Fragments From Floyd

A few of the images from my first year of digital photography remain. The rest were trashed when my hard drive went south, in 2001...ironically, while installing a CDRW drive so I could back up my imgages, so I wouldn't lose them.

I'll post a few of them, like this one...during this yukky NeitherNor season we're having this week.

This one is of "the Buffalo"...the most prominent geological feature in Floyd County (on the distant skyline). Our high school sports teams are the Buffalos. I particularly like the image conjured by the girl's basketball team..."The Lady Buffs".

The Buffalo is one unique piece of planet, protected by the Nature Conservancy (I think. I'll have to review the current status) and home to some very distinctive creatures. I've a trip planned for a hike to the top, third week of April, with fellow blogger Doug and another buddy also too old to be doing this sort of thing. You can be sure there will be pictures coming, regardless of which camera I am carrying by then!

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Hey, now I MUST get the D70. Glenn Reynolds just got one and Fletch told him I was on the verge. And whaddya know... my first InstaLanche! I feel like Cinderella (even though he has transported me to Herndon, Virginia... Fragments from Herndon... I dunno, it lacks something, somehow).

Meanwhile, even the wife is saying "go ahead and get the most camera for the money. And make it last. And, considering our ages, it might not even have to last THAT long!" Wives. Can't live with'em, can't live with'em.

Okay. Pile on and twist my arm just a bit more and I'll not have any choice but to go Nikon one more time!

And BTW, I'm going to be working to get the spiderweb pix ready to go along with some yet-to-be-written text to submit someplace soon for fall publication. And I am getting expert help! Stay tuned.

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It will come as no surprise to Fragments readers that I am hopelessly infatuated with light and color, particularly natural light and the colors of nature. I got my first "serious" camera in 1970. That Minolta lasted until 2002 when the strap broke and it fell to the pavement in Boston. By that time, I'd already given in to the temptation of digital photography and have never looked back. My first digital, the Nikon Coolpix, was delivered to Goose Creek on April 20, 2000 and it will soon be four years old. And if I am serious about this love affair with light, it is time to make a commitment to the future with a new camera, and I am getting shaky knees on the way to the altar. Forgive me as I confess my qualms and hopes and uncertainties in this matter over the coming weeks. I've really got to talk this out, you understand.

For the bulk of those thirty years of SLR photography, I was quite used to carrying a daypack full of camera bodies (two) and lenses (three or four) and filters and film and cable release and... but when the digital point-and-shoot came along, I carried only the camera, the size of a couple of candy bars, in my pocket. All the lenses were "built in", although there were many times I'd wished for a very wide angle or more telephoto than the Nikon Coolpix 950 could give me. Now, one issue of course is how much to invest. The other is buying a digital camera body (like the Nikon D70) and then also needing another three lenses (and lens cases) and filters over and above the camera, and another bulky camera bag to carry with me every time I walk out the door.

The bottom line, I suppose, has to do with resolution. At some point, unless a person plans to create a coffee-table book of images (and I might), the megapixel resolution of a camera at, say, 6 megapixels is going to be way in excess of what is needed to produce professional quality images of the size one would expect to see in even the finer magazine. And so the theoretical difference between a 6MP point and shoot and the higher quality of a 6MP SLR's better CCD is probably moot. Or at least this is my thinking at the moment. I'll let my photo-professional buddy Doug straighten me out when I meet with him tomorrow.

Meanwhile, for the one person who is still reading this blahblah entry, here's what I'm looking at today:

Doing my homework, I've read this excellent primer on How Digital Cameras Work. If you're planning on buying your first or fourth digicam, this is a great review of basic technology of non-film photography that may help you make a more informed decision about what to buy, and why.

And currently, the Fuji FinePix S7000 (released July 2003) for $400 (after the current $100 rebate) looks like it would have everything I require. I could be wrong.

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The grass out the back door piles up in unkempt tangles, dark green, growing explosively from winter's unused reserves; and this morning it is dusted with a skiff of late March snowflakes. The birds--titmice, bluebirds, robins--sing from bare branches, come down to the cold ground wondering why did they arrive south before dinner was served? The only color, save for hidden greens in the pasture under last years grasses of dun and taupe, is the yellow-greens of the tiny flowers of spicebush along the creeks and edge of the field. Everything else this time of year is happening high overhead in the reds of maple and sarvice and poplar buds that you can see when the sun shines brightly. But that is just the matter. Just when all of the rainbow potential of nature is being birthed so fast you could hear it if you truly listened, the season of NeitherNor descends with a vengeance in late March throwing a cold, wet blanket on the party.

It has been three days since we have seen the sun. It will be another week before we see it, and warmer temperatures, again. We will endure another week of tiny fires in the wood stove because it is just cold enough for the house to lose a few degrees too much heat at night for the next day's comfort. Another week of wet mud before the garden can dry enough for tilling. One more week of sepia toned somber days that are more like winter than spring.

Then. The sun will suddenly appear with all its bags as if it has come to stay a spell. NeitherNor will be a memory of a time when we needed a bit more patience than we had for life to return to our lengthening days. And it will be for all the world like a "surprise party" where out pops the world of color again. SURPRISE! And the yellows of bellworts and field cress, the maroons and reds of Trilliums and Fire Pink, and the whites of Bloodroot, Hepatica and Anemone will explode all at once, as if they had been planning this event for months. And then it will be spring.

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A quick note on bloggers in the news...

A few weeks back, Jim Fletcher of Smoky Mountain Journal was interviewed about his weblog in a Knoxville paper. Unfortunately, they didn't see fit to keep it archived long enough for us to read it.

And Beth of "Switched At Birth" is prominently featured in this Florida Panhandle news story of weblogs and bloggers.

West Coast blogger Anita Rowland was recently interviewed on Puget Sounds KUOW and did a nice job of explaining the medium (move the RealAudio slider to about 26 minutes into the show to catch Anita.)

Any other bloggers-on-blogging in the non-blogging media to report?

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Ah. At last. I've manually deleted another seven comment spams (now stands at a total of 208 addresses banned) and sent back a rebuttal to a well-intentioned alarm about the federal bill that will tax my email (which is a hoax, folks). And what I thought I would be talking about now was how pumped I am because we got an income tax refund yesterday, and I am almost convinced that now is the time to replace my four-year-old digicam with its successor. I even went by Ritz Camera to see and especially hold in my hands the Nikon D70. I'm not married to that camera but have been very happy with my Coolpix 950 these last four years. But it is so new, it hasn't reached out little rural outpost yet.

And it may be a non-issue anyway. On the way to town to my little writer's group last night, I was hit by a deer. It came down in a single bound off a five foot bank--a single bound, and hard into the driver's side door. I didn't begin to have time to go for the brake. Last seen it was doing the GyroSpin on the asphalt in the rear-view mirror, very dead.

The door to my truck will open and close, but it looks like somebody took a vacuum to it and sucked out all the air. My $500 will buy not a camera but a replacement door from the junkyard, whatever color they have--certain NOT to be the white with teal stripe of the original.

And thus I will be one step closer to owning the archetypal country truck: I already have the dented fender from an encounter with a guardrail in the ice; I have some places where the paint is chipping off and soon will have the requisite rusty spots; I'll have at least three, possibly four colors of body panels. Now, if I can just find a place to put some unpainted Bondo and a gun rack in the back window...

Anyhow. I got a request to use (and pay for) one of my images last week, which is encouraging. I'm going to be working soon on some ways to do more with the photography. So, I may pursue the camera upgrade in spite of the Close Encounter of the Hooved Kind last night. I'm open to suggestions. I'll need a high-resolution format (D70 is six MegaPixels) and close-up potential. Beyond that, what would you suggest is a "must have" for the kind of images I take?

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He's been at it again--reminiscent of his former Sunday Click-o-Rama. Below, a few neat links from the many at Exclamation Mark.

Mars under water

Diving under Artic Ice (this is way cool--no pun intended!)

My wife believes all cats are defective. These--there's no question. Especially see the jumbo kitties at the bottom of the page. Got any in your house to match these BiggieSized Felines?

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Now: Sudden Oak Death in Eastern Forests?

I concluded a recent post about the disappearing trees of the Appalachian Forest with the following imagined narrative:

"...And fifty years from now, neighbors may meet under the walnut by the barn and exchange pleasantries on a warm March day, remembering those who have lived here in the long-ago. There was that fella who wrote all about this place way back. Took pictures. Remember? And isn't it a shame what's happening to the oak trees here 'bouts?"

Yes, it would be unimaginably terrible for disease to ravage our oaks (the dominant forest species pretty much throughout the Eastern Deciduous Forest) the way that the Chestnut Blight took out that species early in the last century.

Well, this might not be so far-fetched a disaster as I would have hoped when I put those words in the mouths of local characters fifty years from now. Sudden Oak Death may already have come east. (Thanks to Jim Fletcher of Smoky Mt Journal for the bad news).

"Cross your fingers — it's not just Pennsylvania. We're hearing reports of other states finding positives as well," said Everett Hansen, a professor of plant pathology at Oregon State University. "A lot of nursery stock moved, and a lot of people are going to be holding their breath until this plays out.

The worst that could happen would be that, over a period of some years, you'd see a loss of susceptible trees from a significant section of the Eastern forest. There's many, many assumptions here, and we just don't know, but there's a lot of people are very, very concerned about what might happen in the East.

Sudden Oak Death, or Phytophthora ramorum, was first detected in North America in 1995, and has since been found in the wild in California and Oregon, and in nurseries in Washington and British Columbia."

"...In the wintertime in the Northeast it's going to be too cold for the Phytophthora, and that may mean that Northeastern forests are protected even if it gets established in other parts of the East. It might be too hot in the Southeastern forests," Everett said. "We just don't have a clear enough understanding of what the temperature and moisture requirements are and how they might play out in the East." from PennLive.com

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It's not complicated. We know what causes it.

Nitrogen goes on our fields as fertilizer. Twenty percent is taken up by crops. The rest washes into the creek, the river, the bay, the ocean. Phytoplanton (algae, diatoms, etc) in the upper waters thrive on the excess fertilizer. They live, die, sink to the bottom of the ocean. Bacteria gobble up their remains and use oxygen in huge quantities in the chemistry of decomposition. There isn't enough oxygen left for anything else. Voila. A "Dead Zone" (See satellite Images this link). Oh well. What's a little bit of ocean bottom.

Stay tuned. This is not a good thing. This is another product of human industry that we will avoid facing until it is too late to repair the damage. Brinksmanship and beyond. States along the Rhine have cut nitrogen effluents by 37%. We could do the same. We won't.

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How like memory it became, weaving together the images that made up the collage I gave Ann for her birthday last week.

One image lies large or small, bright or faded, sharply or faintly distinguishable from its neighbors. Some from nearby. Some barely remembered until the features appear.

And the instant these shapes become visible, they move to the background and others come to take their places. And again and again the page of memory is filled with color and form, a dynamic canvas of remembrances.

But I could only give her one, frozen in time. There could be so many. So many.

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A few months ago while browsing (the old fashioned kind--in the library) I picked up the free BookPage. I tore out the page that held the account of Susan Shapiro's book called "Five Men Who Broke My Heart". This (married) woman actually interviewed five former boyfriends. Where were they now? Did they still think about her? Were they ever sorry they broke up?

This story struck me, somehow. I suppose we all have unresolved relationships. Questions about ourselves, about the other person, our culpability or vindication, could we replay the old tapes of our on-off love-hate relationships. And replay them we do, bidden or not, in the film noir of memory. If only we could find out what had become of them. And this author not only did x 5, she had the courage (desparation?) to write about the journey into her own past. And it is selling.

My Floyd friend Doug has a poignant story from his archives--a long-ago memory who walked into his studio last week, unannounced, saying "Do you remember?" He did.

