past for another year. I find myself lamenting the loss more than celebrating their brief beauty. I need an attitude adjustment:
Philipians 4:8 "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."
The Dustbunny from Dustbury, Chaz Hill, has struck out (poor choice of words?) on his Third World Tour, blogging as he goes. Today is his first solo part of the trip. Go over and wish him light traffic, open eyelids at all times while hands are on steering wheel, roach-free motel rooms, good digestive processes notwithstanding the fastness of the food, pretty waitresses, fast internet connections and lots of new friends and great memories, and finally, home sweet home back in Oklahoma in another couple of weeks and after, oh, about 4800 miles.
I was savoring that delicious surrender that comes when you finally slip in under cool sheets after rough day, finally relinguishing control, letting go the tensions of the day-- feeling stress flow out my toes and ears and fingertips. I settled down in the lilypads, floating towards sleep. Ann had been sleeping blissfully for at least an hour; the room was dark and still, with only the sound of the creek filling the room through the open windows.
But something made me come back up from under the lilypads. I can't say what-- maybe I had seen something below the level of consciousness before my eyes had grown accustomed to the dark and just at that moment realized I should be concerned about it, I don't know. But I sat up aware of some strangeness. Nothing out of the ordinary, except there was moonlight coming into the room. Now this is odd, I thought, since the moon won't be up for another couple of hours. And yet, there was a glow of pale dappled light falling across a small patch on my side of the bed. It appeared as if it was coming through trees, shining through the window behind me. Except that there was no window behind me. I returned immediately to full consciousness with overtones of uneasiness.
The mysterious light fell in just one place in the room, and when I moved the light moved with me. Granted I had just ended a zinger of a day, including at least three hours on the phone with Dell Tech Support. But my mind should have been clear even if exhausted, and this definitely was not a hallucination I was having. This was a real perception without an explanation. Until...
I turned on the closet light next to the bed and discovered the source of this mystery. The otherworldly light emanated from my underwear. Yep. Joe Boxer Smiley Face Glow in the Dark Boxer Shorts, a Happy Birthday present from Ann a few months back and I guess in cold winter bedtimes, there wasn't much opportunity for exposure between doffing drawers and pulling up covers. This was a sight only likely seen in the warmer months.
I had to wonder: what if I had come into the dark room last night, and Ann had opened her eyes just in time to see a disembodied pair of glowing underwear coming toward the bed? Guess if one of us was going to have a life-altering close encounter with phosphorescent skivvies, it was better me than her. I'm already in therapy for computer-related PTSD, we'll just add this little neurosis to the things I'm working through.
"Now, Mr. First. Just lie back and tell me how it was that you came to be afraid of boxer shorts".
Officer, I think I may have poisoned somebody. But I'm innocent of intent. Really.
Last week, with company milling about the yard, it wouldn't do to leave that hornets nest under the lip of the front porch. Somehow, it had become reinhabited after a thorough soaking a few weeks earlier (and thanks to Scott Chaffin for his logical observation that the hive still contains growing and maturing baby hornets and the smart thing to do would be to remove the hive immediately after spraying it). I didn't do the smart thing, never got around to scraping the melon-sized hive out from under the porch after emptying a can of Raid into it.
Yesterday evening I walked out the front door and noticed pieces of the hive strewn about the yard. "I see you got brave and scraped that hive away" I told Ann.
"I didn't do it. I thought you had. It was there this morning when I left for work".
Apparently what were pests to us was dinner to somebody else. I hate it that those delicious little hornet larvae were marinated in toxic broth. And some coon (I guess?) is off in our woods in GI distress thinking he needs to pay more attention to his GERDS and lay off the pupae from now on.
Also in Nature Notes:
Tell me if I'm wrong: not one in fifty of you have even heard of an "ovenbird" much less seen one. Suffice it to say they are nice to have around (and especially to hear in the early morning coolness) but they tend to be very secretive, and seeing one is a rarity. And so the other day, having one perch on a branch within six feet of me was amazing. And I was beaming with pride since I had "pssssshed" him in (that's a birder's buzzy call that sometimes stirs up the birds, makes them curious so they pop up to be identified. It doesn't always work, but I have had warblers come so close I thought they were going to perch on my sunglasses!).
What was odd about this was that 1) this ovenbird was not at all shy; 2) it was flitting about 5-10 feet off the ground while ovenbirds spend most of their time on the ground; and 3) this one was bobbing his tail in an uncharacteristic way I had never seen before.
And I stand corrected, while not being too hard on myself. Turns out it is another bird (in the same genus) called the waterthrush... identified in part by it's characteristic tail-bobbing. I later saw my new friend feeding two young over behind the woodpile. I'll have to see if I can follow them to a nest, which will be immensely easier to find than the ovenbird's camouflaged 'igloo' hidden on the ground. My guess is, if there were ovenbirds that close to the house, the darn cat would have already discovered them, and had them over for dinner.
Check out the classic image of the backyards of the 'burbs over at Wikipedia.
I'm itching to post some images, but afraid to reload my former FTP software (SmartFTP). I'm spooked now, since apparently something I loaded yesterday or Monday gave the new computer a terrible case of nausea.
Tip for future Dell-raisers: When you FIRST boot up to your OS, go to Accessories/System Tools/System Restore to put a marker there at your fresh start. Although it says that this utility regularly marks your configuration, when I needed it, there were no 'landmarks' saved to go back to. Tough lesson, and one that ought to come with the system. The USER information has continued to shrink with every successive computer, and caveat emptor, bubba.
My father-in-law who was visiting us last week will soon celebrate his eighty-somethingth birthday, and so we packed up Birthday Cake and ice cream and lawn chairs while our company was with us, and carried it all up the valley to the Fortress of Solitude for a shady little creekside party inbetween thundershowers.
As we broke camp, I went ahead with a few odd items, including the leftover cake with the pale green 7-minute frosting in a tupperware cake container, while the rest of the crew stayed behind. As they walked along the path a short time later, they discovered that, as I was carrying the container along, the bottom had suddenly fallen out of the thing and half a cake and several quarts of green mint icing went kersplat in the middle of the trail. Luckily by the time the cooks discovered the disaster, I was safely back home and out of earshot.
Then along came wife and sister, the cakebakers. I could here some kind of caterwalling as they approached. They were singing something at the top of their lungs, and it seemed to have a certain edge to it, as if it might carry ominous overtones. Wait... what is that awful melody. NOOOO! The horrible lyrics! The HORROR....
OHHHH NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I'll never hear the end of this one, you can count on that. It will just go on, and on, and on, and.... just like Richard Harris.
