Fragments From Floyd

Mr. Thompson was commenting recently on my lack of photographic productivity. Okay, DouggeyBoy, we got three keepers this morning. Not much, but better'n zippo.

The pasture, I'll confess, is a disappointment this year. Usually, it would have been cut in mid to late June. The wildflowers, released from the shade and competition of the tall grasses, would be coming up all over. And hanging from them, without the clutter of stems and blades, spider webs would be everywhere. It hasn't been cut--probably won't be. Too wet, and our neighbor who usually cuts it works a 36-hour day--much of it, helping his neighbors and refusing to let them pay him.

This first crop of pasture grass is maturing, even browning, giving the field a fall-like aspect.

As you might have noticed, many of my photos are taken in those rare moments when the sun first peeks over the ridge. The larger version of this pasture image is in the gallery, here.

Also from this morning's walk-about, two new spider web images, here and here.

Posted by fred1st at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Found: A 61 GIGABYTE buncha something in Documents and Settings/User/Local Settings/Temp. (Right clicking on the TEMP folder/Properties gives this size for the folder.) When I do the same thing on any of the folders under TEMP, none contains much volume at all (total about 2 gig). Internet temp files have been flushed, as well as other temp files using disk cleanup wizard in XP. ChkDsk runs, finds no probs. So. What is this 59GIG wart that is sitting on my hard drive that is invisible other than how much space it occupies!?

I've had one suggestion to just delete this TEMP folder and Windows will rebuild them if it needs them. Any thots on if/how to do that?

UPDATE AND AN END TO THE MATTER! Fortuitously, LockerGnome mentioned a freeware program this morning called CleanCache. It is a nice program worth keeping around. It deleted the windows temp files in question and I now have my Hard Drive space back! How such a huge temp file came about is still a mystery I'll not ponder. I have two days of wasted time to recover!

Posted by fred1st at 7:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Jansport D2 External Frame Backpack. Lifetime warranty from the company. It's life has come to an end after 27 years and lord knows how many pounds of necessities carried over how many miles of trail and backroad.

The D2's first trip in 1977 was to Cumberland Island, Georgia, for a three day human sacrifice to the no-see-ums. We caught fish from the inland brackish-water lake (almost stepped on an alligator) and gathered oysters just offshore from our campsite. The pack's next trip was to New York City (first time there, and last) and on to the Adirondacks with friend Steve. It rained for days, and our second morning, we hiked past a flash-flooded creek-side campsite where just the top few inches of a sky-blue tent appeared like an island above the previous night's stormwaters.

How I wish I had been journaling over these years so I could remember details of days on the trail. Thinking back, I've forgotten many--perhaps most-- of the destinations. In every one of them I've propped up the Jansport on its hip-yoke frame to give my shoulders a rest. The odd burnt orange pack stood out in modest contrast against the greens and browns of nature; that's why I picked that color. I learned my lesson once with my first pack that was the blend-with-the-environment color of moss. I once spent a whole hour looking for it from a rocky pinnacle at Grayson Highlands. It blended in so well with the vegetation that, less than three hundred yards away, I could not find it in plain view. I decided then that my next pack would be as conspicuous and visible and non-earth-toned as possible without inviting boo's from fellow hikers.

When we lived in Morganton (NC) I fell in with a bunch of old hiker-buddies and we went on excursions three or four times a year for the six years I lived there. Since moving back to Virginia, I've only used the old pack a time or two. But it has not sat idle, oh no. Its legacy has been borne by younger feet--first, in Nate's travels on the back roads from Maine to Goose Creek--some 1100 miles, in 2000. Then, it traveled with him around Ireland, and in ten other countries of Europe in 2001. When it came home from that ordeal, alas, it was so thoroughly used (not abused) that I didn't have the heart to send it back to Jansport a THIRD time for more repairs.

The zippers are broken, the former repairs to the shoulder straps have failed; it's just dying of old age. I was happy that it could get a second life thru the boy, and now the time has come for both of us to say goodbye to it. Today, with good memories and appreciation for years of companionship with this old home-on-your-back, Nate and I will toss it into the nearest dumpster.

And to rub our poor little noses in the pathos of this sad occasion, for its last farewell photo before it is euthanized, I've propped the Old Papoose up against the two sad hemlocks in the front yard that Nate and I will be cutting down this week. They have dropped 3/4s of their needles already--the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid's effects up close and personal. We're going to plant a couple of pear trees in place of the hemlocks this fall, and hope we can protect them from the deer long enough for them to bear fruit. And so it goes.

And one more thing: In the post called Day After Tomorrow a few days ago, I wondered what was going on with the ash trees in our valley this year. I've since learned that Ash Decline seems a possible candidate. Funny. Ashes were planted along many city streets to replace the Elms that succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease. So far, I haven't seen any of the D-shaped exit holes of the Emerald Ash Borer--another scourge that is apparently wiping out ashes right and left. The forest is paying a high price for our ability to ship nursery stock from Asia and across the US, bringing pests into places they would never have come, or come so slowly perhaps natural predators could have dealt with them.

One thing's for sure: our grandchildren will not inherit the same forests we have hiked under, camped within and loved.

Posted by fred1st at 5:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

After four insanely unproductive hours in some fashion dealing with Dell Tech "Support" I am no nearer an answer to this weirdness than I was. Only when I become convinced the hard drive is at fault will I try this route again. Meanwhile, I see there is a "remote assistance" tool in the Dell Folder on the hard drive that seems to offer to let me let someone knowledgable into my system to look under the hood. It apparently contacts them by email and sets up the computer-to-computer connection. I've never used it before.

Any experience with this? Any suggestions for persons or companies that might provide this higher level of knowledge and maybe some actual help?

The hard drive won't let me use the Windows Scan Disk or Norton Disk Doctor to complete the scan, much less do any repairs. (from a fresh boot the scan starts and hangs 3/4 thru). I'm at the end of my rope. Not to mention the cramping hand and calloused ear and WORN patience with Dell's MUSAK...which is also the language spoken by their service reps I talked to this morning!

Posted by fred1st at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

My defrag utility popped up, saying I have not-too-many fragmented files, did I want to run the program while I went for another cup of coffee. Sure, why not. I come back a few minutes later to find the graphic display of my hard drive shows that more than 50 GIGABYTES! of my hard drive appear to be filled with an unbroken block of RED indicating fragmented files. My available space has suddenly gone from 85 Gig to 34 Gig.

I may be wrong, but seems to me we got some serious problems. Norton DiskDoctor has done its thing, and doesn't seem to see any problems.

Is the hard drive going wonky? Is it FireFox or its extensions, which is the only new program installed since the last defrag showed nothing out of the ordinary?

I have this sinking feeling I'm going to spend a long time on the phone with Dell Tech Support. If it's not the hardware, they'll say "sorry, Charlie, we can't help ya."

So if Fragments disappears for a day or a week, you'll know why. It's in fragments. Whimper.

Posted by fred1st at 6:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (2)

Heard yesterday on BBC radio: one small reason we are failing to win hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. Nevermind all the hamfisted misadministered military-logistical factors that are muddling us along in the 'soft war.' Another reason may be sunglasses.

British troops have been educated to understand the culture of the Iraqi people. In encounters with them individually or in groups, they've been instructed to always remove their sunglasses. If they are to win over these people on a personal level, it's been explained to these soldiers the importance of eye to eye contact in this culture.

American troops either have not been so instructed because of failure at the top to be sensitive to matters other than show-of-force, or the soldiers in the field are playing the part of the self-indulgent all-about-me roles Americans are unfortunately coming to have in this world. According to this report, in that bright desert land, almost to a man, the American soldiers wear sunglasses. We'd hate to have them come home with those unsightly crows feet from squinting, after all.

Granted, this is a small thing. But for want of a nail...

Posted by fred1st at 5:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

He didn't sleep well last night. We probably should have turned on the floor fan in our bedroom to shelter Tsuga from the curse of excellent canine hearing. How many times--six? ten?--did he jump up in the dark, spinning his wheels on the hardwood floor, racing to the window at the back porch to bark in his labrador baritone like a Hound of Hell. He could hear cloven hooves on the walkway that we peacefully would have slept through.

This morning, the Hostas by the footbridge have been masticated to nothing more than a bristling porcupine-ish ball of clipped stems. Ah, the country life.

Posted by fred1st at 6:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

The following is an excerpt from August 2002 Journal, where I am describing how the internet became a part of our life here (such that I am able to cut-n-paste these words this morning at 6:03 and share them with you folks living all across the shrinking planet by 6:07!)

Over the snoring of the dog in the next room, the first thing I hear this cool August morning is the chirp and squawk of the modem. If I was groggy before, the modem's harsh voice--and hot coffee, of course--help me tune in to the here and now. What an odd sound, not pleasant but familiar and somehow comforting, soon to become an acoustic antique, remembered only by those of us who lived in this very brief slice of technological time. I can still remember the thrill of hearing this squeal and sputter for the first time years ago. I watched the monitor in awe as that little black box in some incomprehensible way assembled my first browser (Mozilla?) by way of a "gopher" all the way from some university in England! This was surely the start of something big!

At work in a small North Carolina community hospital pain clinic, I had finagled a free trial of this internet thing I'd heard about. The VP for Operations granted permission for mine to be the first computer so connected. I could tell he thought this technological wizardry was a flash-in-the-pan, and that my enthusiasm for its potential for good was misplaced and doomed to disappointment. That was in early 1995--the only time in our marriage that Ann and I both worked under the same roof. Even though the pharmacy and the pain clinic were on the first floor and not far apart, we rarely saw each other during our workday. But this particular morning, I rushed down the hallway to pull her back with me by the sleeve of her white clinic jacket, no matter how busy she was. This was big! "Check this out!" I gushed with obvious excitement.