We say we'd like to see them. But would we, really? I can think of several old "friends" I'd really love to hear from, to see, but it would scare the fodder out of me to have them show up on my doorstep. Do you have ghosts it would help to revisit? Do you suppose Mrs. Shapiro put demons to rest or stirred them up with her close encounters with her past?

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At last, some stamps for the everyday man-on-the-street herpetologist to love. When the postmaster laid out a half dozen choices of stamps on the counter, I hesitated only about as long as it takes a gray rat snake to flick its forked tongue to decide. "Give me the herptiles!" I said. "The who?" retorted the clerk. "Oh I'm a snake man from way back. Almost had to annul my marriage during its second week because of a snake" I said. I didn't go into my snake tales that I recorded here last year.

Scarlet King Snake: innocuous, but very like the deadly coral snake. Just remember--Red on Black, Friend of Jack. Red on Yeller, kill a feller. And a word of advice: never carry a coral snake in a pillow case with a hole in it. The guy who was carrying it was in the front of the line as we hiked along a sandy trail in the Florida panhandle. Never did know when it came outta that sack. And I was at the end of that line.

I have never seen the Blue Spotted Salamander, which apparently lives NORTH of here. But one of my first herpeto-memories is of turning logs in an Alabama swamp looking for marble and spotted salamanders, which are also Plethodontid (lungless) salamanders, and some of the most beautiful creatures I've ever seen. Alas, our amphibians as a whole are not well and the lungless salamanders that depend on healthy forest microhabitat are in peril in many places. My grandchildren may never see what I have seen in branches, bogs and under bark.

As reptiles go, those of us from the deep south are deprived of much exposure to lizards, at least compared to those in more western areas. Skinks, anoles, and fence swifts was about the sum of it where I grew up. Willing to bet none of you have seen this creature. It is a southern lizard without legs that looks like a snake. HINT: It can blink. Snakes can't. To which the average person replies: I'll not be getting close enough to have the darned thing wink at me!"

Frog nostalgia: I am wading in a south Alabama bog, or swimming--depending on the depth of the water and the amount of support from the bottom muck. It is a warm, dark night before a rainstorm. Around me and my buddies are perhaps a thousand frogs of seven species, all shouting out their buzzy, booming, chirping, whirring, croaking advertisements to the females. Every now and then in the cacophony: a release call. A male had mistakenly clasped onto another male. I can smell the wet night, the organic soup of the bog, and the pervasive frogginess. We must have been crazy. But it was a good crazy.

Box turtles. How many have we rescued from one country road or another, especially when the kids were little. Our dog, Zachary, used to think of them as crunchy snacks. There was one on our first farm that had the initials "H C" carved into its shell. "Oh yeah", said the neighbors. That'da been Herbert Catron. He lived in the house you live in back in the sixties. Died in '65". So, that turtle had been around the block a time or two. We found him at least once a year for the six years we lived there. I like to think he is somewhere up on those hillsides still today.

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It is, I suppose, a family tradition--probably genetic, since our kids have it too--to leave just one thing behind anywhere we travel. It can be something small, like a single shoe. Or, it could be something not much bigger but of somewhat more value and importance to the flow of normal life--like a Nikon Coolpix 950. Yep. I did. It's in the mail. So, until it arrives sometime early next week, I'll have to play the vicarious photographer and point you elsewhere.

First, especially for those of you from off-continent, you might enjoy a visual tour of Virginia, or closer to home, of the Roanoke area. These pages are massively full of images and take a bit to load.

And for a visual feast on a sleepy Saturday, what better than a click-fest on the pretty faces of orchids--perhaps the most "intelligent" and certainly most oddly beautiful of all flowering plants. And it is most certainly not just in appearance that orchids are worthy of our awe and admiration. This article from "The Orchid Hunter" is full of amazing facts and features of orchids. Of course, smell is always pretty high on my list:

Some orchids have straight-ahead good looks but have deceptive and seductive odors. There are orchids that smell like rotting meat, which insects happen to like. Another orchid smells like chocolate. Another smells like an angel food cake. Several mimic the scent of other flowers that are more popular with insects than they are. Some release perfume only at night to attract nocturnal moths.

And lastly (at least for this cup of coffee)--if you have any interest in photography, identifying or consuming mushrooms, this seems like a pretty good place to start. Notice the beginners key in the right sidebar. Gotta start somewhere. Especially worthy of note is the page on what is perhaps the safest and most sought-after spring mushroom, coming soon to a meadow near you: The Morel. Start perhaps with a page full of pictures of Morels (some of these are NOT morels and I wonder why they chose to add them here>). Then work back to the main Morel page for tips about identifying them. If you find some, there are recipes and preparation sites all over the net. It is worth the effort, folks, and the time is approaching for them to come out.

WHEN? "When the oak leaves are the size of mouse ears and the blue violets bloom" say the old-timers.

WHERE? Everybody has their theory. Old apple orchards. Burned over areas. Where Mayapples bloom. The biggest one I ever found was growing next to the gutter downspout behind our home back when the kids were small. TIP: when morel hunting, DO NOT allow them to see your collecting receptacle (bag, bucket or basket) as they will instantly become invisible. In my experience, the best morels and the most are found by accident, carried home in a make-shift sling made from the front of one's T-shirt.

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You're traveling through another dimension -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Twilight Zone!

Carefully, weeks ago, I had chosen speakers for 10, 12, 2 and 4 o'clock from Fridays schedule at the Festival of the Book in Charlottesville. Yet, when I arrived there Thursday night anticipating the next days carefully selected talks, those authors and topics appeared nowhere on the elaborately fleshed out schedule of this year's Festival.

"The speakers you sent us" said my lovely hostess "where all for March 27. That's Saturday."

"Another Senior Moment" I thought at first. But no, I was certain I'd pulled up Friday's schedule.

"Is it possible those were speakers from last year?" Gretchen asked.

And after considerable bewilderment, suspicions that Rod Serling was standing somewhere in the wings in his blue gaberdine suit, and self-loathing for being an idiot, this is what I think explains the fact that today, none of the speakers I went to hear were there today: I know I reached the links to the chosen speakers off the main page-- the one with Garrison Keillor pictured as one of the opening speakers. But the page from which I selected my talks a few weeks back must have been left over, not yet updated from last year. That would explain the fact that the day and the date didn't jibe. Except last year, Friday was the 26th. I'm still just a wee bit bumfuzzled.

Unfortunately, there were not any "must see" speakers on the entire schedule for today. So, "best laid plans" and all that. I did weedle a nice stay in the Ripples Bed and Breakfast out of the trip north and I came home having had much good conversation. Not only that, due to a missed turn, I got to see Business 460 West throughout the fifteen mile length of Lynchburg, Virginia and this was as much fun as a stick in the eye.

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Sitting. An hour in car from Goose Creek to The Airport Clarion. .Sitting. Six hours in my meeting--me and two hundred nurses. Sitting. For 2 and half more hours from Roanoke to this undisclosed location somewhere near Charlottesville. I am sat out, buddies, so no post tonight. Fortunately, host David remains brain active after 9:00 and he has posted, so I will direct you to his brief description of our two-blogger evening, plus a picture! There may be more from C'ville, and if not, I'll be back in the saddle on Saturday. Man, it's an hour past my bed time!

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HeresHome this week is under new (miss)management and this valley here ain't big enough for the three of us. Ann is taking a week off work while her sister from MO is visiting. The Estrogen Warning Level was reached by noon the first day, and I think I'll just find someplace to go.

Not really. Sis-in-law is an easy guest and even wifey is a teddy bear as the work toxins recede and the person down under all that stress and responsibility comes to the surface for a look around. The weather is supposed to be great for the next couple days. But I'm still leaving home.

Today I have to complete my CEU requirements to keep my PT license active. So: an all-day seminar breathing the recylced air of a Roanoke airport hotel conference room learning about "The Aging Brain" where I can feel it coming:

"Let's have a volunteer from the audience, shall we?" says lecturer and author, Dr. Cerebriac, as he looks out over a sea of downcast gazes as conference attendees slump in their naugahyde chairs.

"You there. With the silver excuse for a beard there in the back row. Will you step up to the front of the auditorium please."

The young people sitting around me nudge me awake. I startle, and without thinking, get up and totter off in the direction they are pointing. Somehow, I find myself standing at the microphone, blinking, disoriented and confused in front of one hundred relieved potential guinea pigs.

"Now then. Just briefly, sir: can you tell us what you do".

"I write. About mosses and liverworts and such. To people who aren't there. And I talk to the people who come to read about what I write. They're my friends" I say honestly.

"Just as I thought. This, ladies and gentlemen, is an example of what can happen in the Aging Brain. 'A mind is a terrible thing to lose'... to quote our ex president, Mr. Quayle. "You may go to your seat."

And, after the conference, if I can remember where I parked my car, I will drive up peaceful and uncrowded I-81 north, thence to the Charlottesville area to Chez Ripples to spend the evening and the night with host and hostess David and Mrs. Ripples. The next day, David and I will attend various offerings of the "Festival of the Book."

And the point of all this circumelocution is to say I will miss posting, most likely, until the weekend. So, all you people who aren't there, come back and see me for the debriefing from all my world travels. I anticipate there will be blog material aplenty in the next 48 hours. Should be fun.

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It was the celebration of sort that we don't celebrate in this household anymore. She doesn't celebrate hers about three weeks before we conveniently forget about mine. Nevertheless, some gifts were given last night on the occasion of the annual nonevent, and one gift from me was the latest offering from our favorite Old Time-Blue Grass band and good friends, the Wolfe Brothers. (Their latest, Old Roads-New Journeys isn't listed at CooperCreek yet.) We put the music on and became lost in the rhythms, the lyrics, and particularly for me, the thread of music history of which this is a living part.

If you have the least interest in the history and culture of the Appalachians, you must appreciate the role that its unique music has played in the making of our character. I don't expect that one in a hundred will actually read it, but this is an excellent synopsis (with sound clips) of how the music of fiddle and "banjar" became associated with the Appalachians over the past two hundred years.

Music is a common ground that ties the southern Appalachians together, and recent efforts assocated with the Blue Ridge Music Trails are making it easier for fans and travelers to sample it in all its variety. This map shows the different sections into which the Music Trail is now divided. Floyd County is in section 6. If you're planning a trip this way, include at least one live music venue. You'll be glad you did.

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The small rosette of thick leaves belongs to a plant whose common name is "Stonecrop". It grows in the thin, nutrient-poor soil that begins to form on rock surfaces as the pioneer species…lichens and mosses… come in and establish a microhabitat. As the pioneers grow ever so slowly, they begin to trap a little organic matter carried to the rock surface by gravity, wind and rain and a film of "soil" begins to accumulate.

It apparently takes very little soil for stonecrop to put down roots and grow, but other plants always have come along to that inhospitable rock surface to prepare the way. The plant pictured here (the larger is about 3/4 inch across) is growing in luxury, with mosses providing a protective blanket against the drying sun. But stonecrop (genus Sedum) is prepared for the worst: it has a thick cuticle or skin to prevent excess water loss. And if you look at the leaves closely, you can tell that they are thick and fleshy, their cells specialized to store water in case of prolonged drought. Probably, too, their leave surfaces have few "breathing pores" or stomata that further reduces water loss. Such plants are called "succulents" and many desert plants are thus adapted.

A word about the image: the leafty moss gametophytes (the spiky little moss "plants") in the picture were, well, a brilliant moss green in real life. Just tinkering with the image, I grayed down the mosses to make stonecrop stand out a bit. Then I noticed what I had overlooked before: there are traces of other colors in the small fleshy leaves--some yellows and reds--that I missed until I took color away from the background sea of greens. I decided to post the "altered" version of the image to show you, keeping in mind our mosses are not this color, in fact. Photo-trickery, but with a purpose.