And yes, Part One is hanging tight the morning after a complete nervous breakdown of my zippy new hard drive. Dude! I'm getting a DELL!
All is not well in DellVille. The last in this debacle is that it is looking like there are fatal flaws in this newly loaded and wonderfully stable Windows XP Professional I've been hearing so much about. The nice lady who was practicing her English while pretending to be technically supportive finally threw her hands up and said (in English words here, not as heard over the phone, so as to be intelligible) to just keep on mucking around and if it totally falls apart again we will have to wipe the hard drive I have been working on furiously for two solid days and start over again from scratch. Not a happy camper. So if (when?) I disappear for some time (actually I can go back to my limp-along if necessary) or seem unusually surly, you'll know why. Sigh.
Ms. Dickenson may have been on to something with her prairie consisting of only one flower and a bee. Where I grew up, a quarter acre vacant wooded lot and a small boy was enough to make a wilderness. Like so many kids in the boomer generation, my early years were spent in the suburbs on the edges of an expanding metropolis and I learned about life from the midst of a pseudopodial subdivision sprawled out beyond the old city center, up out of Jones Valley and onto the low mountainsides of the far southern Appalachian ridges around Birmingham, Alabama.
I grew up in city limits but was happiest when I imagined myself to be in the 'country'. From the relative wildness of vacant lots and wooded neighborhood margins I was able to pretend to be a pioneer... like the very popular Davy Crockett of the times... and lived in wilderness. It was here rather than in the ball parks and community pools that I first felt an attachment to place, in the larger sense of living not in just a neighborhood or city but in 'a place with trees like these, mountains, rocks, creeks that look just so'. Playing in the woods (even though that was only a fraction of an acre in some of my favorite wild places) I sensed that here I was closer to 'native land', and so I was closer to being a native myself; and of course playing 'cowboys and Indians' in those tiny woods was part of that connection to an earlier time when men were closer to 'the soil' than any of our white-collared fathers were.
Just what there was about those suburban woodlots that fascinated me so I suppose is not too hard to say. Surely important was the fact that it was 'unimproved' and there, the way things were is the way things were, everything was in the place it should be and managed to get along quite nicely on its own without man's help in any way. There was an authenticity about that I liked. I remember being fascinated by nature as an economy, a 'sacred grove' in a sense where God spoke it into being and so it was. Then too, there was in these quiet groves a strangeness and mystery in the darkness and stillness; there was a Presence there. And in a child's imagination, anything might crawl, fly or slither from behind any random tree. And sometimes they did... snakes, birds, coons and possums. I picked blackberries there in the spring, shot my BB gun, throw rocks at cans, whittled a slingshot, and lay on my back and watched clouds for the first time in those woody patches of suburbia. And as I grew older, I required more of the unspoken nutrient that this remote and natural kind of place offered me.
Summer camp figures into this longing for open natural space. From an early age, I was exported well beyond the limits of the city to a rough and beautiful pine forest to summer camp. I went as a camper at age ten, and found my woodlot magnified a thousand-fold, living in a cabin named after an Indian tribe, smelling nature, hearing the rush of the falls, riding horses in woods, paddling canoes under arching branches where snakes basked in the sun, swimming in the warm brown creek water, being an indigenous person. I came back to this same camp as a junior leader, then leader, and finally for two years was on the staff of upper class high school kids who were life guards, tended the horses, lead games and hikes and music, and got to come all summer for free plus a few dollars pay. This experience was an extension of those joys and necessities I first experienced at the edges of suburbia. The more I got of it, the more I wanted.
Along the way, I had become fascinated with fishing, which possesses its own isolation, otherness and wildness. Mostly I fished alone and from the shore, and more often than not, I'd find myself thoroughly distracted by some little thing in the woods along the lake and forget fishing entirely. When I was old enough for a BB gun and then a small caliber rifle, I thought maybe I'd find satisfaction in hunting, but killing things was not the manly adventure it seemed to be when Davy killed him a 'bar' and so I never became a hunter after all. In high school and early college, many of my friends followed their fathers onto the golf courses that spread into the countryside with the expanding city where they went to find relative solitude, wildness, otherness, hoping to discover it by chasing behind a little white ball. I worked on a golf course one summer, but this sport seemed to miss the point and left me empty, and I'd wander off into the rough turning logs for salamanders, out of the way from humming projectiles hit with sticks by grown men who paid large sums to have an excuse to get out under the sky. I ultimately accepted that, for me, I needed no excuse, that being there was the point, and guns, rods and reels, clubs and other toys were merely tangible justifications for immersion in natural places in a society that seems to expect 'a reason' for grown men to be happily outdoors.
All of the wild places I explored as an older boy with my rifle or fishing pole, out on the edges of human habitat south of Birmingham, are every one of them under asphalt now, covered with condos and shopping 'mauls', nicely landscaped, tamed, private or unwelcoming public places. Even the rocky cliffs I climbed south of town... the very southern teminus of the ancient Appalachians, I later discovered... are now covered with expensive homes, gated mountainside communities, and in the valleys, private fishing lakes and golf courses. To return to these places of memory and discover the transformation is like finding that a favorite wild, free creature has been broken and harnessed to servitude and does not recognise me any more. Even the edges from youth were not far enough away for lasting wildness, and perhaps it is this experience in some sense that has compelled me to find remoter places, not just to visit, but in which to make my home.
And so today, we live every day well beyond the edges of a town so small there are no suburbs. I have a vast woodlot around me, two creeks full of bright fish and sunlight, tranquility by the skyfull, and no neighbors to disturb in my rambling walks. This perhaps is the 'place' I felt I belonged to long ago. I have to wonder if I did not start moving here while picking berries with small hands, behind my suburban house in a secret patch of woods.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Read other posts about "Suburbs" or Edges and how they impact our sense of place at this week's Ecotone BiWeekly Topic.
...sort of. Got the new Dell System yesterday and went through the exhilirating and terrifying process of putting it all together. Much to my chagrin, there are even more wires sprouting out the back of my desk than ever before (the flat screen with DVSomethingOrOther cable and addition of the subwoofer (way SUB) account for new dust-collecting cords unknown before. The 19" monitor is superb, not to mention light, and the system really hums compared to the 450MHz machine it replaces. Windows XP is going to take some getting used to; it's like trying to cook a familiar dish in someone else's kitchen. Sigh.
And of course, there are always those problems that make a new computer owner break into a cold sweat. Short story: the sound card was not recognized and I got to experience the sweet ease of opening the new case to reseat the sound card in another slot (also a breeze, done without tools... and how nice to open a case that is not full of spidery dustdevils!) And then that subwoofer is way too 'sub' to accept, and I will be receiving a replacement in a day or two.