... Discovering the existence of this rurally-accessible technology had a huge impact on me that morning. It was the missing incentive, the catalyst I needed to begin to plan in earnest for our long-considered return to Virginia where we would find our true and permanent place in the country.

I had seen the light! With this electronic-village thing reaching out from Blacksburg into the countryside, we could live in the remotest parts of Virginia and this virtual two-way community would connect us to the larger world at the touch of a button! Community could be possible without geographic proximity. This was Perfect! Now, even when we finally found that place we dreamed of, isolated far out in the county with just a few caring but comfortably remote neighbors, we'd be able to browse local events, buy our groceries, participate in neighborhood mailing lists and world news and keep in touch with family and friends: the best of both worlds!

Posted by fred1st at 6:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is almost July and I am sitting here in my thick terry robe and "big bird" winter slippers and none too warm. It is 48 degrees outside according to the thermometer on the back porch; and because I went to bed mistakenly thinking the windows in the front room were closed, it is barely 60 here at the computer this morning. Brrr! And hot diggety! The task du jour is to get in another couple loads of firewood--an unheard of chore for summer, usually, with the heat and humidity, yellow jackets and gnats. But it is much easier to be motivated to go out and work hard in the woodlot when you can remember what it feels like to need a little heat in the room.

Yesterday, Nate and I cut, split and stacked two truckloads from across in the meadow. I had the chance to see how the truck would do going through the crossing that my neighbor and his tractor dug out for me about a month ago. There's been a four-pronged ash down now for a year that has needed to be off the ground and split for drying if we are to use it this coming winter.

Funny. When I finish with this tree, there are three more ashes (green ash, I think) that have suddenly failed to put out leaves this spring and summer. All of them are down along the edge of the pasture where I can drop them easily, so I'm thankful for this 'windfall' harvest. But it's puzzling why so many of these particular trees would all die at the same time. It's great wood--very dense and a high BTU source of heat from the woodstove. And it splits crisp and clean so that we never even needed the big "monster maul"--even on the knotty pieces. The work goes fast with the newly-sharpened chain and tuned up chainsaw. In the shade of the meadow where we were working yesterday, I can't say I was at all uncomfortable doing winter work in the middle of summer.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: I'm eating cold cereal and my hands are turning blue; and if nobody will tell the wife I was a wuss, I think I'm going to kick on the space heater for a few minutes. I think I can see my breath in here! And so, what is the name of that climate-change movie that's out now--about global WARMING?

Posted by fred1st at 7:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

I really like the tabbed browsers (Netcaptor and Slimbrowser) I've been using for the past couple of years. However, both are built on Internet Explorer. The latest (now defused) virus you could pick up from innocuous webpages and that code would let someone (in Russia, this time) get at your credit card numbers, et cetera. For me, that's the last straw. I downloaded and am tryiing to life Mozilla's latest browser, FireFox. At present, it seems relatively untargeted by the hackers.

First impression: FireFox seems to load some pages a bit faster than MSIE. It is customizable, but largely wants the user to tweak the code, with instructions even I can follow--mostly.

If there are FireFox users amongst you few weekend readers, I need some help figuring out WHERE in the Profile Folder to put user.js, userchrome.jss and usercontent.jss. Directions don't say to move the "example" jss files once they are renamed, but other places it says they are simply in the "Profiles" folder (not a subdir of this.) And what program do I need to open and edit a "*.js file? Guess It'd help to know what I'm doing. Ya reckon? Anyone?

UPDATE: Thanks, Jeremiah and Jenett for your ideas and help! Loading the Tabbrowser extension and ability to edit user files from within FireFox has brought the browser up to and beyond the capabilities of the ones I have used and liked before. I think I have converted! Do I get a framed certificate now to hang on my wall? Is there a secret handshake?

Posted by fred1st at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

I guess my earliest snake stories here went all the way back to herpetology in grad school. That first summer of blogging, I also told about how snakes slithered their way into our lives (and our apartment) during our first week of married life. And this time last year, we had one over our front door.

It's that reptilian time of year again, and legless Ol' Brer Snake joined us last night on the front porch for supper. (I'm willing to bet this is the same individual we found over the lintel looking for Phoebes this time last year.) Well, one visited with me and Nate, but Ann dined inside alone after we pointed out our approaching guest climbing up the foundation just off the porch at dusk.

Nate has seen me catch a few snakes and heard yarns about quite a few others. But he'd never had the opportunity to try it himself. He asked a lot of questions, like "What's the worst thing that can happen?" We speculated on this specimens overall length and decided it was close to five feet tip to tip. He reviewed the basic biology of non-poisonous snakes (King Snakes in particular) with queries about the presence or absence of flesh-ripping fangs, and exactly what was 'musk' and how stinky was it? and once you have the snake wrapped around your arm, how do you let it go? I could tell we were building to a moment of decision.

"I'm gonna do it!" He announced, after inciting his courage and curiosity to the critical point of action--this, to his mother's dismay, and my proud, fatherly, delight. I slipped inside the front door and got my camera while Nate came out the back door and around the corner of the house behind the snake.

As you can see, nothing fancy here. He just reached out and grabbed it--probably too far below the neck were it a more aggressive snake. It turned its head his way. It could have struck. It didn't. Yes, his arm was pretty thoroughly "musked". Yes, he did have a bit of a job getting the constrictor unconstricted. And yes, he was more than a little pleased that after 25 years, he finally was a bona fide snake-handler like his old man.

Posted by fred1st at 6:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I doubt Fahrenheit 9/11 will be coming soon to a theatre near us. Will I see it when it comes? Probably. And I'd sorta like to have my biases in check when I do. Christopher Hitchens sets up some reaonably serious concerns against Moore's decided spin on the facts, as well as on the facts themselves, but then turns around and makes wimpy accusations that are relatively trivial if true, undermining his unabashedly anti-Moore position in his Slate article, Unfairenheit 9/11.

Moore claims to have his fact checking in place for the onslaught of venom that will come his way after the film's release today. And there will be some that will not doubt the facts but fault him for the spin he puts on them in the film, which he readily calls an "op-ed" piece, not a documentary. Already it is being called "outrageously false." It behooves the consumer to sort the chaff from both sides and determine what the truth is. And of course that depends on what your definition of is, is.

I'm already sick of this election. Wonder what it's like on the south island of New Zealand 'bout now?

Posted by fred1st at 7:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

I just can't do it. I can't leave readers out of the writing.

I'm reflecting back on the history of the internet as it began to permeate my life, and particularly as I saw it playing a role in finding our longed-for home, finding community in a remote rural setting, and ultimately as an opportunity and medium for a more creative form of writing.

It occurred to me how central the squeal of the modem became between my first exposure to them (at 9600k) in 1995 and their obsolescence just a few months ago with the coming of DSL to Goose Creek.

Listen to this wav file of a modem making its connection. Your assignment: Complete the following sentence (modified as you see fit, to describe in words the assorted sounds a modem makes) knowing that your answers may in part find usage in the current little chapter I'm working on:

It magically tied my home office to computers across the world, this surreal language of ____________.

Take your time. Come on, writer-types. This could be fun. --FF

Posted by fred1st at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

* I accepted an offer of a beta-account at GMail (thanks, Mark!) Great idea, Fred! Use GMail to store blog comments. Never delete them, group them by "conversation" and search all of them with ease!

Apparently, MT won't send comments as email to online-type accounts. (Does anybody know this for sure?) Meanwhile, all the blogspam emails overnight ended up in a place I couldn't use the blacklist script to delete, so I was back to manually deleting about 20 of them this morning.

If you've sent a comment in the past 18 hours and it has bounced, this is why. I've fixed the problem. And otherwise, cannot think of any reason I need a gigabyte of email storage. Wonder if there is any way to compress some of the junk in the back room into an email attachment and store it with the Google Mail folks?

* Tom M. asks what happened in the "Better, Forgiveness" story. Well, I got both forgiveness for sins already committed, and permission to kick in more rocks because Ann could see her good intentions would result in making a lot more work if we let the stream cut any deeper. So that little tale of disparate domestic points of view had a happy ending.

* For me, the currents of blogging energy and interest seem to be flowing in some other part of the blogoshere just now, and Fragments, even more than usual, is a quiet undisturbed backwater. Having recently passed my two year mark, there is some kind of natural evolution going on, and I won't dissect it here. I'll just say that it seems it might be a good time to change gears while the place is sort of quiet and I don't find many things to say that seem worth saying. I'm thinking maybe I'll not post on weekends, and otherwise not be compelled to post something every day just to fill in the space. So, if you see a change in the frequency of posting here, that's what is behind it.

* Meanwhile, this seems to be the time to push hard to finish that book we talked about some months ago. The body of it will come from roughly 80 more-or-less worthwhile musings from two years of Fragments. But it is on the back-story that I need to be working now-- the memoirist personal story that isn't on the weblog, but puts this unexpected writing life and all these variegated tales and musings into context. This is the hard part--the synthesis and thematic tightening--that hopefully can make a book of what is otherwise just an apparently random collection of jottings.