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Nuclear battle cruiser in danger of exploding

There are few details on this at 6 a.m.

Were my coastal town considered for the possible docking place, I'm sorry, NIMBY.

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Most of 'em walked to church--up and down Goose Creek along the road--it was dusty in summer, covered in ice all winter long, and nothin more'n a muddy path rutted by wagon wheels, springtime and after summer storms. They come down Griffith Creek and north and south along Shawsville Pike. Some hauled up the steep trail through the woods on foot, over Diamond Knob--they followed the switch-backs on down into Goose Creek valley. All of 'em woulda been wearing their Sunday best, and ever last one of'em would look as if they'd plowed five acres by the time they climbed those steps out front of the church and went on in through the little narthex.

That's where they'd hang up their dusty coats and the men'd remove their hats. The women were pleased for the chance to wear their Sunday hats, and these they'd not remove. 'Course, that made it hard for those sittin' behind them to see Brother Lucas in the pulpit. On t'other hand, big hats also made for somethin' good to hide behind and nap. If you watched 'em comin' in of a Sunday morning, you could see the men rush each other for the pew right behind the tallest and widest of those bonnets.

At one point in time, there was a fair piano in the church. Hit was years before anybody came regular who could play it. Mostly they used the shape-note hymnals without any playin'--and what you'd hear would be the womens' voices, clear and strong, and the men less bold and way down deep. The sound pushed out against the rough board walls and through those four little windows, it flowed out along the creek and filled our valley with joyful noise. I can still hear it now.

As soon as services were done, the kids wriggled between the grown-ups' legs and poured out the door. They leapt down the steps in a single bound like so many Spring Peepers and were into the creek with their shoes off and their pants rolled up, turning rocks for crayfish. Somebody'd always go home wet as a mop, usually them that wandered too close to the baptismal pool--that deep place there in the bedrock where the water was high as a cow bell--at least in the wet summers. They'd be maybe a half dozen dunkins during revival in August ever year. Had to be water enough to get'em properly dipped head to toe, so they could rise in newness of life a sputterin' up out of that cold, cold water. In dry years, services were down in what was called the "Green Hole" downstream a quarter mile; except it was so steep to get down in there, one year they had'ta hoist some of the older members back up to the road with ropes when the baptizin' was done.

It's hard to believe now, it's been so long ago that those little ones who played in the creek have had their own young'uns, and them theirs, in turn. The old mill up by Willis' Store couldn't put out what the new gas powered operations up in Simpsons could. We lost a lot of young men from down here in the Great War; then the Depression came and even those what knew how to do with little couldn't make do here, and moved away. Some of the old houses still stand. A few have been brought back to new life in the last little while, and they look so alive, like they use'ta. Most of'em are gone, but you can kinda see where they once were since a boxwood or some yellowbells or row of daffodils still crop up every year under the forest that's come in where there were once yards, meadows and pastures, and people lived their lives.

I tried the door to the church. It was locked. I'd really liked to've opened it up and gone inside to see it all again. But then on the other hand, maybe I wouldn't 've.

Posted by fred1st at 5:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (0)

Zion Church. Its name is all I know about it. I do know that beside it is an ancient trail that I had not noticed til recently, even though we drive past it every time we go out the Allegheny Springs way from here. And since discovering that trail, I've grown more interested in the small, empty, abandoned church and the community that once enlivened this valley. Now, fewer than a dozen houses represent families and homes but they do not reflect the thriving rural neighborhood that once existed here.

If you follow that trail--which I intend to do in the next few weeks--if my reckoning is right, it would have carried the foot-traveler up the side of the creek valley and over the other side of the ridge, down to Diamond Knob road where the old maps still show a "mission". Was this a "mission school" started early last century? Then, the Appalachians were "white unto harvest" and the "Interveners" from up East came in to Virginia and Kentucky and other parts of the unwashed southern highlands, starting settlement schools, missions and later, local crafts economies.

There is so much I don't know about our neighborhood. Some few of the old ones are still alive-- those who lived their lives here and would know about Zion Church, the mission, the old Willis store and the mill there where Griffith Creek meets Goose Creek. I need to connect while there is still time.

Church in the Wildwood / LYRICS BY PITTS

There's a church in the valley by the wildwood,
No lovelier spot in the dale;
No place is so dear to my childhood,
As the little brown church in the vale.

Oh, come to the church in the vale,
To the trees where the wild flowers bloom;
Where the parting hymn will be chanted,
We will weep by the side of the tomb.

How sweet on a clear Sabbath morning,
To list to the clear ringing bell;
Its tones so sweetly are calling,
Oh come to the church in the vale.

From the church in the valley by the wildwood,
When day fades away into night,
I would fain from this spot of my childhood
Wing my way to the mansions of light.

Chorus:

Oh, come, come, come...
Come to the church by the wildwood,
Oh, come to the church in the dale;
No spot is so dear to my childhood,
As the little brown church in the vale.

Posted by fred1st at 7:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I feel better now that I have gotten this double-barreled rant off my chest. Picture intended here will follow shortly.

This picture of the little country church will have to be worth the thousand words I won't write this morning because I've been manually deleting the current flood of comment spam. This has got to be nothing more than a hobby for these people. I'd like to offer an alternative profession for these nice folks. I have in mind an outlet for their talents, a field for which Comment Spammer seem to be pre-adapted. It's a great fit, really.

I wonder if they've considered becoming Professional Litterers.

It's rude. It's obnoxious. It disturbs other people. It serves no social or cultural purpose. And it makes the world an uglier place...just like comment spam... all while saving the electricity, server space and hosting charges of the hard work of being a desk-bound Comment Spammer. Plus, the daily routine of the Professional Litterer would allow these fine people to get out more, get some upper extremity exercise... hurling, flinging, tossing... that sort of thing. And while in their cars on our back roads leaving their spam-equivalent they are at increased risk of serious bodily harm. What's not to like?

Posted by fred1st at 6:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Disappointing. The full-sized image of these little creatures that I'm using for my desktop fills my 19" monitor and is larger than life. There, these moss sporophytes look like alien life forms, or at least more like something seen while snorkeling than common plants growing on a very ordinary rock outcrop up our valley.

To get the image (which stood out from other patches in the area because of the glancing light that left foreground and background in deep, dark shadow) I had to climb up the bank about six feet, then stand precariously against an outcrop of brittle rock while holding the camera ASAP (as steady as possible) for the composition I wanted. For something so trivial, the amount of physical and mental focus was intense and no distraction was strong enough to pull me out of the moment. Except that the dog had somehow clammered up the almost-vertical rock bluff while I was thus focused on getting the image and he was, I realized at the very instant of this photograph, standing some six feet above me on crumbling rock that threatened to break off and come tumbling down on my head.

Later, while standing in the creek, hunkered down to get an image of some thallose liverworts, suddenly a large dog paw appeared, filling the frame and squashing the poor liverwort to livermush. How I wish my immediate reaction had been to press the shutter rather than yell at my assistant. Woulda been a prize-winner for sure. Dog-assisted photography brings a kind of urgency and confrontation with mortality and challenges to bland, pedantic composition that dogless photographers could not understand.

Posted by fred1st at 6:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Fine Gardening's Guide to Pronouncing Botanical Latin may be just the thing you need to avoid those embarassing mumbles at the greenhouse this spring. Be bold. Act like you always knew the emPHAsis was on the anti-penultimate sylLABle when speaking latin binomials.

ACCENT
You place the accents on Latin words following these simple rules:
1. The accent is never on the last (ultimate) syllable.
2. In a word of two syllables, the accent always falls on the first syllable: ser´vus, mi´hi, oc´to.
3. In a word of three or more syllables
a. the accent falls on the next to last (penultimate) syllable, if that syllable is heavy:
pu-el´la, sal-ve´te, ta-bli´num, vi-gin´ti
b. otherwise the accent falls on the syllable before that (the antepenultimate syllable):
gra´ti-as, quat´tu-or, un´de-cim, tri-cli´ni-um

This is one I hear mispronounced a lot: Clematis. How do you say it?

In the mood to learn some useful latin roots so you'll demystify those high-falluting fancy plant names? Check out Roots of Botanical Names.

Note here that each issue of Fine Gardening Magazine has an 800 word essay on its last page, called appropriately, the Last Word. Hmmmmm. Do I know anybody who writes earthy-touchy-feely and might have something to submit? Hmmmm.

Posted by fred1st at 7:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Are Trailer Homes only for the "Newly wed or nearly dead"?

It is interesting that several readers have risen to the defense of "mobile homes" after I put the Trash Gollums living in one earlier this week. Had I cast the characters living elsewhere, would there have been the same rush to defend if I'd said they lived in "brick ranchers" or "timber frame" or "earth-sheltered homes"? Not likely. But, by whatever name you call them... trailer homes, mobile homes, manufactured housing... they have gotten their deserved, and undeserved share of prejudice and abuse. Those who have lived in them, too, have mixed feelings about the economics, aesthetics and long-term role they play in communities where the are "parked" (90% never to be moved once in place).

Here is a study (pdf), done, coincidentally, at Virginia Tech near here, that looks at a lot of perceptions, misconceptions and problems to address in the "manufactured home" relationship with cities, counties, and communities.

Any personal experiences, good or bad, living in or near one or often many of these homes?

Posted by fred1st at 7:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Don't ya just hate it when... the following is that kind of post. Forgive me.

All of a sudden, I have an "F" drive partitioned on my computer, with nothing in it but the DELL directory. I didn't partition a new drive. How could this have happened?

The Referral System (by Stephen Downes) has been improved lately, and now operates in invisible mode. Where did it go? Will it come back some day?

Site Meter just revamped their server and lost four days visit records for this week, so my stats for the week, month and year are meaningless.

I'm getting returned mail telling me I sent some university an email infected by the W32/Bagle.n@MM virus. Norton is up to date and finds nothing. What gives?

My DVD drive whirrs loudly when I try to play a CD. Still under warranty but I guess I'll have to duct-tape the cordless phone onto my cap for the 45 minute hold. Dude, I'm going ta Dell again.

In the next few weeks, I will be moving Fragments (all 135MB of it) from my present too-expensive server to (an unknown location to be arranged). I dread it. Got to be done.

I am using MS OneNote for organizing the various pieces of the imaginary book project. Love the software, in theory. As a version one, it has bugs. I keep sending screen shots of bizarre behavior. They keep saying "well, we never saw anything like this before", meaning... they think I photoshopped the screenshot as a form of attention-seeking behavior?

My ISP has issued a software app that they say makes dialup as fast as DSL. Same speed, half the cost. You can't know how that warms my heart. Now that we've upped for DSL at twice the price. Arrrgh!

kay sara sara (That's French, of course). I gotta go.

Posted by fred1st at 8:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

At last the snow has melted from the margins of our road. And its absence for the first time in three months makes me realize: snow covers a multitude of sins. And one heck of a lot of litter.

Maybe it is this 'all of a sudden' aspect that makes it seem that we have more trash (mostly beer cans) then we did two years ago. I think we have the same (very low) amount of traffic--possibly a dozen vehicles a day, weekdays; more on Saturday, fewer on Sunday. So some one or two individuals have increased their weekly quotas of tossed trash to account for more litter, same traffic. And I tried to imagine what it must be like in the homes of individuals who habitually, thoughtlessly cast off unwanted things the instant their usefulness has passed.

I think it's reasonable to assume these specimens belong to the sub-sub-bargainbasement species of humankind known as homo rubrocervicas. Or Slobbovians as I prefer to call them. In light of their position at the shallow end of the gene pool, it is safe to imagine them of the most primative, microcephalic types, and as a visual model for these roving herds of trash-spreaders, I can conjure no better model than Gollum.