As I was shutting down the limp-along Win95 sytem expecting the Airborne Express guy at any minute, my last task was to copy some critical recently updated files to a floppy. And the floppy drive seems at that moment to have failed. Today is "Write about Suburbs and Place" day at the Ecotone, and that essay is on the old hard drive sans floppy. Only thing I know to do (and will have to decide if it is worth the effort) is plug the whole system in again, connect to the net, and email the document to myself to post at the Ecotone and here. Or maybe I'll just be a reader this time around.
The "town characters" continue to show up here on Goose Creek, and the account of Marcia from One Pot Meal of LobsterLand is a notable addition. Do go read, and there may be a pop quiz later.
I will compile links to all these 'characters' stories in one convenient spot here after another month or so, and please consider adding yours to this growing group of oddfellows and different drummers.
If you're not happy with your color, or ever wanted to be Brazilian-colored, Hawaiian-hued, or Tahitian-toned for a few days, now you can chose your favorite ethnic pigment and have it airbrushed on in a matter of minutes. So far, it seems to be mostly for instant 'tans' but can SKINS OF THE WORLD be far behind? Soon you'll be visiting your local SunSpraySalon, asking "Can you show me something in Abbysinian, please."
Since we've been entertaining house guests for a week concurrent with my using this limp-along Win95 monotasking computer after the crash of '03, I've done more reading than writing to the blog, so here are a few pointers to blogs of interest at the moment, and some other snippets...
** Rana of Notes from an Eclectic Mind has told us about a 'character' at least somewhat in response to my call a few weeks back for you folks there in reader-land to tell us about your local oddfellows. Rana had a hard time deciding which characters to tell about, as she grew up among all sorts in "Little Town" Texas. An excerpt...
If anyone knew a real diagnosis of his problems I never heard it. Most locals, my Mother among them, were content to say Boy “wasn’t right.” I assume he was mentally retarded. I know he was an alcoholic thanks to the barflies in honky tonks like the Bloody Bucket who gave him beer. Boy spent far too much of his time drunk but even sober he’d roll down the street engaged in an animated and profane conversation with himself. Fortunately few people could understand a word he said.
** Rachel from Down Under is putting together a blogger's quilt. I'll let her tell you...
Purpose: A creative way of celebrating and giving thanks - individually and jointly - to God for community found online.
How: Create your own 100px × 100px square: fill it with something that expresses your celebration and thanks for community found online. This could be a photo, drawing, colours, poetry, song, text, verse, symbols, anything that has meaning for you. Alternative: send up to 290 characters (including spaces) to me (and a colour you'd like them in too if you wish) and these will be made into a square for you (using a small - but readable - font).
** The QUILT idea sounded familiar. Oh yeah! Check out Mandarin Design's own Blogger's Mosaic (Fragments is far right on the third row). And speaking of Mandarin, Meg et al have a way to put style in the Stephen Downes Referrer Script (that you can see, sans Meg's improvements, on the bottom of my right sidebar... for reasons I don't understand this script sometimes pulls in dozens of referrers, or like today, only a few of you readerly types.)
** I'm going to go find the picture of the garden from this time last year and repost it later today. I will not show you any pictures of this year's garden however. It is a pitiful shadow of its former self. Susanna, this year, there may not be any Silver Queen to make Fried Corn. Sigh.
** This time next week we'll be scurrying around making ready for the all too rare Real Live Blogger visitation. He will be staying in the Veranda Room, unofficially called the Susanna Cornett Room since she is the only other blogger to stay upstairs overlooking the creek. Our World Touring mystery guest won't be around long enough to get the Floyd County Grand Tour, but likely we will cover Greater Goose Creek, at least. More as it happens.
** Status report: Puppy search... postponed. Sticker shock with the yellow labs; and I am going 'home' to B'ham in August and we need not have an untrained critter for Ann to deal with while I'm away. Computer replacement... it seems Mr. Dell is using Airborne Express these days, and I think I like UPS's approach better. My computer has been in Roanoke, 35 miles away, since Saturday night (I could only ascertain this by a phone call, their online status report is disappointing) and is not scheduled to be delivered until Wednesday. How lame is that. Four days it sits just next door, and will not meet Dell's shipping promise. Book publication: I remain at the very bottom of the learning curve, and this week will meet with a local publisher and a printer to see how color images might impact the production costs (and therefore the purchase price) of a little Fragments book. To make a long story short, I've gotten more encouragement than discouragement so far, but miles to go before I sleep.
Good things come in threes. Here are three authors, their ideas and the books that have come to us from those inner words. These new reads have come from Fragments friends in the past few days and I post them as a way of not losing track of them 'tween the present and the distant future when I get 'caught up' on reading already in the queue.
Thanks to Floyd Countian Jayne for telling me about Ken Wilber, whose "Theory of Everything" comes at integrating body, mind, soul and spirit in such a way the book gets high praise from Deepok Chopra and Jon Kabat-Zinn (Full Catastrophe Living) among others. You can read more here.
Chris Clarke, editor of California's Faultline Magazine (and also an Ecotone participant) made me aware this week of Gary Nahban, who writes about nature and culture, primarily in desert communities, but another writer that seems to have an integrative understanding of how life fits together, and can communicate it effectively.
And finally, reader Connie sends a synchronistic link that made me do a double take. On July 10 I posted on 1) the phenomenon of synchronous fireflies, and 2) a bit about M.A.S.H. and its wonderful characters. Connie links us to WHO CARES ABOUT FIREFLIES?: A TALK WITH STEVEN STROGATZ (professor in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University)... with an introduction by (guess who) Alan Alda! Strogatz' new book SYNC looks especially interesting. He describes new discoveries of the mathematical imperative toward order in our universe.
Sigh. I'm cut off from my email address book (owing some of you letters, sorry) and can't access my FTP software to upload some Rhododendron pix I wanted you to see; can't get to my 'favorites' where I find blogging topics on nature or astronomy and the like, that I resort to when, like now, there do not seem to be any burning issues or silly stories right here at the tip of my hippocampus. My new system sits somewhere in Roanoke, not far from here, and Airborne Express delivers on Saturday ('in most major US cities'... I rather doubt Roanoke makes that cut). So we'll see what the day brings.
The day is already off to a dubious start. After soaking the hornets nest under the front porch for the second time, they are more angry than ever. I thought the first soaking last week took care of them, but our house guests' dog got zapped yesterday afternoon heralding the retaking of the hive. This morning I had just enough spray left in the can to aggravate them, so our cool breezy front porch remains in enemy territory for the day. If the Airborne Express guy does come today, I hope I get to him in time to shoo him (and my new computer) away from the front porch!