Posted by fred1st at 7:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning as we walked the dog around the pasture loop, we noticed that one of the grass species had "flowered" overnight. Its tall tassled inflorescences punctuated the field all around us like exclamation marks above the lesser grasses, white fleabanes, black-eyed susans and yellow clovers.

What especially caught my attention was the fact that each grass spike was spangled with countless tiny anthers that released a cloud of pollen at the slightest touch or breeze. I'd already told Ann as we walked out the door that I was determined to find the source of that mystery smell we've encountered now the past three summers, and we still don't know where it is coming from. I've described it as being "everywhere and nowhere present" and in quality as "almost sickening sweet" but oddly pleasant. We don't know what it is, but when it comes to the valley again for the first time in June, it is familiar and comfortable as an old friend, nostalgic as only remembered smells can be.

My theory has been that the smell comes from a wind-pollinated grass rather than an insect-pollinated flower (except possibly a high-blooming tree flower--basswood has been on the suspect list). When I shook the pollen from the spikey grass today and inhaled it, guess what: nothing. This isn't where the smell is coming from. I'll have to keep on sniffing.

Later in the day while picking wild black raspberries (no more than a yogurt cup full in the loop where we once would have picked a gallon) we found a common milkweed with some flowers beginning to open. Its mauve five-clawed flowers certainly give off a very sweet, almost too-sweet smell, but this plant is not abundant enough in our valley to create the inescapable perfume we walk through in early summer.

There is also a strong bit of this smell in the bark of the maples when the sap rises and oozes from sapsucker borings to blacken the bark with dilute "syrup" in the spring. But I have to put my nose right on the bark now to bring out any of that smell. So this can't be the source of the mystery aroma either. And I've been struck before by the smell of wild honey while walking the woods in years past when honeybees will still common. This everywhere smell is similar, but with a Bit-o-Honey overtone, if you can imagine that, and more cloying than honey, oily, almost oppressive in its omnipresence.

In time, I'll put my nose to some grass or weed, pollen or petals and have that moment of Eureka! discovery that will solve this fragrant puzzle. Curious. In a way, I'll be sad the day when I know. There will one less mystery and one more fact in my life. These days we have a surfeit of knowledge and it is too often the end of a thing. But wonder and curiousity send us out--looking up, turning rocks, scratching and sniffing, inhaling deeply--awed, receptive and ready for surprise.

Posted by fred1st at 5:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Seinfeld. I know it's funny, but I don't know why. Or, as Spock would say it:

The antics of Cosmo Kramer light up my left inferior frontal and posterior temporal cortices but I do not experience spikes in activity in the emotional areas deeper inside--specifically, in the bilateral regions of my insular cortex and amygdala."

Turns out (according to this Scientific American article) that the AH! and the HAHA! of humor happen in two different parts of the brain.

And maybe undeveloped brainspace accounts for those folks we all meet who "get it" but don't laugh; or the ones that laugh but can't tell you why it was funny. I think every one of my grammar school teachers had been required by Alabama law to have both these humor zones surgically removed. Old sourpusses.

Posted by fred1st at 6:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Eighteen trees! I touched them one by one as I counted them thirty years ago in our very first back yard. I swelled with the pride of land ownership. This lot in a small Virginia town held our own personal forest we would enjoy as the leaves changed through the seasons out our back door. Or if we needed them for firewood, we could cut them down. Like the house and the land they grew on, these trees now belonged to us. Ownership seemed to confer absolute dominion over both the land and everything on it.

When we moved to our second home, a little farm a few miles outside Wytheville, that first forest of eighteen trees was replaced by a woodlot of twelve acres. We tended that land and grew to care greatly about it. We owned it, but realized, too that it nurtured and sustained us and we owed it our best efforts to use it wisely. What would happen to it in the hands of the next owners? They could do with it whatever suited their values and their own particular land ethic. It made us sad to know that our influence on this familiar green wedge of land would end the moment we signed over the deed.

And now we are making our home for good on Goose Creek. We walk the trails that our feet have worn beside the creeks and along the ridges. Soon now, once again, there will be blackberries to pick behind the house from the timbered clearings where a young white pine forest grows with adolescent vigor. From the top of these hills in every season we see beyond us the grandeur of what John Muir called "a cathedral made without hands." But without protection after we're gone, it could all become nothing more than a commodity--a real estate plum to be clear-cut, then dissected into smaller and smaller tracts over the years.

This month after living here in Floyd County for four years, we're tying together the last loose ends of a conservation easement. This agreement will confer some legal imperative on future owners to keep this valley a healthy whole as they use it wisely and enjoy it as we have. And there's a larger hope to our efforts. By itself, this property here is just a small patch of sunlight. But combined with the land of adjoining neighbors who may also put their places under conservation easement, together we can preserve whole intact watersheds and unbroken stretches of forest ecosystem on the headwaters of the Roanoke River. The health of both the natural and the human community here and in our region will the better for this.

Today we walk under a canopy of a thousand trees within our boundaries. But we'll always recall those eighteen in our first tiny back yard that made us consider our relationship to and interaction with nature. Since that initial flush of ownership long ago we have become convinced that, since we are only here for a while, we are really just caretakers of land and trees, stewards of creeks and ridges. We don't own these bones and organs of nature any more than we own the air we breathe or these bodies that we use for our short time here.

These young poplar, hickory and basswood trees that we brushed past on our walk today will grow tall, and someone--perhaps our great grandchildren's children--will play in their shade or pick berries under them decades from now. They, in turn, will become the caretakers of this pleasant grove, and in that possibility, I find considerable solace and hope.

A shorter version of this essay will appear in the summer newsletter of the New River Valley Land Trust. I've offered it as a radio piece, but that slot is booked 'til October, so I thought I'd post it here. Maybe someone considering conservation protection of their family farm will find these words and be encouraged by them to take the necessary steps. -- FF

Posted by fred1st at 6:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

De plane! De plane! This image taken from the end of our little bridge over the branch, 70 mm lens, during, oh, maybe the fifteenth pass over the house. The best shot would have been the first unexpected buzz right over the house where the yellow plane suddenly filled the skylight above my head in the kitchen while I was emptying the dishwasher. I think I dropped some silverware when I looked up and saw nothing but fuselage, and I know I scared the dog with my loud interjections.

At least this time I was quick to figure out what was going on--not like the UFOs that came in December 2002 and took two days to interpret. I didn't get to go to the public meeting back in the winter, but did receive something in the mail telling us about the Slow the Spread spraying that would take place in June. Oh yes. In addition to the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid, our part of Floyd County is also along the advancing line in the spread of Gypsy Moths.

I'm pleased to see that they are using highly specific insect pheromones. The female is flightless. The pheromone interferes with the normal mate-searching behavior of the males. "They say" that the chemical is safe in our water and soil. Still, it was an eerie feeling standing directly under the low-flying plane knowing I was being dosed with male mating-disrupting chemicals. But then, maybe it's a better excuse than "I have a sick headache." Ya think?

Posted by fred1st at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are 40 or 50 species of Yucca in the US, most of them in the dessert. We happen to have a dense half acre of it near the creek. Our neighbor disked the field in the fall and again this spring in our attempt to remove the stiff, needle-tipped porcupine-like plants and put in some fruit trees there. A couple of plants survived along the margins, and I'm glad. Seeing their waxy white flowers reminds me of how perfectly nature's creatures have come to depend on each other. Yucca moths and yucca plants can't reproduce without each other (a "mutualism") so when these flowers appeared for the first time last week, I knew when I peeked inside, there would be several slender dark-eyed white boths inside.

There are proabably yuccas where you live. Yucca filamentosa is the most common species over the eastern half of the country. Inside the partially closed flowers you'll find the moths resting during the day. Then read about the rest of the story. Remarkable!

Posted by fred1st at 7:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I will take the liberty to clip from a recent email so I can draw from your experience. I know there are many websites for support and encouragement for those will ill and dying children. Some are probably better than others. If you know of particular sites, please let me know and I'll make this info available to my friend to share with her clients and neighbors. Thanks!

"I know two families dealing with the impending deaths of their two sons. One son is in his thirties and has ALS. The other family's son is only sixteen with cancer. (My usually noncommittal youngest says, "G. is the coolest kid ever" and even I think he may be right) He appears to have lost the battle of a year's worth of extremely aggressive treatments and surgery. The tumors are now in his lungs. These families wonderful people in the community. Do you know of web sites and support groups for them? I know the sites exist and this would be a good use of the internet. If you could steer us that way it could help so many."

Posted by fred1st at 6:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What with all the to-do about Father's Day essays around house and town over the past couple of weeks, it seems our youngest got inspired to pen the following paean that he read to me (and Ann and Tsuga) yesterday morning as we had our coffee on the back porch. He said he took great pains not to get mushy. Musta hurt quite a bit. Pipsqueak. See what ya think.

(UPDATE 6/22): Julie Leung of Seedlings and Sprouts has collected an assortment of Fathers Day writings. Go and see.