They sit around their trailer home in loin clothes. There is no furniture in the room where the Slobbovians large and small sit on their haunches, their green skin bathed in flickering blue light of the Home Shopping Network alternating with the Country Music Channel. The floor is thickly littered with partially gnawed chicken bones, baby diapers (used), empty Marlboro and Skoal wrappers, and, of course, the ubiquitous empty beer can. When the room becomes too full of this effluvium for efficient travel from the TV room to the beer compartment on the fridge (the knee is a convenient guage), the Slobbovians kick the carnage out into the yard. When it reaches middle of the Camaro hubcap level in the yard, they call Scooter to come with the backhoe and push enough of it down into the creek so they can get to the car and go to FoodLion and get more beer and cigarettes and chicken legs.

I was a little more diplomatic when this topic first came up some time back. After I spend the better part of tomorrow filling trash bags with the Gollum's crap, I may have yet more to say about this deplorable failure of human enculturation. Stay tuned.

Posted by fred1st at 6:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

I was out of sorts the moment I walked in the door. Nice old building on what is left of Main Street in the little burg. Comfortable sofa. Pitiful reading material, all the more pitiful after I found myself sitting there at 9:20 for my 9:00 appointment with the CPA to talk taxes. I almost got up and left in protest. I could hear his voice rise and fall, pontificating in muted and wordless tones, but the tones spoke volumes. The client, a female, responded weakly and not often.

I had been sitting there alone over a half-hour, watching fubsy secretaries come and go, waiting--it was, after all, the waiting room-- and my eyes wandered the spare decor for something to hold my gaze. Between the waiting room and the CPA's office where he sat talking at extended length with his client, behold, a door--the modern kind of door with the lovered miniblinds built into the full-length glass. The blinds were almost but not quite closed. As the morning wore on and ponderously on, the sun rose higher and I could make out moving shapes backlit by the windows beyond the desk across which accountant and supplicant were conversing.

Only hands were visible through the narrow glass of the door. Only tones without words were audible. It was a movie-scene vignette.

He orated and speechified, admonished, lectured and mentored. The two hands on his side of the conversation pointed threateningly at the listener like imitation six-shooters, bang bang bang; they made wide palm-down motions indicating the wholeness of the mess she was in; fingerstips met, hands together held like Damocles' sword as they passed judgement. Big hands. Powerful hands.

She remonstrated, excused, parried, resigned. The hands on her side were palms up, exposing the soft underbelly of vulnerability and surrender. The tiny tips of her arms barely rose from the table, then slumped as if paralyzed. Small white hands, powerless, they rose meekly in mock-defense only to drop like tiny birds found in the hunter's sights, lifeless to rise no more.

Posted by fred1st at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

They are begging to be transplanted: wineberry canes "volunteer" all along the road and under the powerline--no man's land. State right-of-way and AEP easement. The species has spread across the country since first imported from Japan in 1890, quite by virtue of its own genius. Ann and I--dressed in our grubbiest work clothes and winter garb-- would be "stealing" these feral specimens to transplant to the house. We felt like plant smugglers out on a caper under the cover of a drizzly afternoon--Bonnie and Clod.

Wineberry (Rubus phoenicolasius) is a favorite of birds. They spread the seeds of the sweet ruby-red fruits in their long-distance travels. Once a single plant germinates, its arching canes--up to nine feet long-- can root at their tips, and that cane may do likewise. We will be bringing this wonderfully fruitful but potentially invasive plant onto our place intentionally. In fact, we have done so.

Yesterday a passing cold front left behind a heavy ground fog that was the larger image of our breath in the cold. In the damp and still of the deserted road, we dug up a half dozen of the plants and brought them home in a bucket in the back of the truck. We've talked about doing this in years past, but have put off the chore until it was too late in the season. While it felt like winter yesterday, the calendar says this was a good time to get this job done, and my honey-do list today includes fetching a bucket of water from the creek to put on the transplanted roots of our new, and hopefully well-behaved wineberry plants. They will spread along the edge of the path on the south-facing slope behind the house, next to the blueberries.

Posted by fred1st at 5:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Hie thyself to the tax man and empty pockets, beggar.

A day I dread. I carry it all in a folder, paper-clipped, labeled--ncome, interest income, deductible taxes, professional expenses, charitable deductions--and dump it on the expensive mahogany desk of the man with the gold tooth and the diamond stick pen in his starched lapel. I'll pay the exorbitant price he demands for divining with approximate exactitude this year's verdict, read'em and weep. What else is a mere mortal to do?

Our particular accountant follows the Eutruscan School of Accounting, an ancient form of augery relying particularly on the direction from which birds call (using the art of "*ostentaria" as opposed to a related competitor school of tax preparation that depends on the arrangement of bird entrails to divine WhatYouOwe.) I fear it does not augur well for us this year. (*information gleaned from ostentaria--which may be relegated to an accounting office assistant-- give rules for interpreting signs and portents and lay down the propitiatory and expiatory acts needed to obviate disaster and to placate the gods.)

I'm reviewing the information our Ostentatious Accountant gave me last year when I questioned by what mysterious means he had arrived at the exact figure he placed before us in the Final Solemn Ceremony of Obligation. Here is a small excerpt from the Tax Code he provided that may help you better understand your tax man and his strange ways this year:

The magistrate taking the auspices is referred to as an auspex, distinct from the augurs who interpret the signs (Cicero: On Divination 1.48; On the Nature of the Gods II.3; On the Laws II.13). The auspex sits out in front of the tabernaculum, usually near the edge of a hilltop, while his assistants and the tibicines and tibicinae will stand within. The purpose of the tabernaculum was to avoid the auspex from being distracted by auspicia oblativa, or naturally occurring omens, and that he might concentrate on the auspicia imperitiva being sought in the sky.

Throughout the ceremony the tibicines and tibicinae are to play their flutes. Mention is made in the ancient texts that this was done to prevent the magistrate from being interrupted by the sounds of any ill omens. However there may have been more to this and the flute players might have also been present to draw birds to the templum.

Posted by fred1st at 6:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Turns out, writing has its occupational risks.

F. Scott Fitzgerald called it “the writer’s vice,” and Hemingway, more memorably, described it as “idea-changing liquid alchemy.” According to Donald Goodwin, former chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Kansas Medical Center and author of Alcohol and the Writer, 71 percent of writers drink to excess—a rate higher than any other profession surveyed.

And herein lies the short-circuit in my makeup as a would-be writer: A glass of wine, and I sit down to the keyboard and within a few minutes, I'm typing like my wife.

Posted by fred1st at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The older I get, the less I take my senses for granted. The more they gradually decline, the sweeter they become, the more I want to indulge them in the minutiae of the close-at-hand. To hold on to what hearing I haven't already lost, I wear earplugs every time I use the chain saw. They block the worst of the engine noise, but even with them in place, it isn't nothing that I hear.

The two-cycle sputter is muted but it vibrates like sound through my hands, my bones; the throb of my own pulse feeds back into my skull, and the sound of breathing echoes as if in a small, closed room; the wind whistles across the plastic line that keeps the two earplugs together making wonderful exaggerated studio-wind sound effects.

I've used this same pair of earplugs for so long the airplane orange is now a faded pink. I yank them out as soon I shut off the saw. The audiosphere explodes out of the muffled silence.

Today from overhead, when I become unplugged: the mewling caw of two crows flying counterclockwise swooping circles along the unhurried path of a magnificent redtail hawk. If this raucous remonstration made them feel better, it obviously had no appreciable deterrent effect on the hawk who barely changed the camber of his wings to accommodate their clumsy attack.

Closer, just at the top of my cap, the season's first swarm of midges hummed while they wove their loopy spiral dance over some imaginary point not far from my right ear.

And the water. I don't even hear it, even without the plastic cones crammed in my ears like bungs in a barrel. I take watersounds for granted a lot of the time, and it doesn't register as anything to bother being aware of--like the feel of the shirt on my back--it's just there. When the plugs come out, against the soft shushing of my breathing and pulse, the rambunctious rush of the creek seems larger than life--crisp, close, and coming from all around me. I can hear part of its rippling babel richocheting off the house; can distinguish the trickle of the branch from the roar of Goose Creek from the wind in the bare branches.

I hate having those pink plugs in my ears. But it's almost worth it, just to be able to take them out and hear again. And listen.

Posted by fred1st at 6:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Back, briefly, to prepositions and titles and cover letters and such, then no more on this for some good little while, most likely. Your input is much appreciated and among other things, has served to show that the author will do one thing that he thinks best about naming the book and describing it to agents, publishers and the like; the agents, publishers and the like will not like it that way; and the reading public will love and hate whatever choices are made in about equal proportion. And so it goes.

Re the name, if the title remains in the end more or less as proposed ("Here's Home: Belonging ___ The Blue Ridge") I would chose "IN" instead of "TO" and my reasons are the same as those of you who expressed this preference; and they are different. And "Here's Home" may be too mushy. Some of you liked it. Some of you gagged. I've done both myself. But not to worry. I have miles to go before I sleep. Or name the book. Or send it off any of the various wheres that loom as options down the road. No hurry. I can't even say yet what the book is about.

It might be easier if the would-be book were about a "how to"-- a technology involving objective objects, process, details. Or if it were about a particular historical event with chronologies, personalities, facts; or defended a certain thesis with arguments pro and con; or were about characters I created and wove into a fictional reality. But it's not. It is a book (or could possibly someday be a book) of vignettes of being here through ordinary days. A Seinfeld book. A book bout nothing. Or so it seems, looking from the inside, out.

I write every day from within a reflective orb. It is the very local here and the now. Each of us has a different one. I look out to the edges of mine, experience it and write briefly about it each day. I know it well in these months of total immersion and am thankful for it. But I cannot step outside it and look back into it and say what's inside. It's too close; I wear it, breathe it like air that has no substance, is necessary but feels like nothing to me. I do know that the book is not about me. And yet it can't be told without me. And I have to somehow come to see it from the point of view of the detached other if I am to tell the next person who asks me "What is your book about?" I don't know yet. I haven't been able yet to climb through that orb to the outside of it to look in.

I had to confess to Trish that I have not once read through the whole thing, start to finish. This is part of my difficulty getting a "gestalt", a holistic outside view of the whole subjective enterprise that has filled the last almost two years of life reflected in what I've said about it. And so, I have a lot of work to do before I get back to you with final things like names for a book I don't yet know myself.

As I was sitting here in this navel-gazing state, I got an email from Trish asking permission to post her spin on our conversations on this deep wading. She voices her thoughts in a "cover letter" as someone who has been both inside of and watching all along from outside of my little bubble. Do go over there and read it if you're at all interested in the meta-story of Fragments. (Trish's LiveJournal, March 15 entry).

The earth moves a little under my feet when others obviously know more about me than I can see about myself. But that is what friends are for, and blog readers, and they can be one and the same people. I do appreciate all of you who help me understand the where and who and why. If this book thing ever really happens, it will have a hundred authors, if one writer.

Posted by fred1st at 8:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm sorry. I must violate my usual committment to politics-free blogging on these pages. But there is another election coming up in a few months and we all need to do some serious thinking about the long-term consequences of our choices.

If you voted for him last time, don't do it again out of habit. Vote for George W. Bush with the full understanding of the impact that his administration has had and for another four years and decades thereafter will have on the air we breathe, the water we drink, the biology of human lives and ecosystems that lie way more at the core of our collective "health" than can be measured by corporate profits, the sad GNP and balance of trade. It seems to me that the hungry fox is guarding the henhouse. Some of those hens are your children and mine.