Oh the poor sad garden, a mere shadow of its glorious self from this time last year. True, I had to pull water every other day from the creek (until it dried up in August) to bring it along as far as you see here, but too much water and the cool weather in May and June this year did no favors to gardeners. Yesterday I found not a single corn plant emerged from what I put in the ground two weeks ago; we've had rain...heavy ponding rains... every day since then save one... and the seed simply rotted in the saturated soil. If our lives depended on it, we would not feed ourselves from this year's garden.
Having entered the second year of Fragments, it is interesting to me to look back and see what was going on within and around me a year ago. Man, I was wound up telling my tall tales for the first time last year, even though there were not many coming around to listen, and I was the Strange Farmer then. I'd like to get in that 'anything goes' write without editing mode again, and see what comes forth. Maybe later this summer I'll find that zone again and either remember more old ones or conjure up some new stories. I'm a bit bored with myself lately and need inspiration. It may come if I can call up the discipline to read daily. Reading seems to lead to writing. Is it that way for you?
We've known each other long enough now that maybe you will not think me overly haughty when I, after a year of self-revelation and soul-spilling, tell you this morning with no small degree of pride about a distinction that I am pleased to recollect from some long years ago. It still makes me stand a little straighter, confident in my southern heritage and thankful to have grown up in the omnipresence of the National Fruit of Dixie, the Wallamellon.
Yes, dear hearts, back in the year my youngest was abornin', I won first place in the Mt. Lake Biological Station Summer Seed-Spitting Contest. One of the proudest moments in my long life. Yessir, I remember it plain as day. How could I forget after long weeks of preparation and the incredible discipline I had in those days. As I stand on the porch in the cool morning air this morning, I can remember the long hours off away from the station in a private place with my practice seeds every morning in the cool foggy air before the breakfast bell. I would sit for a hour before sunrise in lotus position, first clearing my mind of all distractions, then visualizing each nuance of the 'put' as we call it in the sport. I will not spend 2000 words in the details but rather tell you that I used the approach to the line that you may be familiar with if you have watched a shot-putter starting low, facing away from the line, then bursting into his 'put', turning toward his mark, arching his body full into the motion to push every ounce of strength into the heavy shot. And so it was in my seed-putting form, an art more than a sport, and I can still feel the warmth of the admiring "OOOOhs" and the congratulations in the winner's circle.
But here's the sad part of the story. They just don't make'em like they use ta. That melon we had last night is typical of what passes for the Fruit of Dixie these days... with small, roundish, thin seeds that are more aerodynamically designed for swallowing than spitting. Even with the rolled tongue method (again some details are proprietary) and my very best form (limited of course by the bad knee, stiff back, and several other orthopedic impediments) I could barely clear the front of my shirt with those sorry little pips. I dunno. Maybe I've lived long enough.
Our visitors from Atlanta brought us a basket of peaches from near the world's largest cleavage of the gluteal kind. We came up over a rise on I-85 back when the kids where small, and all our jaws dropped. There before us, and towering 75 feet over us, was the Just Say No to Crack memorial... ostensibly an homage to the state fruit, the Georgia peach, or to its overweight plumbers' best side. The tower has been repainted in recent years so as to avoid so many accidents on the interstate because of its shocking effects on drivers. I was once one of them.)
Our guests also brought us a watermelon, and tonight, sitting on the front porch eating it after it cooled in the creek for two days, it conjured up a story for another time (probably here directly; don't fail to miss it!).
I would beg to differ with Mr. NZ Bear in his Ecosystem heirachy that Marauding Marsupials are afforded a higher place on the evolutionary blogogeny than Adorable Little Rodents. I seem to recall that it was the placental mammals such as little homeothermic rodents that account for the fact that Marsupials survive in any great degree only on island refuges (such as Australia) where rats and their kin did not get the upper hand. Nevertheless, I will be happy among the pouched mammals on Mr. Bear's evolutionary ladder, and happy to announce the new and improved stats on his fine site. For those who have publically accessible SiteMeter code on their weblogs, NZB now provides a ranking according to number of visitors, an additional way of humbling lower organisms with whom I keep company. The few. The Chosen. The Fragments Readers.
"Our General...sayled to a certain little Island to the Southwards of Celebis...throughly growen with Wood of a large and high growth.... Amongst these Trees, night by night, through the whole Land, did shew themselves an infinite swarme of fierie Wormes flying in the Ayre, whose bodies being no bigger than common English Flyes, make such a shew and light, as if every Twigge or Tree had beene a burning Candle." Sir Francis Drake 1577
It is July 1981 and we are sitting on the front porch steps of our first place truly in the country, about sixty miles from where I sit this morning. It is our first night in the new house that does not seem to be ours yet, will not for some months, but rather a quaint little cottage that now contains all of our things. It is not our front porch or our pasture or our road yet, but we are starting the process of allowing that place to own us. There are the same warm barely perceptible evening breezes, insect noises and undefinable aromas then as we know now from this front porch, so the moment is easy to recall in memory.
The horizon some miles away appears faintly as a gray-pink outline each time the thunderhead flashes lightning over Grayson County to the south. There is no thunder, only whirring stridulations of a vast chorus of bush crickets, katydids and a hundred voices that are new to us. And the fireflies begin to emerge from the tall grass, first a few and near us, then by the hundreds, blinking candlelights down the meadow, and up across the road by the old house and field. To the vanishing point they rise and blink and signal. Indigo dark is punctuated by cool flickers of amber and lime, some sustained, some staccato code, many rising during their brief pulse, others falling, the females waiting patiently on the tips of timothy grass for motherhood.
Then, the headlights of an approaching car beam over the pasture ridge, sweeping briefly across the meadow as the car turns off. And I imagine that, with that signal, hundreds of the thousand fireflies blinked together in response to this greater light. Yes, it happens too at times with lightning near enough to produce stroboscopic shadows of trees along the road. Yes, there are times that a small detachment of these lowly luminous beetles work together briefly in the same language, synchronized by light... a language they both produce, and understand. I am amazed.
But consider this greater wonder: In a few places in Thailand and Malaysia, every single firefly blinks no more than 13 milliseconds before or after its thousand neighbors, producing a stunning stroboscopic chorus of light alternating with brief periods where every last one of the thousands all pause together for a short while before starting the giant synaptic pulse once more. And compounding this oddity, there is one place not far from here, in the heart of the Smoky Mountains, where one can see synchronous fireflies. There it begins in one part of the cove, and passes like a human stadium wave to include every part of the super-organism that can encompass many acres of woods and field. And this seems worthy of a pilgrimage later this month.