For Dad--
For all the times you made me hold that damned ladder;

For all the times you said, "if you throw that tennis racquet again, we're going home," and I threw the tennis racquet again, and we went home;

For that time you wanted to go hiking in the Smokies, and I wanted to go to Amy Harris's pool party, and I pitched such a fit halfway to the Smokies that you turned the car around and drove us home at breakneck speeds, only to give in half an hour later after I pitched another fit, and we went to the Smokies, and had a nice time;

For beating me every time at every sport and every game, many years after I was sure I was better than you;

For the thirty-seven times you told me the name of the same green-metallic beetle, while each time I was thinking about some girl or some song I'd like to write, or some song I'd like to write about some girl, only half an hour later to see a green metallic beetle, and wonder what kind it was;

For the times you crushed between your fingers something sweet-smelling, or sharp-smelling, or minty-smelling, or putrid, and shoved it toward my nose, saying, "Nature snort;"

For all the arguments we've had about religion, and all the agreements we've had about politics;

For all the times we've called each other "smart-ass," audibly or otherwise;

For every time you should've made fun of me for the way I split wood, and the vast majority of times in which you did;

For all those really stupid ideas I've had, which you vehemently opposed, until you knew I'd go through with them anyway, at which point you supported me;

For all those trips I've taken, and you've secretly worried about, even while you tried to project all your concerns for me onto "my mother;"

For teaching me to light the water heater--and to rake with full, efficient strokes, and curse at the weed-whacker, and spread the peanut-butter clean out to the crust;

For all the creative ways you punished me, with just enough consequence to sting, and just enough humor to tell stories about later;

For finding your craft, your voice, and a fulfilling sense of place--for living my aspiration and giving me a sense of place, even as odd as I feel to live vicariously through my father;

For all those times, all those lessons, all your friendship and love, this father's day I bought you an ice-cold bottle of beer,
Which I'm drinking now as I write you this poem,
All the while thinking, man, he would've enjoyed this.

Thanks, Dad. Love you. I'll spot you that beer sometime.

NLF

Posted by fred1st at 5:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (1)

Posted by fred1st at 5:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The Floyd Festival, I gather from those there all day, was several orders of magnitude "more and better" than last year.

We arrived early at the small stage where the Fathers Day essays were to be read. One girl and one guitar were making music, and two small spontaneous interpretive dancers twirled as I sat down. One click of the shutter and they were off, spinning their imaginations, stage left, then right and gone, out the doors.

Posted by fred1st at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

...said the spider to the fly

Posted by fred1st at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

We go past this gazebo, constructed, I think, of Rhododendron trunks, on our 'back way' to Christiansburg and Blacksburg. Best as I can figure, this is all that remains of the former "Allegheny Spring Resort" that once stood there. Even included a golf course, I understand. But I can find little more about the area on the web. I keep saying "one day" I'm going to find some old-timer contacts and write up a history of this interesting stretch of road. I have a few more pictures I took while driving along Allegheny Spring Road one day last week.

Also, you may benefit from learning of the "Gazebo Effect". I think maybe standing in this odd structure might be just what it takes to snap me out of these summer doldrums I'm in. But then, it may all just be in my head. Ya think?

Posted by fred1st at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

... than permission.

She's been working so hard for so long with such good intentions that I feel a little guilty, even though I'm right.

It has been a consuming passion with her for months--going back to a frozen time when only one with a vision, zeal and uncommon fortitude would venture out in parka, rubber boots, and cotton gloves soon caked with mud and soaked heavy with cold spring water. With a mattock and a strong back--for one of her years and small frame--wifey has been working every couple of days to clear obstructions from the branch beside of house. She pulls the grasses along the water's edge that grow together, even though they offer more shade than resistance to flow. She pulls from the sandy mud pieces of pottery, shards of blue glass, irregular flaps of old red rubber that hasn't been used in farming inner tubes since the 50's. As the channel deepens, more artifacts attest we are not the first to live beside this little trickle. Some of our forebears of place apparently even stored their canning in the cold spring-fed stream before the days of refrigeration. But of all these deposits and alluvia, she has particularly declared war on the rocks.

All along the bank in the tall grasses and sedges, down under the coming fall's Joe Pye Weed and Touch Me Not are the rocks she's laboriously pulled from the cold water. And this morning, I went along throwing them back in. She'll be upset. But I think if she looks at the unintended changes she's brought about by her efforts, she'll forgive me.

The branch no longer meanders, goes underground or benignly trickles across the muddy bottom. Now, with all obstructions removed, it fairly zips along unimpeded like a channelized stream created by the beavers of the Corps of Engineers. With the extra rains we've had, the little stream has cut a dark steep-walled cleft two feet deep and less than a foot across. The rocks and weeds used to break up the flow and channeling effect. What will happen in the absence of these things in the stream is, eventually--in a week or so, perhaps--the depth of the branch will become so great that the top edges and part of the soft walls will collapse, reversing all of Ann's hard work. With some of the rocks kicked back in, for which I initially will be scolded, the flow rate is retarded; the channel will fill in with sediment slowly, regaining a better aspect of depth to width. This seems like common-sense engineering to me. We'll see how it flies with the Corps when she gets home from work. But then, I've been court-marshaled before and won a reprieve when my case came to trial.

Posted by fred1st at 7:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The name of this butterfly, with the nice hard consonants, makes a great polite-company explitive, don't you think?

A common butterfly of summer, it is easily identified by the black stripes on the "shoulders" and the chevrons at the outer margins of both forewings and hindwings that look to me like one-eyed frowny-faces. Also note the silver trim along the wing margins. GSF's lay eggs near violet leaves which the young larva feed on in the spring.

I finally gave up getting a decent shot with the D70 where the photographer's eye (and head, of course, followed shortly by neck, shoulders and the rest) has to be adjacent to the viewfinder. The only way this would work would be for the photographer to levitate above the flower patch and I seem to have lost the knack for such things in my dottering later years. So out came the trusty old Coolpix. I still favor the swivel body and LCD viewfinder for hard-to-get closeups.

The larger image is here in the gallery with "ferns and flowers and such."

Posted by fred1st at 5:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

It's Friday again, and this always seems to be the chatty, ruminative day in my blogging week. So, indulge me, blow me off, remove me from you blogroll--as you see fit. You were warned.

TsugaDog is playing his part in the Great Chain of Being. He has become the universe to hundreds of flat writhing proglottids passed on to him via the infested viscera of a rabbit. Or a groundhog. Probably not from the turtle or the many delicious butterflies that have been part of his recent diet. We didn't know how to explain his recent (relative) lethargy until we made the scatological observation yesterday. Plat-the-hell-minthes, as we called them in Parasitology. What a way to make a living.

I'm house-bound most weekdays until the end of August. Sonny-boy is home from Vancouver and started working (hammering his thumb) yesterday (again) with Karl, our (former) contractor and friend. They'll be renovating an older home nearby that will become a rural health clinic. Karl's wife is a Nurse Practitioner. My MD friend Joe will be the supervising MD. And who knows--friendly fragmented fred from floyd may be the physical therapist there one day. Interesting how things work out. Careful with my truck, sprout.

Ah. The Floyd Summer Festival is tomorrow. Being on the committee has been a study of caricatures of small town personalities and the teapot-tempests they engender. Some things have fallen together, but far more have fallen apart. "I'm sorry to announce that the flatbed I was promised by Gerald Simpson will NOT be available to carry the king and queen of the Pageant, and they will have to walk in the parade." And so on. However, the Fathers Day Essay Contest did attract an impressive THREE adult entries (after I waved all established criteria for length, content, or punctuality) and these will be read, along with some guest appearances, at the program tomorrow night. Sorry, but the chairs and tables (to create the coffee-house atmosphere we envisioned) have been moved elsewhere, but there may be some stacking white plastic chairs we can borrow from the Baptist Church. A special thanks to Doc Roc for writing and sending her tribute to her three "father figures." I will have the honor of reading this from the stage in front of the white plastic chairs, a few of which will contain real Floydian people.

I've cobbled my first NEWSLETTER, and thanks again for all suggestions, warnings, and encouragements a week or so back. I created it first in WORD and then went to Publisher, deleted all their template gobbledygook except for the banner, and moved it piece at a time from Word. Thanks for great pointers and feedback from knowledgeable reader-buddy India. You guys make me look like I know what I'm doing. We all know better.

UPDATE: It's been called to my attention that it is actually THURSDAY, so don't read this until tomorrow. By then, I may have oriented to place and date and be able to tell those who find me wandering on Daniels Run my actual street address and real name. "A mind is a terrible thing to lose." --Dan Quayle

Posted by fred1st at 6:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

As many interviews go, this meeting with Wendell Berry and Sojourners staff ranges across a multitude of topics in a conversational and tantalizingly superficial way. But from it, the breadth and depth of the man, the energy and wisdom and quiet grace of this Kentucky farmer find resonance in my deeper places.

The conversation leaves me wanting more with every topic that arises. He briefly and extemporaneously hits a nerve, gently, on essential issues--sustainable communities, subsistance economies and capitalist totalitarianism, bioregionalism and provincial mentality, the profound role of place on language and character, national insecurity and self-destruction, the economic implications of the gospel, and more. He doesn't have all the answers, but he seems to me to have the right questions.

Below, an excerpt from the essay (available in its entirety) that deals with place identity and language--two realms of importance to me. Perhaps, to you, too.

BETH NEWBERRY: How does your identity as a writer connect to a region, a place, and a land?

BERRY: Well, I was born here, not in this house, but in this county. I grew up in these little towns, and in the countryside, on the farms. All my early memories are here. All the voices that surrounded me from the time I became able to hear were from here. Tanya and I came back here in 1964 and have lived here for 39 years, raised our children here. How could you draw a line separating this place and my identity? If you've known these places from your early youth, that means that you have a chance to know them in a way that other people never will.