I challenge you to invest some thought in this aspect of the Republican platform: Read all of the lengthy and thorough article, Crimes Against Nature, by Robert Kennedy, Jr. (who works on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council) describing not just the Bush environmental ambitions but those going back to the early seventies-- including the Sagebrush Rebellion, "Wise Use", the Heritage Foundation and the "Contract with America". Then vote your conscience.

Crimes Against Nature
The Bush Environmental Record

Posted by fred1st at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (2)

Okay. I admit it. I got pulled in to watching scummy movies for a whole hour yesterday. Dozens of them. Not a one was longer than just a few seconds, just long enough to tittilate, to make me want to see more, ending just when the action got interesting. All the actors admittedly played bit parts and were the lowest kind of characters. Some, sessile wards of the state, were obviously unwilling to move an micron to feed themselves, waiting around as if food was just somehow going to float by and they would pull it out of the air. Vagrants. Others marauded freely about without limit, shameless predators looking for those smaller and less powerful to suck in. Disturbing. And to think this is happening within a five minute walk of your house.

Warning: some scenes depict contractile vacuoles and pseudopodia and are not suitable for children.

Posted by fred1st at 5:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My fourth grade teacher, Miss Long, left indelible marks, for good and for ill, on my habits of reading, writing, and thinking. I was not the only one singled out for classroom humiliation. But it is my experience that is etched forever in the infamy of memory. I stood at the chalk board with no place to hide and did math problems in the exact rectitude of rows and columns she commanded as she called out each new problem like announcing guilty verdicts in a bank robbery trial; I wrote in yellow chalk the definitions to my weekly vocabulary list while others looked on as I drew tiny circles instead of words in front of my chest, stalling for time, hoping beyond hope Teacher would never make me stand back and show my classmates I hadn't the foggiest idea what "foliage" meant; and she made us diagram sentences.

I still sometimes, while having a conversation with some familiar someone, begin to see our discussion projected on the screen of my fourth grade memory, and as we are talking, I imagine our words falling in three-dimensional space along a framework that is so characteristic one person to the next that these discussion diagrams are as unique as fingerprints. Conversation-prints, I guess they are. Time is plotted along the horizontal axis. Lulls in conversation appear as gaps in the diagram, left to right. The vertical axis represents the dichotomous twigging branches where one topic leads to another, or several more, or the dead end where he and I or she and I could or would follow that branch no further. Their voice is in blue lines, mine in red.

For reasons I do not understand, I have often attracted male friends who draw short blue lines punctuated by long horizontal empty spaces. Meanwhile, my red lines branch off first here, then there, trying desperately to get the twigs of the tree of conversation up in the air, out of the muck, up growing somewhere into the light, only to be truncated by lack of interest or indifference or boredom. I just don't find many people who can hold up their end of the conversation in satisfying, dynamic, unexpectedly mutating, expansive ways. Such is not the case when talking to TravelerTrish.

I am certain, Miss Long, that no matter how long I stand at the board, I will not be able to retrace the eight hours of conversation with Trish from her short visit this weekend. I do know that I can see no gaps in the horizontal dimension of time. Blue or red or blue AND red lines always emerged easily when threatened by a lull. Topic-nodes arose by spontaneous generation, morphed, diverged and then somehow came back like a snake grasping its tail in its mouth, circular briefly, before launching out some other surprising but somehow related direction, branching again. And again.

Good visit. Good talk. Mostly about writing. And a hundred other things. And a modern-art conversation-print that could never in a hundred years be diagrammed. The best kind.

Posted by fred1st at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Did you know that March is National Small Press Month?

Here's what the The Small Press Center and Publishers Marketing Association say, in part, about Small Presses and Small Press Month: (emphasis mine)

"Independent publishers are making a huge impact, and Small Press Month actively promotes all of their work. With an estimated 70,000 independent publishers in this country, they are the real pulse of publishing."

"These publishers, and the million plus titles they produce, form the core of the industry. Independent publishers are publishing unknown authors, enhancing the careers of established writers, constantly taking risks, exploring innovative ideas and, through their diverse titles, reaching new audiences. Individual expression is the driving force behind these publishers. The Rest of Us 2003, a study conducted by Publishers Marketing Association, substantiated that the small presses are a vital, growing part of the book publishing industry. The 70,000 publishers in this group accounted for nearly 30 billion dollars in book sales."

And from the Small Press.org pages, here's a couple of great resources (at least for UW's --unknown writers-- like me)... 1) Ten Basic Steps to Finding a Publisher; and a 2) Small Press publisher directory.

And, along these lines... by all means, read an excerpt from Tom Montag's small-press-published Curlew:Home that appears on the Prairie Home Companion "Stories from Home" page. (Tom, of course, is the proprietor of The Midwesterner, only the latest of his writing outlets). And I see from the sidebar at "Stories from Home", even Appalachian homes are included. Nice poem called Appalachian Breeze.

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We had a bounty of walnuts from the trees along the edge of the road and pasture this year--more than I've ever seen. I couldn't stand to see them go to waste, so I gathered, dehusked, cracked and picked the meats out of one five gallon bucket of kernels. Then I had another five gallon bucket of dehusked nuts in the shed to work on over the Fall and Winter.

A few weeks ago when the weather was (temporarily) warm and relatively pleasant, I went to gather a coffee can of kernels to crack for some cinnamon bread Ann was going to make. The bucket was empty. I stormed inside laying blame on WifeyDear for emptying the bucket to use to gather twigs or somesuch, which she indignantly denied. Yeah, right. I guess five gallons of walnuts just disappeared by magic.

Yesterday as I was reorganizing the wood stacked next to the shed behind the house, I solved the mystery. Somehow, even though the cat sleeps in the shed, something--probably a little red squirrel--had carried my hard-won walnuts one by one to the shelter of the woodpile under the eaves of the shed, and eaten four cleanly chiseled holes in each nut, leaving just the empty hard-as-iron shells in a tidy and not so tiny heap for me to discover. Of course, there were fallen walnuts all over the pasture still, and he could have lived quite well over winter off of these with a little effort. But why bother? This lucky squirrel probably thought he'd won the lottery: fifteen pounds of husked, clean walnut kernels all together in one easy location, and conveniently stored under a roof and out of the wind and rain, no less! Life is good!

It's man against nature here in the Virginia Outback, I tell ya. I hate to report this to Ann, but all day today, I've been hearing the phoebes plan their assault on the door lintels, and the porch lights and the soffit returns--just like last year. Homeland defense. It's like deja vu, all over again!

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Jayn Avery and Charlie Brouwer install Jayn’s ladder on the Silo at The Jacksonville Center in Floyd to promote “Rise up Together- Floyd County”. Charlie is a Floyd County artist who will be creating a temporary installation April 3rd at the Center as part of the Center’s “Spring into Appalachia” Regional Art Exhibit. It will be made of ladders loaned by individuals or organizations with an interest in the County. Visitors will have an opportunity to write their “ladder stories” in a blank book during the time the installation is on exhibit. The idea of the project is to create a metaphor for the spirit of a hopeful, interdependent, and diverse community of individuals rising up together. (From Press Release, 3/12/04)

Jayn’s Ladder Story

This ladder belonged to my father, the Rev. Reginald Avery. He wasn’t much of a “fix it” man—didn’t have to be—we lived in parsonages and the parishioners did the repairs. But we spent our summers at my grandmother’s house, a house we all loved dearly, for it was our only real family home. It was a big old colonial built by my mother’s grandfather. My Dad seemed to be on the ladder most of every summer, caulking, scraping and painting. It was an endless job that he loved. Sometimes he would whistle while he worked—unusual for an otherwise very sober man. When my parents passed and the house was eventually sold, I was the only one who wanted the ladder. I had recently divorced and knew I needed to start collecting tools, for the house repairs would be my responsibility now. Having his ladder was somehow comforting. That was 10 years ago, now we are both too heavy and weak in the joints for each other. After seeing Charlie’s ladder sculptures I decided to paint this ladder and hang it on the side of my house as decoration. It would be a joyful way to remember my father. The community ladder installation idea spurred me on to follow through with the idea. I know my dad would have loved to have his ladder be a part of something like this. He devoted his life to encouraging people to work together to build community. That’s what this project symbolizes to me.

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The Title du Jour for the would-be book (after all the great help from many of you last week) is one of the following two titles, below. Different only by one little two-letter word. And I am ambivalent. Can you sway this decision one direction or the other? If you have a preference that hinges on more than "I dunno, I just like it better", please feel free to elaborate why you prefer one to the other. I'll chime in with my preferences maybe on Saturday after one or two of you give me the benefit of your ideas.

Of course I understand you'll have to decide based on your best guess as to what the finished book will be like. And not even I know that for sure, yet. But this is just some early thinking about this. Although I may be giving whatever name we decide on as the title when I sent off the next editor-fodder early next week. A penny for your thoughts. Put it on my bill.

So. Here are the lovely contestants in their swimsuits. Take a gander and cast your vote.

1) Here's Home: Belonging in the Blue Ridge
2) Here's Home: Belonging to the Blue Ridge

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Even as we speak, er type, I hear the coos and baby-talk coming from the other room where the New and Improved Tsuga is being coddled and indulged, squeeking his favorite squeeze-toy and wagging his tail against the side of the woodstove like he's keeping time to an internal doggie rap-song. He seems far more like his old self than he did as late as last night when he was still demented and uncoordinated from general anesthesia, pain killer and sedative. He was having an especially bad time of it changing direction on the hardwood floors; his eyes were bloodshot, and he possessed an uncharacteristic hang-dog expression that he has lost this morning.

Tsuga is understandably just a little chagrined at his bareness where they shaved him. He stands a lot because sitting down on the southern parts is not and won't be comfortable for a few days. But already this morning when we let him out to get rid of some of the gallon of water he's put down since he got home, he chased the cat. She seemed sort of glad to have him back in mock attack, but he's not supposed to get too rowdy too fast. Later today, we're expecting company so may give him one more sedative this afternoon. And pain pills, prn.

So, Ann is plying him with puppy treats, assauging her persistent guilt and second-guessing if it was the right thing to "put him through this". I'm happy to be done with it. By the way, the vet looked up the stats on leaving an undescended testicle. It increases the odds of testicular cancer over 13 times. Yeah, we did the right thing. And oh, for those of you who've followed Tsuga since week one, he now weighs 73 pounds. And he ain't done yet.

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This biweekly topic at Ecotone for March 15 will be "Spiders and Place". I'll just let the images speak for spiders on our place. I've linked to the original posts that went with them, too, if you just can't get enough ArachnoPhilia. Enjoy!

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Blown away. I ran across this Hubble image last night. It now resides as my computer desktop wallpaper. I can't get my mind off of it and have become all convoluted in thoughts of pond water and scurrying microbes; the speed of ciliated locomotion, of foot travel across the galaxy of our pasture, and of light; and a circular realm of 800 million suns shaped like a Mexican hat.

I expect to become pleasantly lost for a while in a wormhole of words. See you on the other side.

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The vet called yesterday morning with the bad news. "He's mighty wiggly, so I did the best I could to find the undescended testicle and couldn't find it with him awake. We'll have to do exploratory abdominal surgery, and of course, that will be an extra fee and his recovery will take longer."

"What would be the worse case scenario to not remove it" I asked, dreading the long week or weeks of keeping him on a leash and out of the creeks".

"I once removed an 8 pound cancerous testicle from a dog. The undescended tissue predisposes to cancer and there's no way to spot it until it is a large tumor, put I can't give you any odds" she told me, honestly and sympathetically.

At one o'clock, she called back. "Good news. With Tsuga sedated I was able to find the missing testicle, descended but deep and embedded. No abdominal incision. He should be good to go tomorrow."