Zing! The new system has shipped. Mr. Dell will be sending my third computer since 1995, when I upgraded from a 386/40MB memory to 200MHz/? MB RAM, and now from 400MHz/128MB RAM and 13.2GB HD to 2.8GHz/1GB RAM and 120GB storage. In four or five more years, when I upgrade the next time, will there be functions and uses for a computer that are not even imagined today, or just the inexorable creep into faster speeds and more storage? Now the limiting factor for putting all this new speed to use is going to be my dial-in 56K net connection. DSL is available, even here in the boonies, but I'll have to wait for the sticker shock from this new, unanticipated expense to numb up a bit. And then maybe consider cancelling the monthly DISH TV fees to keep in budget. We'll see.
There are those times when bubblegum for the brain is just the right kind of junkfood my listless cranium craves, and so I'm waiting for Mr. DISH to send me a replacement for the lightning-fried receiver. Home alone last night I would have watched Law and Order, a show I discovered for the very first time about two weeks ago (reruns are usually first runs for us). Reasonably good acting, plot and point, I'm thinking, as the Boobus Toobus goes. But no signal, sorry Charlie. But there I have planted my carcass in vegetative viewing position, remote in hand, so I'm gonna watch some danged thing, and am happy to remember that I have not worked my way through the M.A.S.H. First Season videos I got for Christmas year before last. Hot diggety.
You know how it is. There is a reticence to be done with it, like a good book. When it's over, it's over. So, I felt guilty when I indulged myself and watched two episodes last night... one roaring hilarious, the other poignant with some funny lines... in the way this series so characteristically could hold you by that fine thread of emotion between laughter and tears. It occurred to me that the characters are pure archetypes. In the first episode, Hawkeye the hero/jester fired one-liners baddabing with Trapper John McIntyre the straightman valet; Radar is cast as the wizard, sees and hears things the others do not; Henry Blake is benighted king who inherited the throne not from desire or aptitude; Frank Burns is the Villain/Fool, Hoolihan the fawning wench/witch. In the second more serious episode, the characters all fell into the same roles except for Hawkeye who was the prevailing Moral Voice, the Conscience of an era, Jury and Judge of War and Death, and his humor black. But I digress...
Among the various torments inflicted on old Ferret-Face, Frank, in the first episode, Hawkeye and BJ put Frank's hand in a bowl of warm water while he was asleep. The first time I remember seeing this trick was at summer camp. But for the life of me, I can't remember if it produced the desired effect. Is this just a camp tale, or can anybody tell me for sure that this would work on anybody but a TV character? Not that I have plans to use it like on our house guests this week or anything.
Camp tricks. Let's see. There was the old standard of short-sheeting your victim's bed, putting toothpaste in their hair while they slept, honey in their shoes, itch powder in their swimsuit, that sort of thing. The most memorable camp prank I recall was the year somebody brought to camp an old crank telephone innards that generated a nice little current (malice and forethought?) and wired it up to the trough urinal in the latrine. We waited for an hour or more until our least favorite counselor came in to complete the circuit with a very brief yellow stream. That folks, was entertainment, and I think Pierce and McIntyre would have given that prank the 4077th Seal of Approval, don't you?
It is July hot. Oppressive if you're an adult. As a kid, I didn't really notice the heat that much; but of course, I was never far from water, as I remember.
I wipe the oily-sweet smell of Coppertone and cocoa butter across the back of my neck, under my eyes, across my slender chest with sandy palms, basting before baking in the Alabama sun at the local pool. Cascade Plunge it is called, and it still stands in a 'transitional' Birmingham east-side neighborhood-- a whitewashed stockade surrounding an enormous blue pool, a persistent landmark among children that my mother had known in her childhood. At the far, shallow end near the baby-pool stands a series of gleaming blue-white steps the width of the pool. Water cascades too-smoothly down these perfectly sculpted waterfalls continuously, summer after summer.
There are a dozen other kids in the locker room this day, and I know all of them, there in that cool bunker of benches and bent metal bins and naked two-toned flesh and wet cotton; it smells of dank concrete, chlorine and ammonia. There is an echo in that dark windowless box so that our voices flow together into one shapeless happy hum. I pin my locker key inside my trunks and, gathering up my fins and goggles, step my feet quickly into and out of the unavoidable tray of white disenfectant that stands as the final barrier before leaving the last of the cool shade, destined for a day of total immersion beneath a searing, cloudless white-hot Alabama summer sky.
It was 1989 and we were living the other side of Asheville. We called him Woody. He showed up at the house one day, a young speckled pup, an Australian something-or-other I found out. Very smart dog, will grow to about 40 pounds, easily trained they said. We looked around for 'lost dog' posters, checked the paper, called the pound. We found no dog matching Woody's description, and after two weeks, decided that even though we had Zachary, our first Black Lab, Zach could use a playmate. And so we had our first 'pound puppy' and he had come to us.
So, all is copacetic in the Smokies and we are a two dog family. We're sitting around the dinner table, and out of the corner of my eye, I notice that our new oak rocking chairs on the porch are rocking, nobody in them. It's not windy. What's going on? Woody (a name which he got only after this day) was blissfully chewing off the ends of the rocker legs. We still have what's left of the chairs on the upstairs porch as evidence.
The next week, same out of the corner of the eye thing... something large and yellow was moving jerkily across the back yard like a huge fuzzy caterpillar. Woody (rename: R32) had found the door to the 2 foot high crawlspace under the house and came out with a playtoy... a 20 foot section of 6" yellow fiberglass insulation. Much more of it didn't come out so nicely in one piece, and there were tufts and chunks of it in the dark under the entire house. I nearly lost it. The stupid dog was oblivious.
I finally calmed down, but not enough to get back to my computer work, and decided I would sit down and watch TV for a while. Hmmmm. Curious. No signal. Reason: Woody (rename: CableGuy) had chewed the cable in two. This relationship, needless to say, did not work out. And so now, as we look for a pup to fill Buster's big ole paws, I have some reservations about bringing home the saddest, kindest or cutest doggie face from the pound. It could be another Woody/R32/CableGuy.
Thanks for the Hallmark Card, Bogie. Somebody nailed it with that one:
That danged lump keeps trying to get out, sometimes it succeeds when I'm alone. Alone a lot this week.
We've been calling around looking for a yellow lab. I'm wishing we were attached to a less popular (read less $$$$) breed. Have found some locally. I talked to the vet, Julie, here today. They have some great dogs, including a litter born yesterday of mixed Lab-Golden Retriever pups ("Goldador" mixed breed). Some more great Virginia dogs here. Sticker shock. I dunno. I feel guilty enough laying down ten times the world per capita income for Buster's recent (pointless) x-rays to tell me he had arthritis... somehow it seems obscene to spend this much up front before you even bring the mutt home.