I think often of the importance of a language spoken by people who are really local, who really know where they are and have lived there a long time; that language has a particularity about it that no language of bureaucracy or government or the university can ever have. It has a designating power that's utterly precise. Knowing the landscape in common and knowing it intimately, minutely, that has to be the basis of a language. That's where it starts, and you can raise it up from there, in successive levels of abstraction. But if you lose that power to particularize and designate precisely, in some sense you don't have a language anymore. So having a common tongue can mean that at one level you have the dictionary in common, you have the English vocabulary. But to have a common tongue in the sense that you can speak in detail, knowledgably and responsibly, about a well-known place, a well-known ecosystem and a well-known human community, is quite another thing.

Posted by fred1st at 5:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

...a state of motor and mental inactivity with a partial suspension of sensibility; a period of dormancy in which an animal’s heart rate slows down to conserve energy; a state of lethargy

I call them the summer blahs. I think they come from 1) growing up in Alabama where the heat and humidity could kill. I once had heat stroke digging a ditch on a summer job during college, came to looking up at the dirt walls of a pit and thought I had died and been buried. And 2) I don't sweat like normal folk, so after a period of vigorous work or sport, when my core temperature reaches a certain level, my brain tells me, as if I were a desert reptile, to find shelter from the heat, shut off all unnecessary metabolism and wait dull and sluggish 'til September. Dull. Thick as a stump. Lost my fizz. Seasonal Affective Disorder. Summer.

Posted by fred1st at 7:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I was newly dysemployed and the garden was at a resting place between planting and harvest, so this time two years ago I decided it was a good time to go west. I spent a few days with my daughter and her family, including young Abby, about 18 months old at the time. Lacking a pet of her own then, she was thrilled when a stray cat hopped over the fence. It seemed hungry (as all cats do always) so my daughter went to fetch the untouched chicken that Abby had refused at dinner.

Somehow, the fact that it was good enough for the cat made it enticing to the toddler; and while she was now eating what she had refused to eat at the supper table, she might as well eat it without hands--the way the cat does. Made for one of those shots you blow up big and give'em at their wedding reception twenty years later, don't ya think?

Posted by fred1st at 6:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

From the PRX "Overview" page:

"Most of this country's broadcast media have been stripped of an authentic sense of place, culture, and experience. In this media environment, public radio is one of the public's few trusted sources of information, dialogue, and culture in a rapidly changing international environment and a time of challenge for communities across the nation.

Many within the creative community and station leadership of this maturing broadcast system believe it is time to build on this position of strength by reinvigorating public radio's public service vision and extending its values through new programming models.

Our nation's airwaves need fresh voices and new perspectives that currently have little opportunity to emerge in either the declining commercial broadcast field or the successful but battened down public radio arena. Hundreds of public radio producers working independently and at stations are regularly crafting exceptional pieces, both large and small, that are rich in the ambience of connectedness, relationship, and community."

I'm not exactly sure how this service might be helpful for those of us who share our ideas and stories from our own unique cultures and parts of the country. But it seems to me there is something here worth a look. Wonder if several writers could go together and join as a single "producer". I just learned of this yesterday (from another WVTF essayist) and haven't quite got my mind around it, but here's what you get if you join as a producer:

For Producers You will be able to:

• Open a producer account on the PRX.
• Create a producer profile page with your bio, photo, home page links, etc.
• Upload air-quality versions of your pieces.
• Describe your pieces, including credits, transcripts, promo copy, and more.
• Choose category, keywords, other descriptive tags for each piece.
• Set price points for your pieces within PRX established per-minute range.
• Preview, rate, review, and discuss other pieces.
• View ratings, reviews, and carriage/usage/pageview statistics for your pieces.
• Receive periodic payments for any station downloads/carriage of your pieces.

Anybody have ideas about or experience using PRX?

Posted by fred1st at 8:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"How did you start thinking about 'place", and why did you start writing (or blogging) about it?"

One year ago on June 15, an energetic and eclectic group of bloggers, LiveJournalers and other web writers united to turn our words to the topic above--the first of what has come to be the "biweekly" opportunity to write about place. The online site bears the dysphonic but appropriate name from the field of ecology-- Ecotone: "a place where two natural communities meet and in which there is greater diversity than in either of the component habitats by itself".

Here is a list of the biweeklies to date, responses all totalled including several hundred essays, rants, lamentations, expositions and narratives somehow, loosely or tightly bound to place.

I think back over the names of people I've come to know as friends through the Ecotone in this year. It includes many of the place bloggers at Ecotone and also many readers--bloggers and non-bloggers alike--who have found Fragments via Ecotone postings or blogrolls of Ecotone writers. I'm not sure any of us could put our fingers accurately on what it is that binds us together loosely as a community of writers and readers. Maybe, in another year, we'll better understand our connectedness to place and to each other. I can say, there is something here that warrants digging deeper.

I tried to express my own motives and hopes a year ago by using the analogies of maps and lenses. I didn't say it very well but I still think I agree in principle with what I wrote in response to the very first Ecotone biweekly topic. My map is dotted now with pins marking the places of writers in the northeast, the middle-west, the southeast, the Left Coast and across the world--so many places I could travel to now and feel like "I've already been here because I read what he says about the countryside, where she goes with her camera, how they come back from their local haunts with word pictures from those mountains, towns or fields." And I gather many of you feel in some small way the same about Goose Creek and the Blue Ridge.

I'd like to think there is much more to say and many more writers to become involved in the Ecotone its offspring someday. It has become a resource for more than a few. The Ecotone writings have found a role in the dissertation topic described at Tim Lindgren's Where Project--an "experiment in place-based blogging." Who knows what other things are working behind the scenes.

And so ends the first year of Ecotone. Thanks especially to Numenius and Pica at Feathers of Hope for setting up and administering the wiki that houses the site. I look forward to getting to know more writers about place in the coming year; and there at one point, there was even some talk of a gathering some day for a face-to-face place-writer's weekend. Hmmmm.

Posted by fred1st at 4:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Does anybody know of a web-accessible non-copyrighted Fathers Day story or essay that would read in about five minutes? I could use several.

We only had three essay entries for the Chamber of Commerce Street Festival on Saturday. Sigh. But I'm determined to have the program as planned. Thing is, we need more words spoken in tribute to fathers.

There's gotta be some good stuff out there. I have readers. I need essays. Write me one. Find me one. I'm not proud.

Posted by fred1st at 9:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Heat. Haze overhead.

A green wall of woods and growing things. Wet air, whining insects spiralling in white sun.

Summer closes in--incandescence constricting and confining.

A morning walk and little catches my eye but lush life in shades of green

but for one small columbine, that who knows why, put pigment from fallen petals in leaves that lift like pink birds from an emerald forest.

Posted by fred1st at 7:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Subtitle: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

Excerpt: "Despite what some critics say, the Slow movement is not about doing everything at a snail's pace. Nor is it a Luddite attempt to drag the whole world back to some pre-industrial utopia. On the contrary, the movement is made up of people like you and me, people who want to live better in a fast-paced, modern environment. That is why the Slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word: balance. Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and be slow when slowness is called for. Seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto — the right speed.”

This is a new book. For me, it is an old and important subject that lives on between new covers. And I am so glad! Below, one of the only things I wrote pre-blog, about the matters addressed by this new book. I'll include the whole, longer-than-usual piece here for a day or two. And I'll probably read the book and include more excerpts and discussion in coming weeks.

Slow Living
Fred First (c) 2001

My wife and I have settled happily and permanently in Floyd County. When we move from here, Lord willing, it will be in a pine box. We love it here; it feels right for us. But apparently, this slow lifestyle is not for everyone.

I recently found myself defending our decision to live in rural Floyd County. An acquaintance, newly transplanted to Blacksburg from a large Mid-Atlantic city, was lamenting her new "life in the sticks", as she called it. But she didn't live in real country--not in the middle of a university town. I felt obliged to educate her regarding "real" rural living as we know in Floyd County. You could see the horror on her face as I described our pleasantly isolated setting where there is only one traffic light in the entire county. "Where do you go to get STUFF?", she asked.

I described the twisting gravel road that we live on, at the far corner of this quiet county. "I bet it takes you forever even to get to the pavement. How do you stand it? Give me a traffic jam any day!" I swear she actually said this.

"Yes", I replied, "you can only go SLOW on our road, and that is why we like it. And traffic is never jammed in Floyd County."

I had the realization then that my new acquaintance was writing me off as "cull" from the fast, urban society of her experience and preference. I couldn't stand the heat of modern life, so I got out of the kitchen and "went rural". Gads! What if she was right? For days I was oppressed by a mood of self-doubt. Why had we abandoned the swift main current of society and opted for a life in the slow lane? What did this say about the time-values upon which we had built our family lifestyle ? Over the next week these questions ruminated some deep place just below the surface of conscious thought.

In our country life, we are as active as anyone anywhere. We can't be faulted for running away from things to do. But there is a difference between being busy and being hurried. It is hurriedness that our gravel road helps us to avoid when leaving home, an enforced kind of meditation that prepares us to enter the faster world in a slower state of mind.

We approach each blind curve with care, and on slowing down, notice the beautiful way that light streams through the hemlocks and the creek eddies under the rhododendrons. We would never have seen that on a fast road. As we return home one bend at a time, this winding road becomes a welcomed part of the detoxification ritual to bring down our blood pressure, calm our racing minds, and bring us to center again on the simple act of living here in the present moment. I imagine I am as busy as my city friend, but I know I am not as hurried.