We pick him up at noon. We will keep him chemically sedated for a few days to give his incision time to heal. I'm going to see if the vet will prescribe some for Ann and me, too. Maybe we'll all just sleep through the remainder of this ordeal and wake up perky about Wednesday of next week.

Annxious Ann is all worried that without his gonads he's going to come back all limp-wristed and effeminate, a mere shadow of his former obnoxious self, and it will be OUR FAULT for disfiguring his little doggy uniqueness. She even considered calling the vet and asking them to put the missing parts back in place. I think she was kidding about this. But you have to know how some of us here are governed by an overpowering sense of ShouldaWouldaCoulda. I'm sure in a month all the emotional and physical scars will have healed and the boy will be back in the creek, up to his hip-waders and happy as a pig in mud. Tsuga will be better too.

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After years of talking about it, Ann finally got that tatoo she's been talking about. I have to say, I think it looks good on her. I'm thinking about getting one, too.

Whaddaya think about "I'd rather be Fred than Dead". And, where should I put it? Thoughts? Anyone? (Credits to the Fred Society.)

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And not just because here on our second attempt, again, it is snowing.

The first time we were prepared to take the pup in to be reproductively neutralized it snowed a lot and shut down everybody's plans for several days. That was in mid-December. It has taken this long for Ann to have two weekdays together to help me get him to and from town. It is snowing, but not enough to stop us this time.

Tsuga is eight months old now, and has calmed down and gotten "lovable" and more tractable and wanting to please in the last few months--finally. This somehow makes it harder to put him through the trauma of two days in a pen with a major incision in his belly. But we really have no choice: he has one undescended testicle (cryptorchidism) as did several of his litter mates, and this can lead to problems (including increased risk of cancer, I think) down the road. So, in several ways, it is for his good, and the responsible thing to do. Which does not necessarily make this morning's trip to town more fun.

So, he's going without water in his bowl this morning; and when we let him out, I have to stand there in my bathrobe and rubber boots and my Elmer Fudd hat in the snow to make sure he doesn't sneak down to the branch for a drink. And he's hungry and we won't feed him. What kind of a luxury hotel is this, anyway? What happened to the service? You guys go union or something? he wants to know.

Will he come home tomorrow with one of those plastic collars that keep him from biting his stitches out? Will we have to keep in from getting his stitches wet in the creek for a week? Will it be a problem that we are having company and he will do his usual VISITOR FREAK-OUT on Friday afternoon? (Sorry Trish). Will he blame us for his reduced libido and inability to get a date in the neighborhood? This is the first of three male country-living labs we've seen through this process and we are anxious parents, I confess.

Blogging along the usual mindless rambling way of things will have to wait until later today. But while I'm at it, let me remind you that this Ecotone Biweekly topic for March 15 is "Spiders and Place" (I didn't make up this topic but you can imagine, I have photo-coverage planned). I'd be great to have some new contributors this time around. April 1 topic is "Smells and Place". Need help posting to Ecotone, let me know.

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Last week we were treated to a beautiful early March Sunday afternoon-- a sampler of what spring would eventually be like when the new month finishes having its tantrums and bipolar mood swings. Ann, the dog and I been out most of the afternoon working in the yard. We wore ourselves out in the way one typically does on the first mild days of yard clean-up after a long winter. And in the past couple of years, this is the way we work. Do a little; take a rest; do a little more. We put the dog in his outdoor home so we all could recover a while before going on to the next pleasant chore in a day of puttering under a benevolent blue sky. We'd barely settled into the Sunday paper when Tsuga barked his "somebody's here" bark. I didn't see how that could possibly be. It's a big event when a car or truck goes by and nothing had come down the road for a hour.

The dog persisted. I glanced up from the pages of the New River Valley Current section and followed his line of sight as he continued his polite "hello-alarm" barking aimed across the road somewhere. Sure enough, two dark figures ambled unhurried from the head of the valley--bold forms against the barley-colored field of winter-flat grass. They were walking toward the house. Foot travelers in our valley are either victims of an accident, very lost, or neighbors from up top who wander down the creek a few times a year on nice warm days in the spring or fall. I fetched the binoculars to see if I recognized one or both of them. Sure enough, one neighbor, and one stranger, both gals about our age. By the time I had found my boots and sunglasses and a flannel shirt to throw on, they were standing at the barn crossing and both were pointing to various features as if reminiscing of days gone by. They seemed to know exactly where they were.

I hullowed them from the porch and ambled the hundred yards to the barn crossing down to meet them, uncertain trespassers who obviously hoped they had not disturbed us too much, but didn't let that risk stop them from appearing out of nowhere into our Sunday afternoon reverie. They came across the plank footbridge and we met under the walnut at the edge of the garden. My neighbor introduced her friend, Emily, who was no stranger to this valley or the place we have made our home. It's always very grounding when people we meet tell us "oh, you live in Melvin's place" or substitute any of a half-dozen other names of farmers or hippies who have been connected to "our" house. They still hold claim to it in memory, though Melvin and Larry and the Boones are moved away to another part of the county, another state; and one lives here forever as ashes under the back maple tree, we are told. Ann and I are just passing through and neighbors who have lived here longer than we have are good for putting belonging and roots and the illusion of ownership into a healthy perspective of mortal transcience.

"I see you tried to grow fruit trees" our neighbor said, pointing toward the strips of aluminum foil still spangled from the dead form of a yellow delicious apple tree. The deer had masticated it to death two years ago in spite of all our mint-soap, dog urine, pie-pan attempts to protect it. It stood there as a reminder of the realities of homesteading among long-legged herbivores that like the same fruits we do.

"It's a cold pocket down here along the creek, even if the deer would give us a break. We're thinking maybe some cold-hardy pear trees might make it if we can build a high enough fence" I told them as the conversation shifted to other kinds of trees.

"You know, the woods are not like they were when your home place was built here" our neighbor said. "We built a deck from locust we cut off our place twenty years ago, and already it's going to rot".

Black (or yellow) locust is widely known for it's resistance to rot. "A locust post goes into the ground the day you're born, that fence post'll still be standing when they put you in the ground seventy years later" I had heard when we first moved to the country thirty years ago. How odd that the properties of a species could change like that. We speculated maybe it had something to do with the locust leaf miners that plague these trees every summer. Maybe the insects keep the trees from putting down as much fiber or something, we guessed.

Emily, who wasquite knowledgeable about fruit trees and forests and gardens, also offered as how these hills used to be filled with all sorts of big cherry trees, many producing a bounty of free fruit that you just don't find anymore around here. I agreed that both here and over on the edge of the Blue Ridge where we used to live there are the standing remnants of massive cherry trees--gaunt, heavy-branching ghosts--yet another species that seems to be going through some kind of change in its place in the forest. Curious, we said. Insects? Weather? Who can say?

It was the very next day that I happened to read an article about the damaging effects of ozone on forest species--particularly vegetation in the higher elevations of mountainous areas where the impact of ozone (and acid rain) are more severe. Some plant species have ways to protect themselves effectively from high ozone levels; others do not. Blackberry leaves turn red in summer from ozone damage--an indicator I'll watch for a couple of months from now in our berry patch up back. And according to this study, black cherry-- whose absence we were lamenting-- shows a 26% growth loss from ozone and other pollutants down in Shining Rock Wilderness in Carolina.

And the locusts? Maybe it's not just our imagination that we can't count on it to hold up to decay like the old-timers used to. It is not the same wood because it's not the same forest that grew here when we were born fifty years ago. And fifty years from now, neighbors may meet under the walnut by the barn and exchange pleasantries on a warm March day, remembering those who have lived here in the long-ago. There was that fella who wrote all about this place way back. Took pictures. Remember? And isn't it a shame what's happening to the oak trees here 'bouts?

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Aren't we the most interesting animal? A few weeks ago, I watched poetry being danced. Now, I'll be able to see ladders (maybe including our old rickety 8 foot folder made from pre-aluminum) assembled into some kind of visual "art" hanging from a dairy barn. If somebody wants to suspend a hundred ladders thirty feet off the ground from the side of a silo and call it art, well, I guess maybe I can learn to see--if not beauty, then at least mankind's imperative to create something that was not.

I watched graceful hands pretend to be shoots growing and twining up out of a seed as Theodore Roethke's "Cuttings" was read and the words projected on the walls of the theatre, and I will never see the simple germination of green things again in the same way. Maybe a hundred ladders can show me something about how people work together to create "installation art" that will make me see our own community grow and twine together in ways I could not have imagined had I not seen it. I'll try to keep an open mind, and I'll let you know how it turns out.

Rise Up Together Floyd County

Imagine one hundred or more ladders leaning and tied together and supporting each other. Some are very tall and some the size of toys, some are shiny and new and others are paint splattered and repaired. Some are home made. Some are not even fully functional ladders but they are able to stand with the help of others. Could this image be a metaphor for a community? That is what the Jacksonville Center and a Floyd County artist, Charlie Brouwer, hope. Their hope is that individuals, families, organizations, agencies, and businesses, of all types with an interest in the community of Floyd will participate in “Rise Up Together - Floyd County”.

On Saturday, April 3, 2004 Charlie and volunteers will create a sculpture with the ladders. Each ladder will have a prominent tag identifying who loaned it. The installation will be both outdoors and inside the Community Room and it will be designed to fit the Center’s architecture and programming. It will be on exhibit for three weeks. This event will coincide with the opening of the center’s Exhibit “Spring into Appalachia” show featuring work of regional artists depicting the season of Spring. Events are scheduled to take place from 9am-5pm, with a reception following.

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It seems like a good time to think about another year's entry in this retrospective of the process of making green pastures where we live. A stranger would imagine that it was always as it is this morning-- a narrow grassy wedge of floodpain field between windy ridges. Five years ago when we saw it for the first time, we could only dream of what it might one day become.

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Oh Law! Not only is she off work today and home, she has got her voice back. I'm paying for almost a week of laryngitic silence. Believe me: she has a lot of Honey-Doing and I be the Doo-ie. I'll get back to posting if I can entice her to go to Floyd for some reason. We're out of raisins. There's your raison d'etre, Sugar Lump. You go on to town, me and Tsuga'll be fine without you for a couple hours.

Meanwhile, I find I'm getting google image visits and wondered what of my pictures were findable by searching Google Images. Turns out, of the several hundred images I've posted over almost two years, only 91 show up. At least that's all I could find.

Go to Google. Insert this in the search box: site:fragmentsfromfloyd.com and click on IMAGES (or just click here). Why only those ninety-some-odd images show up I guess is just a matter of how the engine crawls the website.

Uh-oh. I'm hearing the assembly call and have to go fall in rank with the other troop. I think we're about to take a ten-mile hike and come back to KP. See ya later, y'all.

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The Smokies are perhaps the most 'famous' part of the Southern Appalachians and are part--the broadest and highest part--of the Blue Ridge geological province. The Blue Ridge possesses a unique and more ancient history than the other parts of the mountain chain. Both the Smokies and the Blue Ridge get their names from the pervasive haze or transpirational "plant breath" that cloaks this thickly-forested region in a fine pale haze for much of the warmer months.

The Appalachians extend from just south of my home town of Birmingham, Alabama (some would argue it can be traced from here westward, underground, to the Ozarks) to the Gaspe Peninsula of Nova Scotia (and some would argue the Appalachians extend geologically to northern Great Britain where the same serpentine rock under our Appalachians lies under the Scottish Highlands.) The Blue Ridge is one "physiographic province" making up the Appalachian Mountain Range. It is a tourist destination--a "sexy" part of the maligned geosocial region named Appalachia--a term that was once synonymous with ignorance and poverty--a stereotype conferred at the turn of the previous century and made indelible by caricatures since, and which we are slowly and deliberately casting off.