By the way, Dr. Julie agreed his symptoms sounded like a lymphoma and Buster's joint pain was just the most visible early manifestation of it. Had we caught it earlier, we might have spared him some suffering. I dunno.
Meanwhile.... should we find a new pup in the coming weeks, I will be accepting suggestions for DOG NAMES. Make them as Goose Creek specific as you can, but any old name will do. I was thinking earlier about our friend from years ago who took in a stray, named him JUSTA. JUSTA DOG. Yeah, I like that.
Pica seems to be the only writer picking up my 'challenge' from a few weeks back to tell about 'local characters' from places you have lived. I love it that she took a bus for 'an hour or two of warblers'. In some folks minds, Pica, you and I would be considered eccentric characters for our odd interests and peculiar slant on life, don't you imagine? Personally, I don't mind being considered eccentric, having no desire in these times to be 'centric'. But that's just me.. old Weird Fred of Goose Creek.
Well it's (not) been a quiet week here at Camp Runnamuck.
Black hair reminders are everywhere, will be for years, most likely, and we are still going through life's mundane chores and activities thinking "this is the first time I walked here, ever, first time I came in the barn, first time... without Buster". We brought him home as a wee pup the month we bought this place in its roughest condition, the month after the hospital shut down the Floyd clinic, and I was out in the cold (the first time) but was never alone. It is amazing how hollow our holler has become for the want of that beast, and hollowness inside too, but looking for filling soon. I'm for considering another breed, Ann doesn't change her mind, or heart, so easily, so my guess is we'll find something with a lab's face, even if not black this time.
Our daily storms continue. The pasture grass, tallest grasses laying brown and heavy but with some green growth underneath, was to be cut a week ago, since it was supposed to dry off some; but Tropical Storm Bill had other plans. The storm that came through yesterday sent lightning into the house; a jagged orange flame jumped out of a light switch box between Ann and me as we chatted in the kitchen. No harm done, except when I sat down exhausted at 8:30 last night to 'watch' TV for a few minutes, I found the DISH box is fried. Sigh. Another call to the list for today.
Exhausted and disgusted is what I was. After working all day and finally finishing the painting of the upstairs bath, we went up to admire my work. What's the deal with this dang pocket door... won't open... stuck back in the wall. The molly bolts that attached the new toilet paper hanger to the sheetrock... you guessed it... were long enough to pin the door inside the wall. Undo, replace bolts with shorter, repaint, etc. The joys of home moanership.
Re the computer woes: best I can figure, I should be able to reinstall Win98 without losing data on my hard drive. However, holding Control while booting does not bring up the installation dialogue as I read it is supposed to do. So for now, I'm locked out of my email address book, the bank account won't get reconciled, I can't upload or work on photography, yadayada. I've been considering replacing the 3.5 yr system, so will be calling Dell this morning. I'm getting a flat panel display... for the space savings, but also because my 19" console I carried up the steps yesterday weighs 47 pounds. I made it up the steps with it, but I swear, I'd be afraid to come down them with it. I'd probably lower it with a rope from the upstairs porch if it ever needed to leave upstairs for any reason. (I'll be sure and get pictures when this happens; should make a nice companion image to the snake picture from the weekend. Oh Ann checks overhead whenever walking out either door now... probably always will from here on... know what I mean?)
So. That's the story from where I live... where the woman is strong, the man was reasonably good looking, and both the children are above average and living in places without snakes over their doors. (Apologies, Garrison).
Booting up this morning, Explorer fails to load. I am not highly technical, but even I know this is not, as in N O T, a good thing.
I was able to boot to DOS and rescue my "book" files most recent update, and one or two other essentials, and have a backup from a week ago on CD-RW that won't do me much good at this point. I am working off my old Win95 system with a weeny little modem and no memory until 1) broke gets fixed, or 2) I get a new system after almost four years with my current Dell system.
I need as much opinion, advice and pity as I can get from those of you who know more about this situation than I do, which is most of you, probably. Can I reinstall Windows without reformatting my HD (which I have done before only with Dell folks leading me through the process)?
This is really, really not something I wanted to face just now... well, never would have been preferrable.
I am standing by....
I feel like I've left my native tongue for the past week, gone someplace where I just don't say much knowing there won't be many that understand me. Some of you have, and thanks for hanging around during these few hard days.
Meanwhile, we are beleagered by summer aggravations, pestiferous critters, and the general verdant overabundance of the season, now that the air and soil are finally warming up. Paper wasps are building in every conceivable place. I discovered a hornet suburb growing under the front corner of the front porch in such a way that I had to lie on my belly (this morning at 5:00, before coffee, even) with flashlight in one hand, Hornet Spray in the other, looking almost directly overhead to get a shot at the 6" hive that seemed to grow in place overnight. I can tell you I was hoping the spray would do what it promised, and very quickly, because if all it did was peas them off then they'd have me, sprawled out, half dressed, and dinner for eighty is served.
This morning, in the accelerating flurry of pre-house-guests preparations (which, btw, may explain why I appear to have entered the witness protection program next week)... I just happened to look up as I was shufflin' about 'yes m'am' dis and 'yes m'am' dat'... shakin' it here boss. I looks up whilst vacuuming and over the door, through the glass lights around it, I sees this lumpish shape on the lentel. What dat, says I? I walk closer and see that it is a 5 foot king snake, up there where we have phoebe-proofed the house a few weeks back (some of you will remember). I called Ann downstairs. "Hey, lemme show you something neat" I told her.
Now Ann didn't think it was so neat. It took me a while to figure how he must have put himself up there, and when, several hours later, he decided to leave, I watched him sure 'nuff go back down the grape vine wreath next to the door, same way he musta got up there. Looking for phoebes, maybe? He's welcome to all he can eat. Oh, and Ann has told me not to dare post this, or we'll never get any visitors. Hmmmm.
I picked you a flower. Go see.
Could we bear to look our third Lab in the eyes and see both Buster and his predecessor, Zachary, or should we move on to second-best? Is a yellow lab different enough? Less shed hair would be nice, and a thinner coat to be able to see and remove ticks more easily. A dog less home-schooled and welcoming of strangers than dopey go-with-anybody Buster might be an advantage here in the far boonies where 'my dog can whup your dog' has a certain deterrent quality, should a stranger decide to come snooping around uninvited. (Hasn't happened in four years, but of course, we had ferocious Buster on patrol. He was indeed formidable, in appearance at least, back in is prime).