The 90's was a decade afflicted with "hurry sickness" or "time urgency". The problem shows no sign of diminishing here in the new decade of palm-piloted instant gratification and mock-convenience at any cost. Society has one rate of life-flow; fortunately, we, as individuals and communities can have another. Where and how I live is and intentional step in my quest to "simplify, simplify, simplify" my life. I think of poor Mr. Thoreau, who exhorted us to "suck the marrow out of life". In his exhortation to live life fully he did not envision modern families cramming the maximum activity and consumption into every mile and minute, each effort and motion.

While my new friend claim success when she has filled in her Day Planner with no lines left empty for months ahead, I think I have successfully managed my time when I open up spaces in my calendar and they don't get filled in. Guess it depends on what one wants out of life. I think St. Augustine said that God wants us to have everything we want, provided we want the right things. Is a disposition that desires a slower pace of life, that seeks to avoid haste and tinsel a right thing, or a character flaw?

And so my thoughts ebbed and flowed, and I wondered if I this point of view was just one of my personal idiosyncrasies. It was good timing that I should happen to hear Sylvia Poggioli's piece on Public Radio that very week, and to know that I was not alone. There has been a movement in Italy during the past year to say NO to the American invasion of Fast Food into their venerable towns and cities. The Slow Food movement is organized into enclaves or "convivia" that approach the meal and food sharing as a metaphor for a city's or a region's soul. They hope to protect the meal as a convivial, shared experience, not merely the utilitarian digestive process it has become in much of our country. The issue is larger than a return to hedonistic enjoyment of local foods and wines, however.

What encourages me in this development is the next logical step of "slowness" that is also spreading from Italy, embodied in the "Slow Cities" movement. (Their objectives can be found online via your favorite browser search engine.) Many of the Slow Cities principles express a pace and value that seems to fit my time-values, and is shared by many, but not all, of my southwest Virginia neighbors. This point of view probably not held by my new friend who is more comfortable in a traffic jam, munching on a Biggie Fries.

The solution to hurry sickness is not in where one lives. One could live "fast" in the country, or "slow" in a city environment. It seems to be more a matter of individual and collective discipline and temperament than population density. Slowing down requires purposeful and difficult choices in our stewardship of time, and we must become less passive in this unspoken struggle between competing philosophies. The more we succeed at guarding ourselves from speed addiction, the louder the purveyors of façade and tempo will shout for our attention: bigger signs, louder ads, flashier graphics, gaudier plastic and neon, Happier Meals. Where does it stop, and when?

Can we and should we seek to protect our lives and our towns from the onslaught of haste and mock-convenience? For many communities, it is obviously too late. The pseudopodia of homogeneous bigness, hurry and urgency--the Chicken McNuggets counterfeits for sustenance of body and spirit--are already engulfing some of the more "developed" parts of our region. There is lots of STUFF in those places, but they are no longer "convivial". I pass through these places, but I do not tarry, and I sure don't want to live there.

If the Slow Cities philosophy or something like it should find support in our region, then I can hope that a healing correction might take place in the coming decade. Then, at least some communities may protect and maintain a more human rhythm, where solitude, quietness, genuineness, honesty and slowness might supplant the hype, noise, pressure, artifice and speed that have driven us in the past. We must make some hard choices. And some of you will understand: It's about time.

Posted by fred1st at 6:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)

Thanks to all you well-wishers re the Anni and weekend away. Did I mention this hoidy-toity get-away was compliments of our dear daughter, who two years ago, was appalled that we BOTH forgot, and determined that this year, we would REMEMBER! We did, and we will.

On the way home, we detoured along Route 58 that follows the Virginia Creeper bike trail from Damascus to Whitetop, stopping at Green Cove station--once photographed by Winston Link when the trains were still running on what has now become the bike path.

And before coming down mountain, we spent a short while at Grayson Highlands State Park, just to see if our legs would still pull us up to the top of Massie Gap for the view of Wilburn Ridge and Mt. Rogers. On the way down, we got seriously held up by berry-lust. The wild strawberries were at their peak, and once you get started treasure-hunting for the sweet red dots in the grass, it is almost impossible to stop!

Posted by fred1st at 7:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is our 34th wedding anniversary. As we woke up to the whippoorwill's call through the open window, I became aware of this symbolic testimony to our long lives together: the velcro of her black wrist brace and mine were intertwined as our arms lay there side by side under the cool sheets. But there were no teeth in jars beside the bed. No assistive devices were needed to reach the kitchen and the coffee pot. And I didn't have to get up and put my hair on. We've voted each other off the island a few times over the years, but stayed together as the cruelest form of getting even. I suppose, all things considered, for better or for worse, in want and in plenty, as spousal relationships go these days, we're in pretty good shape for the shape we're in.

We have some tiny travel plans for the weekend, so I'll be out of the Control Center here on Saturday. Meanwhile, if you want to follow me down memory lane, here's the way we were. Two years ago, I forgot our anniversary. Last year I remembered.

Y'all stay outta trouble, ya hear?

Posted by fred1st at 7:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

What few presentable images I brought back from the Giles County excursion Wednesday are now posted in their own gallery.

Giles County is just north of Montgomery County where Virginia Tech is located. It lies outside the Great Valley in the Allegheny Highlands and south of the coal geology in the southern part of West Virginia just to the north of Giles. The New River runs through the county, south to north. The county is also drained by Walker and Little Walker "Creeks" that would be called rivers in some places. They usually run clear and clean as there are few sources of pollution other than agricultural, and that very low-density.

I drove north to meet the landowner on his place, with a huge thunderhead approaching from the south. It caught up to me a few hours later while we were cruising his place and the adjacent farm in his 4WD. The rains finally came and ended our tour, but it did make for some dramatic lighting, as you see in the image excerpt above. For photographic purposes, give me roiling clouds any day instead of clear blue sky!

Posted by fred1st at 6:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I ran an errand Tuesday, and when I returned home, a van with government license plates was parked in the driveway. As I got of my truck wondering what was going on, Ann was coming out the door, dishrag in hand, to explain. This could not be good, I said to myself. I was wrong.

I had called the Department of Environmental Quality a few days earlier about concerns I had for some changes in our stream, particularly since the "oil spill" of last month. And someone--two aquatic biologists, actually, had come to do stream sampling. I found them up the road along Goose Creek with a dip net and stainless steel bucket, turning rocks and stirring up the bottom to dislodge, collect and identify immature insects--a great indicator of water quality.

Good news: no apparent damage, insect-wise, from the recent pollution. On the other hand, they could offer no better explanation for the recent periphyton growth (the slime that covers the rocks) than to blame it on recent rains.

"We have another creek (Nameless Creek) that got the same rainfall but doesn't show the algal growth (periphyton) and it still seems like possible waste discharge upstream" I offered. They are going to come back in a few weeks and sample Nameless Creek for a baseline. I'm pleased. I was also happy to be able to tell them about a possible siltation problem secondary to what is probably a flagrant violation by loggers just up the road. The DEQ folks said they'd check it out.

While on the topic of ecology and health of fresh water habitat, even though I know these topics are not widely appreciated among bloggers at large, let me tell you, by way of a snippet from a wonderful piece of work credited at the end of the piece, about a most marvelous freshwater mussel's strategy for making more of its kind: the orange-nacre mucket. Truly remarkable. (Read More clicking link below)

Soon it will be spring, and in a handful of southeastern rivers a freshwater mussel known as the orange-nacre mucket will once again fish for a home for its young. As if driven by some insane inspiration, this unpretentious looking invertebrate will package its young in a self-made fishing lure which looks like two minnows swimming side-by-side. The likeness is truly amazing. When conditions are just right, the mussel’s maternal instinct will instigate it to produce a long, clear, gelatinous line (up to eight feet long!) which it will attach to the lure. As the line is produced, the lure is payed-out into the stream, taking with it the lot of a future generation. Waving in the shallows of a clear stream, the line is nearly invisible, yet the lure is quite the opposite.

Under direct force of the passing water, and being further influenced by its invisible tether, the lure looks like and acts like two lovesick minnows — minnows who seem oblivious to their surroundings while carrying out a dramatic courtship dance. As the fishing continues the lure is noticed by a passing bass. Its reaction is startlingly quick. In a blink of an eye it charges and engulfs the lure. The force of being sucked in ruptures the lure and out spill the tiny mussels. At this point in their lives, each mussel is like a miniature mousetrap. As some of them contact the gills of the bass they snap shut, clamping onto their would be killer. Here they will live for a while, deriving some unknown need without which they cannot continue to develop. Eventually they will mature enough to drop off of the bass, and they will disappear into the stream’s bottom to slowly grow into adults.

Few know the wonderful story of the orange-nacre mucket. In fact, it was only recently discovered. The life history of this remarkable mussel hints at some possible reasons for its apparent scarcity. For example, could it be that the high levels of siltation which today so commonly cloud streams throughout much of the Southeast are detrimental to the fishing action of this species? If this is proved correct, then ultimately it will be through an understanding of the life history requirements of this species that the critical information needed to help ensure its survival will be identified.

Source: Preface to the online book, Aquatic Fauna in Peril: The Southeastern Perspective. This is a wonderful resource.

Posted by fred1st at 7:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Here is a snapshot from yesterday's photo-excursion to Giles County. I went to bring back pictures of Little Walker Creek. I did not go to be washed downstream in an SUV by Little Walker Creek.

"I'm pretty sure we can do this" he said, as if to reassure me.

But for a brief instant as the landowner eased his Explorer down the muddy bank into the swollen, muddy river; as I felt the force of the current shift a ton of metal subtly seaward--I quickly considered my emergeny plan. Would I wait until the vehicle came to rest against a hidden rock somewhere downstream, then if not submerged, open my window, climb onto the roof holding my camera high over my head, and scream for help? Or would I start screaming now and save the wait?