The geology called the Blue Ridge is the remnant core of the earliest extrusion of molten earth that became mountains of igneous rock (quartz, granite). They appeared over a billion years ago. The smooth shoulders of today's ridges would hardly suggest that in fact these peaks were once higher and more awesome and rugged than today's Rockies. The Appalachians most conspicuous features today perhaps are the folded and faulted layers of sediment (sand, clay, silt, conglomerate, and also coal) that were pushed up by colliding tectonic plates some 700 million years ago after shallow seas had covered this part of the ancient world for millenia.

Goose Creek lies on the western face of the Blue Ridge and our creeks tumble down into the Big Valley, flowing past Roanoke and then on to the Atlantic. We have both kinds of rock on our place--Blue Ridge igneous and Ridge and Valley sedimentary rock because our valley lies along the junction between Blue Ridge and the new Appalachians. Our ridge to the east is mostly quartz; our ridge to the west is mostly shale.

"Blue Ridge" is part of our identity of place. Businesses, churches and organizations include the term proudly in their names. The region has its own history, topography and vegetation. If you know your rocks and plants, you'll know precisely when you've passed into the Blue Ridge from an adjacent physiographic province and especially as you rise more than a thousand feet out of the Piedmont. It is a bioregion in its own right, so clearly evident that its boundaries separated indian tribes and prevented accidental trespassing and reduced territorial warfare among them, I've read.

The land is beautiful, but it is also steep and rocky, and highly dissected into tortuous valleys that turn to gorges carved by tumbling streams. To us these old mountains are beautiful. The early settlers saw these jumbled mountains ridge after blue ridge from the first mountaintops as they climbed the escarpment rising up from the Piedmont. The view evoked the horror of impenetrable thickets of Rhododendron that stretched out for endless miles to the farthest hazy horizon. There were few passes through it traveling by horse or oxen-drawn wagons. Dan'l Boone's gap through the Cumberland part of the Appalachian barrier represented a most welcomed window to the West for the pioneers of those days.

Early migration and settlement in southwest Virginia followed the relatively level land and fertile valleys of the "Great Valley"; the Blue Ridge areas such as Floyd County were far more sparcely settled and much later, and in no small part by those wanting off the beaten path--seeking refuge from political or religious persecution; or come here to take advantage of the cold mountain streams suitable for the manufacture of untaxed corn products.

When it came time for Ann and I to return to southwest Virginia, we sought out the Blue Ridge, even though our first Virginia home of a dozen years had been in the Ridge and Valley and we still had friends there. It was to this particular ambiance of rock and forest and landform that we chose to migrate because it suits our temperaments in some ways I am yet hoping to understand. While to those outside the area, Blue Ridge may be the name on a promotional brochure hawking mountain communities for retirement, for us it is the name of the ground under our feet.

And so, when someone asks me where I live, rather than saying in more general way that I live in the southern Appalachians or Appalachian Highlands, I say I live in the Blue Ridge of Virginia. This is where I'm from... this is the land that has adopted us. And like children of adoption, we are here not by random fate, but because of all the places we could belong, this is the place that has chosen us for its children.

This post arises partly from the good discussion that has been going on in the comments to "Name ad Nauseum" (read comments here) and I wanted a longer "two cents worth". The image I shamelessly lifted and modified from Jim Fletcher's excellent photography at SmokyBlog. Thanks, buddy. I owe you one.

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The broad band of rain we were expecting around midnight was just sweeping through as Ann opened her umbrella headed for the car at 5:30 this morning. She was fretting because the "five-thirty" hadn't gone by. This is a neighbor that comes down the road as Ann would be heading up it towards Blacksburg. Passing is rarely possible even in daylight; backing up is treacherous. About ten minutes after she left, I saw the headlights of a vehicle go by, coming down the way she had just left. Turns out, it was her.

There will be more of this: a dead Hemlock (there soon will be no other kind) has fallen across the road, and poor reverse-impaired Annie had to back down the muddy road in the dark and in the pouring rain until she could turn around and head out the long way to work. She'll be late. She called when she got to a place with cell phone reception. What a trooper.

Tsuga and I are about to put on our raincoats and go see how big this tree is. If it's the one I'm thinking, it will take at least a 36 inch bar to chainsaw this thing off the road. I'll come back and call VDOT Emergency number and see if they'll come clean up the mess. I'd rather they not toss the tree-corpse into the ravine if it can be avoided. Maybe I can get a truckload of windfall firewood from the clean-up. It's soft, low-BTU wood, but the price is right.

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Thanks to all for mixing it up re the name-game. Lots of good ideas, and no consensus whatsoever. Hardly. And another instance where Mr. Murphy's inexorable laws come into relevance: If you try to please everybody, somebody's not going to like it. You like Fragments. You don't like. Some of you like Here's Home; nobody likes HeresHome (Yippee! Consensus!). You like Blue Ridge. You prefer Appalachians. And in the end, Trish is right. If the book gets picked up by a publisher, the editors will have no small role to play in determining the final name. At least I'll have a long list to chose from--a list that has already had reader input. Many, many thanks.

From yesterday's comments and discussion: I gladly give up HeresHome. I'd like to keep the idea of coming home or being home or finding home, because that is what has happened as I've written out my daily musings (truly "field notes" as in careful notations of things observed stated succinctly). I think I'd be better served by "Blue Ridge" and technically I do live in the Blue Ridge province of the Appalachian Mountain range; plus the name elicits a mental image of tranquility and distant vistas, at least for me.

I'd like to keep some reference to the YEAR. As you read through the book, the idea of cycles, rhythms, the yin and yang of the seasons is very conspicuous, I think. It was the seasons that provided my frame of reference for that year I was so isolated here. Many days I didn't know what the date was, but I always was deeply aware of the season, dictated by my duties of the day: feed the woodstove, hoe the corn, rake leaves, cut next year's firewood. I like the word "almanac" (as in Sand County Almanac) defined variously as follows:

Almanac: An annual publication containing useful statistics and facts, both current and retrospective; Annual publication that contains useful data and statistics relating to calendars, countries, personalities, events, subjects, or other miscellaneous information. May be broad in geographical and subject coverage, or limited to a particular country or state or to a special subject. An annual containing miscellaneous matter, such as a calendar, a list of astronomical events, planting tables, astrological predictions, and anecdotes.

This folksy quasi-factual calendric anecdotal aspect of "almanac" seems to fit. What do you think?

And some of the recent combinations in the running...

· Heres Home: A Blue Ridge Journal
· Here's Home: A Year in the Blue Ridge
· Here's Home: Notes from the Blue Ridge
· Belonging: A Blue Ridge Journal
· Belonging: A Year in the Blue Ridge
· Here's Home: A Blue Ridge Almanac
· Fragments: A Blue Ridge Almanac
· Fragments: A Blue Ridge Journal
· Finding Home: A Blue Ridge Almanac
· Coming Home: A Blue Ridge Almanac

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That's THE Wedding Song written by Paul Stookey in the early seventies. Paul is the second "P" of P P & M, of course. Son Nathan will be singing this song in the wedding of a friend in Carolina in August. Wife Ann has deemed it imperative that husband and father Fred must find a Peter, Paul and Mary CD that has the Wedding Song on it and send it to son before he comes home for the summer. I don't understand why this is so important but then, I don't ask questions. I just do as I'm told. And I've failed to find a CD with the wedding song on it that is not part of the five CD PP&M collection going at around $55. At $55, I start asking questions.

Is anybody aware of a single CD that contains this song? I sent Nate the lyrics and he can hear the melody via various midi sources on the web. But She Who Must Be Obeyed will not be appeased.

Interesting to note that all the music from this oft-performed song goes to a charitable foundation created by Stookey called the Public Domain Foundation from which the "funds are channeled to public good".

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We always hoped that we would someday find the place in the world where we wanted to settle in for the long haul. Ann made up her mind that if and when that day came, we would call the place "HeresHome". She had seen this somewhere and was smitten with the idea of a longing fulfilled, the feeling of rootedness and belonging conveyed by the double-word alliterative name. Personally, I balked at the idea, thinking that naming one's home was a bit precious; but the month we moved in, I had a yard placard made with raised aluminum letters against a green background. She drove up from work one day in October of 1999, and there was the little sign welcoming her home. It's been there ever since. You've seen it in many of the pictures of the house, sometimes including the pup, like this one here.

Here is the matter at hand: I am considering a name change for the book I may send off soon to another publisher. (I know you're sick of hearing about this and promise to go underground with this issue very soon and only tell you when something noteworthy happens. Promise.) Its core will consist of some eighty descriptive vignettes that have emerged as I've narrated the seasons day by day. The current working title has been "Fragments: Field Notes from an Appalachian Year". I like this less and less as time goes by. "Fragments" I chose for the weblog because it is descriptive of both my life and the book that has come from it... one meaning being shards of a larger vessel that can be reconstructed to make a whole... that sort of idea. But the word is jarring, suggesting something broken, and by itself, it lends no information to what the book is about. It forms a connection to the weblog, of course, but 99% of potential readers will have no familiarity with the web journal Fragments.

I'd appreciate your thots: what do you think of "HeresHome: Field Notes from an Appalachian Year" or "HeresHome: Blue Ridge Field Notes" or something along those lines? The HeresHome puts the focus on this place, the connections with daily discovery from my own back yard, on finding home--which is what I think it is all about for me. It's an odd enough term to catch attention but conveys enough information for someone seeing it to grasp what it implies. I think. I'd value comments and emails and your candid opinions. I'm not married to this idea, just trying it on for size. I'll need to decide something by this time next week.

And oh, by the way: I called about the Parkway job that was to be decided in mid-February. Well, now the decision is expected by mid-March. So I'm still in the running to be the next Ranger Rick. Stay tuned.

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Ahhh. Not a single comment spam overnight. Life is good. I am deluded but happy. And I am not sore.

I did as much physical work in the past two days as in the past two months and so far, knock on wood, no tendinitis, no sacroiliac instability, no knee pain-- the thousand shocks that half-century-old flesh is heir to. How could anyone be bothered by mere pain when it is this beautiful outdoors! On the other hand, poor Ann was inside all day, home from work with the crud I had last week and preparing to go see the doctor instead of her scheduled hair appointment-- that's how sick she was!

Meanwhile, Tsuga and I worked the woodpile. The poor woodpile. I have always considered the "presentation" and to a lesser degree, the size of a fella's woodpile and his garden as the dual measures of a man (comment spam advertisements notwithstanding). In which case, my self-esteem has withered sadly over this long, cold, snowy winter evidenced by the sad detumescence of the dwindled stacks. And so building back the woodpile to its former dimensions will be a springtime endeavor towards reclaiming my manly bragging rights.

Toward this end, the dog volunteered his assistance yesterday, much appreciated. Matter of fact, he and I entered a partnership and now have a home * excelsior business we're very proud of. I split the yellow poplar; the bark peels off cleanly; he carries the planks of bark over beside the back porch and shreds off all the soft, stringy yellow inner bark into haphazard piles all over the yard. After a week of this, we'll be exporting organic excelsior to your finer boutiques regionally. Place your orders while supplies last!

Ann hasn't been able to speak audibly for four or five days now. As I left to work outside, she was busily writing down her symptoms and the chronology of her illness to hand the doctor to read. A few minutes later while Tsuga and I worked the woodpile, I heard a tiny toot of a whistle. Ann was standing in the back door motioning for me to listen. And a weak whispering voice asks "how do you spell 'laryngitis'?" A few hours later, back from the doctor, we decided there must be an entire class in medical school these days where students learn to say "It's a virus. That'll be two hundred dollars".