And so, what can you folks tell me about boxers? (Not the underwear, silly.) They sure have a different bearing and a face you'd have to come to love, not the immediately congenial comeliness of a black or yellow lab. They seem to fit most of the features we are looking for (thanks, Anne, for the link to the Breed Selector). Here is an interesting page that compares the temperament and personalities of the two breeds from someone who owns both a black lab and a boxer. Anybody has any experience with boxers, give me a hoot.
We're already looking. This place, and these people, require a dog to fill a very empty niche in the scheme of things around here. What do you think about one of these critters?
We want a dog that is big enough to offer some deterrent from unwanted visitors, a non-barker, preferrably with short hair (to better see ticks and avoid cockleburrs and the like) and a light shedder (which labs are not but are said to be 'medium shedders'). GSD's are too long-haired, Weimaraners are said to be barkers and prone to a largish list of disorders.
If anyone has recommendations, please let us know. We're not going to be in a great rush, and oh how I dread going through puppyhood all over again; it is such an investment in so many ways. Putting ourselves through this ... bringing home yet another dog... is an indication not of good sense but of the deep emotional imperative with which some of us are inflicted that requires us to keep these strange canine souls near us. They serve purposes and do good we so poorly understand and yet so sorely miss, when suddenly, they are not there to give them.
After yesterday's ordeal, I thought I would tell you that we are okay, and that, even though our sky remains cloudy, the early morning sun will once again shine as it peaks just over the ridgetop and through the lush forest. Much is lost, but much remains. And when tragedy strikes, you just do the next thing, find something to clean, fix, organize, arrange. Or you find a picture that gives you hope.
Thanks to all, and the consensus is 'all dogs go to heaven'. If He knows when a sparrow falls, there is a soul in a dog that is worthy of redemption as well, and we fully expect heaven to be a most marvelous Ark of His creatures and our old friends.
Writing the Last Chapter
Setting: Pathetic fallacy setting a pathetic stage, like today, when the northern band of tropical storm Bill spills somber, sodden low clouds and sheets of rain across pale monochrome fields of blue-green, and ghosts of fence posts and wet cattle disappear just beyond the nearest few.
Characters: You will write about only two. A man, and a dog. The man and dog are driving to town silent and joyless, along the same roads that just yesterday had made the man smile, smile because each bend offered familiarity and comfort and beauty. Today, he neither speaks, nor thinks, nor feels, but merely reacts to each curve and gust of wind and passing vehicle with it's faceless driver. He struggles between the need to keep his psychic shields up against what it is that he must do, and forcing himself to be there, to the end, for his closest companion of years.
The dog, listless, is energized by this unexpected trip. He knows he is going to 'puppy camp' since he only travels in the car when he's going to that place of exotic smells and pheromonic messages of canine familiarity and comfort and a kind of fellow-feeling he does not get from being with his humans, for all his love of them. For him, this is a good day, notwithstanding the terrible pain that is eased now only because of something his humans have been feeding him in a little fingerful of butter a few times daily for the past week. He doesn't understand all this, but it must be part of the Great Plan that he cannot fully know, only being four years old.
They arrive at their destination, and the dog tumbles awkwardly out of the back of the hatchback. He looks empty and frail, like an old man who has got off at the wrong bus stop and is unsettled, confused; and for some reason he is wearing the rumpled suit of a much larger and stronger man, seeming hollow, diminished, moving away as if in time he might simply disappear. But he is happy to be here now, in the rain, and busily scurries all about the vet office, reacquainting himself with the invisible presence of others of his kind, and he goes through the gate with the nice lady and disappears, forever.
Critical point: The man of steel feels nothing as he drives through the tropical storm mechanically. And yet, somehow it is easier now, having done this thing that begged to be ignored in the counterfeit hope that one day, miraculously, he would wake up, and this terrible thing would not be so, not be required of him. But now it is done, the decision has been made, right or wrong, and he is relieved, the lump subsides in his chest. He listens to the radio for solace, and sings loudly, as in a graveyard, with some old MoTown tunes that he never especially liked, but grasps at them now because they can be sung loud enough to drown out other voices. And this is helping to maintain the psychic numbness.
The next song begins its opening bars, and he is pleased to hear a familiar Harry Nillson tune that he can't quite name. And then the lyrics start. And then like a storm surge, the fog and rain are riven by anguished thunder inside that moving box on wet wheels; and his pretension ends, his stoney mask crumbles. He walks through the mist into an empty house and understands that loneliness is when there is no wagging tail waiting for a solitary aging man by himself on a day of driving gray rain.
No, I can't forget this evening
Or your face as you were leaving
But I guess that's just the way the story goes
You always smile but in your eyes your sorrow shows
Yes, it shows
No, I can't forget tomorrow
When I think of all my sorrows
When I had you there but then I let you go
And now it's only fair that I should let you know
What you should know
I can't live if living is without you
I can't live, I can't give any more
Can't live if living is without you
I can't give, I can't give any more
If you are not familiar with this man, you should be. Contrary to the unspoken assumption from Larger America that no good thing can come from Appalachia, Wendell Berry speaks with wisdom and clarity, for his farm, his neighborhood and community, and increasingly for the larger world in his forthcoming (September 2003) Citizenship Papers. Put this one on your list.
This link and much more Wendell Berry information by way of BrTom. Go spend some time browsing this rich readerly site.
In the case of Fragments, that's Minute \Mi*nute"\, a. [L. minutus, p. p. of minuere to lessen. See {Minish}, {Minor}, and cf. {Menu}, {Minuet}.]
1. Very small; little; tiny; fine; slight; slender; inconsiderable.
Bigwig of Silflay Hraka has done the math. Multiply the daily visitors by the time per visit and get total reading time for the blog. Some for instances:
Instapundit: 526.8 hours
Amish Tech Support: 78.8 hours
Silflay Hraka: 19.6 hours
And scroll on down the list there, and trailing a distant 'minute' last in the list (thanks, Bigwig, for bothering to pull me in with the big boys and girls and hold my weenyness up to public display!).. Fragments from Floyd: 1.5 hours.
But I have to ask: why would 75 people spend 1.2 minutes reading about my life as a cow? I guess I should be thankful for small blessings. And I am. I wouldn't take Instapundit's anonymous thousands for my three score and ten regular blog visitors. And thanks, Bigwig, for being one of them.
If you could be any kind of animal, what kind of animal would you be?
They still use this as an interview question in the hospital where my wife works. In one of the professional departments, mind you. And I faced it on the first day of the second week of the 'writing conference' a few weeks back. I was glad the enthusiastic, new guest faculty for the week could not hear my internal dialogue when she handed out the list of ten animals with phrases describing them, then instructed us to introduce ourselves to her by telling how we were like one of these creatures. She probably did however see my eyes rolling under closed lids. Sigh. Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to moo or die. I was to be a cow.