Meanwhile, the buds on the maples by the house are visible from the far end of the valley in the late afternoon sun. Scarlet cups are popping up in the woods where the turkeys scratch back the flattened leaf litter searching for fresh shoots of violets, uncovering the scurrying arthropods that have regained their motions with the warming days. The hours of daylight are getting longer, and it was still light enough last night to split wood at 6 p.m. I'll be working at it obsessively again this morning at first light. I have my honor to uphold, after all.

* Ok Kiddies. Excelsior is shredded wood or "wood wool" that we old-timers remember pulling out of packing boxes before the days of styrofoam peanuts.

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As nearly everyone knows, Orkut is Google’s entry in the crowded “social networking” field.

So says Rebecca Blood on Digital Web Magazine.

Okay, 'becca. I don't know. Am I the last to learn about Orkut? Should I be outraged that no one has invited me to join? What the heck it this all about? Does this network extend all the way to Floyd County? It promises to make my social life more active and stimulating. Well, I'm not sure that's possible, but I'm ready to take a walk on the wild side.

Maybe I should just read Rebecca's article and hush. Maybe I'm not Orkut material. Maybe I wouldn't become a member if they begged me, pretty pretty please. How 'bout you?

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I am struck this morning by a pervasive silence-- an alone-ness uncommon but not unprecedented in my almost two years in the blogging community. Many fellow bloggers during the past week have shut down comments because of comment spam. Several have simply gotten too busy to blog. Some, like Pascale, have chosen to give up this absorption to focus on more eternal things.

I can't explain it, but I sense that it is not just me that feels like the tide has gone out, somehow, for a while.

I attribute some of the shift of energies to the change in the seasons; some small part, perhaps, to the season of Lent; and oh how I dread the next eight months when we will be pundited to pieces over the damned-if-we-do election coming up where I can already tell you I will not be happy with the outcome.

Last March during the War Du Jour, Fragments readership fell by 50%. My energies and spirits sank to all-time lows, and attention shifted toward war-blogs and news-blogs and pundit-types. I think I sense that same sinking feeling coming on. But life will go on, and the weblogs that are about ordinary lives will, too. Ce la guerre.

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I don't know how it is with your dogs. Maybe if they're city dogs they don't get wet except in the occasional bath at the vets, or if you're brave, in the backyard garden hose or even inside in the tub on bath days. Our country dog gets wet every day, many times a day, and when he does, you'd better stand back.

Watching Tsuga come out of the creek and run manic round and round the barn yesterday reminded me of having felt that same feeling decades back, after dipping in some isolated scour hole in a far-off creek I'd discover. I would find such a place for a dip on my overnight solo backpack trips-- back when adventure and exploration were part of my life.

A dunking in cold water does something healthy to the internal gyroscope-- a shock that is so energizing! I prefer my dunkings on a hot day when I can sit in no hurry on a warm rock in the sun and dry off. A cold, cloudy day is just as good for the dog so I'll take my thermal shocks vicariously until June, thanks. But long before the total immersion--if I can find a pool deep enough--I'll be soaking my bandana in creek water to put around my neck or wrap around my forehead when I overheat while working in the garden in July. Ahhh. Cool water.

We walked up the valley yesterday, upstream along Nameless Creek, up the narrow V of the gorge where the water plunges a little at a time, dropping not spectacularly but regularly. Looking down from the old postal road above it, the pools have formed in a predictable pattern every hundred feet or so, and in this manner the stream flows and falls, flows and falls, down to the level of our pasture where it meets Goose Creek and picks up a different rhythm.

All those incremental pools along the flow of the creek used to be clear down to scoured bedrock, the water emerald green, probably more than six feet deep in many places. Even some of the oldtimers who have stopped by to chat have asked me had I been in the "green holes" up the creek lately. But sediment from roads, tilled pastures and home construction have long since filled in the deep holes. In my imagination looking down on it yesterday, I dredged out all the sand and soil from those green holes.

And while I was at it, I also put back in place all the fallen trees that Hurricane Hugo brought crashing down to damn the flow and clutter the composition my photographer's eye seeks in that rugged cleft where the creek with no name does what it does, day after month after year.

Later this summer when the old road is shady and covered in nettle and the air is muggy and still, the dog and I will go back up the valley to the deepest pool on the creek we can find and get crazy wet.

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Tonight I'll be heading to town to hear a writer read from her work and talk about the process of writing and publishing. This is one of the series of Appalachian writer visits that the Floyd "Friends of the Library" has sponsored in the county in the past two years. Silas House, Sharyn McCrumb, Robert Morgan, and Nikki Giovanni are a few of the speakers I've heard and can recall.

I always come away with mixed feelings listening to "successful writers" describe their rejections, frustrations, victories and rewards from their writing lives. Tonight Denise Giardina is speaking. I was not familiar with her work, but I'm sure I'll learn something more about how it is that people find their passion and their voice.

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Last week I got back a piece I had submitted to a gardening magazine. The editor was kind enough to mark it up copiously with comments, largely positive. He'd be interested in re-reading the piece if I'd just rewrite it to make it into something else entirely. Sigh.

And so I stared at the original on the screen this morning thinking it was not possible to sever one head and put it on another body and keep the subject alive. I would just move on to something else. Close, but no cigar.

But I couldn't leave it be. And so I went back and tweaked it here, deleted that whole paragraph or two, pulled in a nice turn of phrase picked up from earlier in the page that brought a kind of circularity into the finished piece. Yes, I think it is a finished piece again. The transplanted head looks rather stylish up there if I do say so myself.

And this is as close to the triumph of the hunt as this office-chair adventurer comes these days. There is a kind of victory in the feel of making something from the relative nothing of ordinary sentences about ordinary days. But like one writer said when asked if he liked to write: I like better to have written.

So, now it is time to tend both the woodlot and the garden: the twin topics that I am now finished writing about. Time for the rubber to meet the road. See ya later.

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A Postcard from the Volcano
by Wallace Stevens

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budding aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

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Birds were calling outside my window this morning in the dark long before I attended their sounds. We hear what we expect to hear, and for so long over winter now, there has been only the wind, the creek, the hum of the computer, the yawning dog stretching in his sleep in the next room, the ticking of the woodstove.

When bird voices finally broke through winter's oblivion, I could not name them. That kind of familiarity with the particulars of life outdoors will return soon enough as I comprehend I am no longer alone in a gray-numb world.

First light lured me with my coffee out onto the front porch. A comfortable flannel shirt was just enough. Beneath the raucous sound of the creek, spring was humming underground. I could feel it through the soles of my feet.

March wind wafted a trace of sweet loam, moved faint red buds gently at the first hint of a March dawn. March is to June as morning is to mid-day: there is not much color yet in the day, or the year. But the sun will rise today. And it will come sooner, stay later, every day adding more tint to the faint dilutions of February.

By late April, the color will be almost more than a body can stand, and I will sit down on the front steps all hours of the day in blissful Kodachrome. The east sky is pinking up already.

The pasture grass is smooth as a golf green painted butterscotch, pressed down flat as pancake batter, snow after snow. Five black crows move erratically back and forth across the field like ice skaters, leaning forward, arms tight against their sides, gliding in the twin choreography of hunger and curiosity.

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Finally, I got back my old guitar from the music store yesterday. My old guitar: a classical--a gift from the parents when I was a sophomore in college. That was, well, more than fifteen years ago. I think the first piece-of-the-era that I played on it was Jose Feliciano's Light My Fire. Yeah, that would have been about fifteen years ago. I always meant to learn to play it the way it deserved, but never could let go of the flatpick. Me and Willie. That old guitar saw me through Classical Gas, the Beatles, lots and lots of John Denver and countless other balladeers over the years-- the ultimate Karaoke machine, capoed into the key of G.

Our new friends raised eyebrows when I wanted to play along with the Old Time music after we moved to Virginia in the mid-seventies; they tolerated it, because you couldn't hear its soft voice over the claw-hammer banjo anyway.

A few times, it performed solo, with a warbly singer backing it up: at my daughter's wedding, and Susans'; a few times in church; and often when there was no one around but that guitar and me and the dog of the moment. It taught Nathan the basic chords. He wasn't interested. Six months later, he got way interested and now can play circles around me. Heck, I'm doing good to get any sound out of it at all anymore, with the bad joints and all.

Still, when the turning peg broke while I was restringing it back before Christmas, I wanted it fixed, even if it doesn't get much attention from me anymore. I was happy to see Ann carrying it up the driveway in Nate's guitar case yesterday, ready to tune up and play at least a few bars of hello.

I lifted it out of the case, first looking to see how closely the tuning pegs had been matched with the original. Not very. I had already started stringing the ball-end strings when the tuning peg broke, and wondered if they had gone ahead and strung it up for me at the repair shop. They had.

I held it fondly, laid it flat across my lap, sensing something wasn't entirely right. I lifted it up against me to strum the strings to see if they had tuned it in the shop-- just to play a chord or two, and put it back securely in the case, knowing it was here with me as it had been since Michelle ma belle. My old friend the guitar.

I swear I'm not making this up: somebody at the Music Shoppe had strung it backwards. The tiny nylon string was strung in the place where the steel-wound G sting should be, all the strings in perfect order, in reverse sequence. I was stunned. Speechless.

I am, however, looking forward to the phone call to the music store later this morning when I will tell them:

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I can squeeze in one day to run up to Charlottesville for the Festival of the Book.

There are some great authors coming, including Garrison Keillor on the opening day, and Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, and many more. I am more drawn to hearing those who will be talking about publishing than about writing, and have decided, tentatively, on who to hear when (see "read more").

I have been giving consideration these past days to "self publishing" in all its many forms, especially as I think about having more control over images that I'd like to include in the book (black and white, I'm afraid, because of cost considerations). There will be three of the larger self-publishers represented at the Festival: 1stBooks, Infinity, and iUniverse. I'd like to hear
all three of them, but wouldn't you know: they all come on stage at the same time on the one day I'll be there. Any recommendations for one vs the other?

Thanks to friends Dave and Gretchen of Ripples fame for offering to play host and tour guide for my short stay in Charlottesville. And we're hoping Old Man Winter will be quite worn out by the end of the month, although he is famous for one last surprise punch in late March or even into April.

Tentative schedule for Friday, March 26:

Jacqueline Deval is the author of Publicize Your Book: An Insider's Guide to Getting Your Book the Attention It Deserves. Now the publisher of Hearst Books, she was director of publicity for William Morrow, Villard, and Doubleday, and director of marketing for Morrow. 3/27 10 a.m.

Chris Bolgiano's book, True Tales of Sustainable Forestry, won two literary awards in 2003. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wilderness Magazine, Sierra, and done commentaries on NPR's "Living on Earth." 3/27 12 p.m.

Peter Cashwell, author of The Verb 'To Bird', graduated from the University of North Carolina. He has been a radio announcer, rock musician, comic-book critic, and improv comedy accompanist, and now teaches English and speech at Woodberry Forest School. 3/27 2 p.m.

And one of these three...

John F. Harnish is Special Projects Director / Author's Advocate for Infinity Publishing. With four decades of publishing experience he's recently authored three POD books, including Everything … About Print-On-Demand.… He helps authors understand POD and he's responsible for Infinity's annual author's conference. 3/27 4 p.m.

Katherine Brandenburg is the Author Marketing Manager at iUniverse, a premier print-on-demand publishing provider. She is charged with creating programs to help over 8,000 iUniverse authors market and promote their books. Her extensive background in book publicity has led to a significant increase in book sales for iUniverse authors. 3/27 4 p.m.

Celeste Policastro is Director of Marketing for 1stBooks, the leading North American publisher utilizing print-on-demand technology. A business writer and newspaper editor, she has spoken all over the country on self-publishing. She is a graduate of Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and received her M.B.A. from St. Francis University. 3/27 4 p.m.

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Cuttings
by Theodore Roethke

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it --
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

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