Like a cow, I am slow. I chew my food, although I swallow it only once, and am always the last to finish any meal, this due to more mooing than chewing my cud. I move slowly. Ask my children. They have always been embarrassed because I drove the speed limit... or slower, especially on the back roads and particularly when wildflowers bloomed, birds flittered around, or the sky was blue, or a string of oldies was carrying me to a distant age in a galaxy far, far away. I'm use to having people sniffing my exhaust and hell no I won't pull over and let them pass, I'm going the blinking speed limit. And I'm slow as January molasses on our walks around here, with the emphasis on the journey, not the destination. (I should mention that I am married to a race horse.) Like a cow, I can be happy standing in the same place staring at the ground for hours. The grass is greener right there where I am, by golly, I can stand in one place and watch it grow, happily.
Cows know what to expect from a day because they read the signs. Watch them find their place in the pasture... poor man's weathervane, they call them. I like to think I attend the shift in winds to the east and know snow or rain is coming; I smell ozone before the storm gets here; and I know where to go to find shade at any time of day, and shelter from the wind, and from worry and work. And I can lie down and nap in a heartbeat, and although you will rarely see a living cow lying on its back, barrel belly to the sky, that's the way I like it... a world of solid ground behind me, infinity above me forever, a spinning, orbiting, expanding universal speck.
And so on the way to town today, I drove slowly, contemplating the cattle on a thousand hills, as well as the soft green hills themselves. I ate dinner slowly with a friend, settled down in a deep wallow of a chair in a shady part of the library with a good book while I got new ball joints (not me, although I need them badly... but it's my old Dodge T-ruck I mean). And on the way home this afternoon, I marveled at the variety of roadside 'weeds' that I have learned never again to take for granted. It is these tatters of white and blue and yellow that I so missed along the busy edges of places I have lived away from here during years when Southwest Virginia seemed like a greener but galactically far-off pasture.
Chickory: chicorium intybus... a name that always reminded me of a Druid incantation, a hex on a rejecting lover, mayhaps. Sweet clovers, yellow and white... Melilothus. Aesclepius... common milkweed named after an ancient Greek physician, his commemorative genus buzzing now with red milkweed beetles and skipper moths, a host soon to include the Monarch that will extract poisons from the milky sap and thus protected, will live long enough to winter in Baha. Rhododendrons bloom white and pink where enough forest remains overhead to coax them to blossom in the dense cool shade.
These untidy random volunteers planted by no one in God's garden make me smile. Rounding a bend in the road and coming upon familiar friends is to find a common thread of memory from all my homes in the Blue Ridge, of other roads on so many journeys. I know what to expect on these particular bends, and it is comforting. This is familiar country to me now, after seven years in the county, more than four in the house, countless hours standing enthralled, cowlike in our pasture or woods, or embedded to midcalf in the cold creek. I am bovine in my ways, happiest to be outstanding in my field chewing my cud, and up to my knees in flowers.
The Ecotone Writers About Place are collecting responses to the question "How we are shaped by the places we live?" We had a dozen responses to "Why write about place" on June 15, so check the page for the July 1 group-blog collection, and the associated page of discussion on this topic. (The essays may trickle in over a day or so).
How are we Defined and Shaped by the Place We Live?
It is the year 1803. I am a Scots-Irish immigrant seeking independence and a few hundred acres to farm, so that I might carry on the traditions of my ancestors, in the western wilderness of America. I hold here a handbill stating that there is cheap land available in far western Virginia, along the New River. And everything I will do and where I will go and how I will get where I am going... all of these are determined by the nature of the place. The pitch and grade of the primitive trail determines where I can and cannot go as I move generally westward. And it limits the size and weight of my wagon, and therefore the belongings I can bring with me. The weather and season effects when my animals can find browse, when dry paths will allow travel, when I must seek shelter or die. My destination of three hundred acres of my choosing on the newly acquired Indian lands will be absolutely mandated by the nature of the place: where will I and my animals find water; how does the land lie for crops, can my oxen clear the forest; is the soil rich and deep; and where will the staples that I cannot make or produce myself come from? From day to day, once I arrive and over the years make my home, my life and livelihood will be determined by the nature of place: I must have a lover's knowledge of every fold and hillock and holler around me, because it is from this physical place that I kill game for food, find herbs for medicine, select just the right kind of wood for the tools I craft in order to survive. Place determines whether I live or die, and I respect it's limitations, honor it's provision and will spend a lifetime living in an uneasy balance with it and seeking to understand it.
_____________________________
It is the year 2003. I am the direct descendent of the settler from two hundred years ago. I live near where my ancestors settled in Southwest Virginia. His notions of dependence on the providence of place is foreign to me, neolithic and repugnant. To assume that place shapes us and constrains us in any way is to acknowledge that there are forces or conditions imposed on us by our physical surroundings. This is a very alien and archaic way of thinking in our modern age of freedom from the effects of place upon people. In my day, it is place that is subject, and places that are being changed, shaped, altered by our living here, as we think best. This is the modern way of thinking about place. If there is a mountain where we want a city, we take it down. If there is a stream where we want a road, we divert it into underground pipes. We modify and control every aspect about where we live... our microclimate, ambient noise, the texture and color and order of everything from our clothing outward... to suit our vary narrow tolerance of comfort and preference and pleasure. Indeed, it is this capacity to alter and control our place, our world at all levels for efficiency, economy and predictability that epitomizes mankind's ultimate conquest and dominion over his environment. We need accept none of the givens of where on the earth we live as my forefather was obliged to do, since nature is subject to our whims and malleable to the power of our technologies. What higher good is there than this, than to be free of the constraints of place?
______________________________
How we think about place has undergone a sea change in two hundred years. Basic human biology and the fundamental workings of nature have not. We have allowed ourselves to be dulled to complacency by the prevailing political hubris that the health of humanity is measured more by the economic than biological yardstick. This is a dangerous delusion to which we have succumbed. I fear for our future if the physical world... our forests, parks, seashores, prairies, pastures and woodlots...continues over the next two hundred years to be reduced to nothing more than a quaint backdrop for SUV commercials or pleasant scenery for our brief vacations away from the narrow comforts of our manmade cocoons.
I am pleased we are asking this question of how place shapes us. And answers will come from a better understanding of our dual role as both object and subject in regard to place... learning how to better live in it, and let it live in us. Our ancestor of 200 years ago understood his physical, emotional, spiritual and re-creational needs and attachments to place that we poorly understand, but can reclaim.