I did appreciate J taking his afternoon to transport me where the rabbits couldn't go yesterday. I was disappointed that the stream was so high and muddy because I had preconceived ideas of the shots I was going to bring back, and they all included the clear, green pools below the towering green ridges, the reflections, the motion of the current. I saw it all beforehand, and that just didn't work out. I have two or three I will keep, and may post them later, here or the gallery.

Posted by fred1st at 6:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

...of music, that is.

The zany gals of Blogliners have set up a radioblog. And, wait! What's this? A familiar voice.

Go to BlogLiners, click PLAY ME in the menu, lower right of the page . Wait for the song menu to load. Number one is first. Nate First. The resident Sprout, singing Wood on Wood, from a dormant CD demo of the same name (featured on Fragments once or twice before.) Enjoy. And thanks, Mistress Anne of Fishbucket.

Posted by fred1st at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The dog is on house arrest. No more wide-ranging, free-roaming daily walks for him for now. Too many baby deer around, and the scent is making him follow his nose far more than he follows his fellow-travelers. So we carry a hank of rope with us. He gets one shot at freedom. First violation, he goes on The Rope.

Seems like Da Dog has been starring in way too many recent posts here now that the spring wildflowers are past. This, soon to change, what with Fourth of July, the Floyd Street Festival and the weekend trip, more about which, later. Today, matter of fact, I'll be "on assignment" for the Land Trust (oh please Brer Fox, don't throw me into that brier patch!) It's been pegged as probably the choicest piece of land in the region under conservation easement. Pictures of the place are needed for several uses. Would I please go over to Giles County and meet with the owner of this land on Little Walker Creek and bring back some digital images?

Well darn. Somebody's gotta do it. (Stay tuned. Possible gallery pix ahead, mayhaps.)

Posted by fred1st at 7:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Where was I going in my gray tweed sportcoat and razor-creased charcoal slacks, you ask? Well, I was bound for the Blue Ridge Parkway, of course. Not the parkway of leisurely sightseeing, birdwatching or hiking, on no. The parkway of upscale dining, gifts, viticulture and schmoozing: the Chateau Morrisette Winery for lunch (at least a tie) and to meet with Congressman Rick Boucher and a committee of the chosen (the whole monkey suit).

Then why was I there, you may wonder, among the glitterati of Floyd and Patrick County? Because I learned of the meeting at the Partnership for Floyd meeting a few weeks earlier and wanted to be involved. I asked to be included, I thought, for the noon meeting. Instead, I was volunteering to be on the committee. Oh joy.

And on the task of that committee I feel certain I will have many occasions to write in the future. It is a BIG DEAL for the county, potentially for good, possibly with some far-reaching negatives if not undertaken with great care and sensitivity. It will result in hundreds of thousands of visitors stopping, shopping and consuming in these two mountain counties. It will bring in millions of dollars of revenue to this area, hard hit by the demise of textile jobs in recent years.

To paraphrase Congressman Boucher: "The Blue Ridge Music Center at Fisher's Peak is completed. The Interpretive Center at Fisher's Peak is well underway. It is time to turn our attention to the next major project for the highlands region: the construction of a significant facility at Rocky Knob on the Blue Ridge Parkway at the junction of Floyd and Patrick Counties that will become whatever you, the committee, tell us you think is the best use for this center. I have already put a bill before congress to appropriate the first 1.5 million dollars toward this project, and expect it to pass. I'm asking you to think large in this undertaking."

This facility will be some 8 miles as the crow flies from downtown Floyd. Two million travelers pass down the Parkway every year. Very few spend time or money here. That is likely to change. So might the slow-life laid-back ambience of this previously-undiscovered part of the world. Yes, I'd like to be a part of deciding the direction that this project goes. I'd even wear a coat and tie to do it.

Turns out, I was over-dressed. This IS Floyd County, after all. I ended up sitting at the table with the congressman, our local bank president, and the owner of the winery, among others. Just me and the congressman wore monkey suits. Everybody else was casually cool and comfortable. My only consolation was that, upon entering the large hall full of milling dignitaries, two folks who know me immediately pulled me aside, spun me around for the full view and proclaimed that I clean up nice. Perhaps. But not very often. Just enough to confirm I can still tie a perfect Windsor when I want to go some place in disguise.

I stopped at an overlook near the winery on my way home--a strange sight: a man in a coat and tie on the Parkwy climbs out of a dirty two-toned truck with a driver's door bashed in and the bed full of firewood scraps. His engine is running as he pans his Nikon D70 quickly for the shot. A green-gray silk tie is lifted by the wind. It repeatedly casts shadows across his viewfinder and blows into his face. He mutters curses at the ridiculous scrap of obligatory fabric. He puts down the camera, rips the tie from under his collar and feels like Superman in the phone booth. Ta Da! It's CountryMan!

Posted by fred1st at 6:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Stop shedding forever! DoggieNamel forms an impervious barrier to ticks, fleas and pesky cockleburrs!

This product is totally waterproof, so your pup stays dry even when swimming--he won't come in and shake water and wet dog hair on your fine furniture--ever again!

Dirty dogs? A thing of the past. Just wipe Rover off with a damp rag! Pet allergies? No more pet dander EVER! with DoggieNamel products in your home!

Available in a variety of colors so you can accessorize your dog to match your decor and whimsy!

DoggieNamel paints on easily with the convenient roller applicator (included) and dries in minutes!

This low odor, non-toxic, impervious body glaze is so revolutionary--you'll wonder how you and your favorite pet ever lived together without it! One treatment lasts 6 to 7 months!

Or, for a once-a-lifetime treatment, try PuppiEpoxy.

PuppiEpoxy is permanent, non-toxic, hard-as-nails, and will never fade. (Not recommended for growing dogs except for intentional bonzai-type dog-shaping purposes. See product insert for details.)

Posted by fred1st at 6:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

You might as well have asked me to put on a red-frizzy wig, yellow suspenders and a bulbous rubber nose. I felt like I was in costume this past weekend; a pretender; a complete counterfeit. But then, as my family will tell you, since the sixties, I've long bristled at "business attire".

First there are the carefully creased trousers one shouldn't sit down in lest they become wrinkled before the moment of The Grand Ostentatiousness (as a speaker, during an interview, or other dreaded "special" occasions). And of course, there is the matching dress coat or contrasting "sportcoat" (I can't for the life of me figure out where the sport in this is) that such occasions call for. There is no regard in this obligatory costume for the fact that the wearer is soaking the back of his expensive jacket with sweat during a formal hot-afternoon June wedding reception. And lastly, but most grievous, is the necktie.

It had been so long, in this sabbatical from social pretense as I have fallen into these past two years, I had already made sure that, if my hands did not remember how to follow each other through a "four in hand", I could refer to online diagrams to produce that stupid but perfectly puckered triangular knot constricted uncomfortably at my neck, shutting off what meager ventilation might help cool me under my itchy, thermally-enhanced summer dress coat.

I've often said: "The guy that invented neckties should by hung from a bridge with one of them." Turns out, it was Louis XIV that started this silliness--the cravat (from the word CROAT) that ultimately became this noose I wear around my neck when I want to pretend to be somebody. I had always thought this expensive piece of silk around my neck was foolish, but now, after I read the history of the necktie, I'm certain of it. And kids, this coming Father's Day, you know not to waste your money on a you-know-what for me, thanks.

So where was I going on Saturday so adorned? I guess that story will have to wait til another time since I've already used up your blog-reader 15 second attention span and you're not even reading this last paragraph. Are you?

Posted by fred1st at 6:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

The showy flowers of spring have passed, so many of them blooming unseen and even more, unphotographed. Once the overstory trees have leafed out, the spring flowers that grow low to the ground and quickly are vegetating in the shadows, storing up energy for next year's short display of bud and flower. But even now, when there isn't much color in the woods, along the pasture margins and roadsides, fall's flowers are coming on. They seem to grow more slowly, flower over a longer period, and many of the fall flowers, necessarily, are taller--to rise above the competing grasses to show their offerings of pollen or nectar to their preferred pollinators.

The county roads are graced with blues of chichory and the dark pink of sweetpea; whites of chrysanthemums and yarrow; yellows of ragwort and blackeyed Susan. The tall Joe Pye Weed with its whorls of lanceshaped leaves, isn't yet very conspicuous, even though it stands five feet tall all along our branch, out among the translucent green-stemmed touch-me-nots that will begin in a few months to dangle their odd orange flowers for the hummingbirds to drink from in mid-air. Autumn's flowers are already here, waiting for their turn.

This roadside plant pictured here is Aruncus dioicus or Goatsbeard. The individual flowers are less than a tenth of an inch across. Taken collectively, all the flowers (the inflorescence of the plant) give the appearance to me of Roman candle fireworks zizzing off in all directions. On our walk yesterday, it was the only blooming thing that offered itself for the lens. Soon, there will be more: much, much more.

Posted by fred1st at 5:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

The July-August issue snuck in well ahead of the cover date, as this magazine always does. It may have been here for a couple of days but I didn't discover it until I almost set my coffee cup down on it this morning.

There on page 48 is the sidebar story and three small photographs that came from my visit to Meadows of Dan back in April. If you're interested, read more by clicking "read more" below the picture. Or, of course, you could pick up a copy of Blue Ridge Country and get the whole story by my friend, Elizabeth.

Construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway changed life in the little community of Meadows of Dan back in the 1930s. Completion of a new four-lane Highway 58 will bring even more visitors to the area. But memories of Ed and Lizzie Mabry remain undisturbed at the little country church they attended and the cemetery where they are buried-both within a few miles of Ed Mabry's now-famous mill.

The fenced enclosure where the Mabrys are interred is officially called the Caney-Richardson Cemetery, though there are no signs to mark the small grassy plot. The cemetery contains perhaps twenty gravestones and is well-maintained by families still living nearby. Edwin B. Mabry's headstone is easy to find there. But the stone next to Ed is inscribed Mintolia L. Mabry. It was only after talking with a local historian that I confirmed that Mintolia was indeed Lizzie, the wife of Ed Mabry.

"Nobody ever called her anything but Liz or Lizzie", said Ben Harris, eighty year old life-resident of Meadows of Dan. Ben's family-especially his uncle Newt Hylton-was involved in much of the construction of the mill. Newt built the original water wheel. [*He poses here with a model of the mill he made in about 1955] "Uncle Newt got his picture taken a lot" Ben says with pride. He showed me one black and white taken by Appalachian photographer, Earl Palmer. "Mr. Palmer said Newt was as true a mountaineer as he could find, and of course he meant that in the good sense".

Uncle Newt, a blacksmith by trade, also built the "new" Concord Primitive Baptist Church from chestnut logs in 1908, according to Ben. The unadorned church welcomes a congregation once a month now. The recent addition at the front of the church brought plumbing indoors for the first time. The grounds of the church are spare but the built-in picnic and forty-foot-long covered dish and watermelon-cutting tables speak of busier Sundays past. You can imagine the Mabrys enjoying a pot luck meal with their neighbors after services before walking the mile home.

"When Ed and Liz got up in years, they weren't much able to do for themselves" Ben told me. "Matter of fact, though my folks didn't accept it, the Mabrys offered to give them the mill-everything-if they'd take care of the two of them those last years. The Mabrys are buried with the Richardsons, who helped Lizzie handle her affairs after Ed died."

Finding them:

Cemetery: Travel north from Mabry Mill on the Parkway about a half mile and turn on the first left (Fork Mountain Road). The cemetery is on the left in about a mile.

Church: Take the Meadows of Dan exit from the Parkway. Immediately upon exiting pass 614 then take an immediate right onto Concord Road (Rt 795). The church is a half mile on the left.

Posted by fred1st at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There have been some water quality changes recently on our stretch of Goose Creek. It could be related to the recent "oil spill" but I don't really think so. All the submerged rocks in the creek are covered with a brown slime. From my limited limnological experience, I'd say we are experiencing a bit of eutrophication--a fancy way of saying we got poo in the water. As in waste. Probably human. And this does not make me happy. You have seen the way the dog has taken to the water. Should the creek be coliform-contaminated, there could be health problems for all of us--dog and humans alike.

I've called the Department of Environmental Quality. I'm sure I'll have to call again many times to bring about action. But trust me: I can be a royal horsefly on the rump of the bureacracy 'til they get up and do what needs to be done.

Posted by fred1st at 5:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Today, or very, very soon, if I don't make a scarecrow or come up with some other deterrent gardening device, there will be one bean plant and maybe two corn stalks in the eventual garden. First, the daily rains wash the newly-planted seeds up to or onto the top of the soil--easy pickings for the feathered scavengers.

That's bad enough. What is worse, and what makes me think it is not true that only humans know malice, is that the birds come along and pluck newly-emerged seedlings from the wet soil. They don't even eat the seed-leaves off the little plant--just pull it up and deposit it in the garden row--TAKE THAT, YA FARMER! I have already replanted twice. They're evil. Evil I tell ya!

Posted by fred1st at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I have alluded to the fact that, when the dog dunks himself in the cold water of the creek, he gets a mite frisky. I offer this photograph as exhibit A, should there be any doubt.

Posted by fred1st at 6:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (1)

Thanks, all, for your suggestions, information and help with the newsletter project. I'm playing with a couple of programs other than Word and Publisher for the eventual task, but will need to be able to convert the file created here at home into some printable form at the office of the people that hired me to do the newsletter. The software I played with last night, in the end, would not convert to a PDF file using the freeware go2pdf; it garbled all the text except for the default font heading.

I'll start with Word and we'll see where we go from there. It is nice to have some hand-holding along the way. I do appreciate the benefit of your experience, kind Fragments reader-friends.

Posted by fred1st at 6:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A backroad vista, Floyd County, Virginia, in late May. Larger image is here.

With the reliable rains this year, the pasture grasses are tall, heavy with seed and ready for mowing. The pleasant winds that precede and follow the afternoon storms move the fields of grass like an invisible hand. After the storm, the air is free of tiny motes of pollen and dust and you can see from one side of Floyd County to the other.

Posted by fred1st at 5:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Four images of the barn (a couple of new ones) added to the gallery. Start here and click "Next" in the upper right hand corner of the images to go take a peek Inside the Barn (fourth image in this sequence.)

Posted by fred1st at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

...we'll see. A few may come. But in all likelihood, not as many as we had hoped.

The deadline for applications for the Father's Day essay contest is approaching. So is the end of the school year: final exams; SOL's; summer vacation: a A remarkably inauspicious time to expect school kids to write an essay on their own time. But then, the die was cast when I inherited this project. School ends Friday. Deadline for entries is Saturday so there will be a week to get the judging done. No way around it.

The consensus among the judges who met last night to discuss the actual procedure of judging was that, quite honestly, there may not be as many entries as there are prizes. I was encouraged that all were very supportive of the concept of community writing projects, even if convinced this one was the right idea at the very wrong time. We'll give it our best shot and try to put the best light on the writers and the fathers they honor with their words.

Posted by fred1st at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Evening meetings. I seem to have rather a few of them these past months. Who would think there could be this much going on in the sleepy little town of 400? Truth of the matter is that I welcome the opportunity to see what life is like at sunset up in the high country. Dusk is beautiful, too, down here in the bowl of our valley, but after about 5:00, we don't see the sun directly; we miss seeing the way it paints the hilltops and the yellows and reds that tint the clouds.

So, when I go, the camera goes. Here is a skyline not far from home. Matter of fact, I can find "near home" from many places in the county because of this large, conspicuous white golf ball that sticks up above the treeline on Cole's Knob. It is the NEXRAD radar tower for our area, about two miles, as the crow flies, west of home. Such a visible landmark it is that our friendly fighter pilots navigate down the ridge past it, over our valley, and into Carolina a few minutes later. It is our small sacrifice for world peace that we tolerate F16's appearing suddenly in the middle of our pasture walks--so low we can count rivets underneath the wings. There are always two. The first surprises us. We wait briefly, watching--not listening-- for the second. The sound doesn't reach us until they are well out of sight.

A few weeks back, one of the fighter jets crashed about 30 miles and 5 minutes south of us. Hit a flock of birds is what I heard. Pilots bailed out safely. Now that would have made for an interesting day if it had happened just moments sooner.

"F16 training flight crashes on Goose Creek, pilots parachute safely into a slender pasture and are greeted by a big yeller dog."

Posted by fred1st at 6:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

The WeatherBand radio told us the story. It was mostly north of us; and south; and east. We went to bed, but kept the radio beside us, just in case. We talked about where we would go if we knew a tornado was coming. We agreed we would not forget and leave ToTo upstairs when we went to the cellar.

Posted by fred1st at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Among other things they needed and hoped I could help them with was a beefed up newsletter. R went to the file cabinet and fished out the previous month's: a single page, one-column Word document whose most prominent feature was the fact that a couple of words were in BOLD type.

"They tell me that you can't put in a picture and make the words type around it in Word" she lamented. And she'd like columns but nobody knew how to do that. Sigh.

I don't know exactly what I can do for them, but I do have somewhat of a better sense of design and style than that! So, when she called yesterday to see if I would help, just for now with the newsletter, I said yes.

The first one will probably be just a more sophisticated Word document. But soon she wants to expand it to go not only to their staff of 70 but also to their referrals across the region. And to do this, I probably need to come up to speed with a desktop publisher software. Not been there, not done that.

Is MS Publisher the most logical choice (especially if it is a bird in the hand?) Are there other programs whose costs range from NADA up to FREE for the download that you would recommend? I have obtained Serif PagePlus 5 (which meets my cost criteria) but of course it lacks the standard MS Office icons and will be a bit steeper on the learning curve. Any experience with this proggie?

So, in a few days I'll receive a bulging envelope full of snippets and clippings and scraps of paper to turn into a newsletter, for which I will receive pay on a par with what I used to make mowing grass in high school. But hey--it's a challenge and will add a teeny bit to the Lens Fund. Replacing their old newsletters with something more spiffy may just be the final missing act that will lead to the Universal Equation! Or World Peace! A butterfly beats its wings, and all that. Ya never know.

Posted by fred1st at 6:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Okay, Marie. Here 'tis. She challenged me to capture both dog and his butterfly-prey in the same image. Sounds easy. But hey. You try it! As you see, the boy is moving right along--so fast that his back end tends to run up on his front end. One of these days, he'll go arse over teakettle, you can count on it.

To Tsuga, butterflies are his sheep. They constitute his life's work, his purpose, his raison d'etre and the object of his herding instincts. As working dogs, who, as the dog books say, "want to be involved in all family activity", when there seems to be no family activity, Labradors invent something to be engaged in. In our dog's case, it is chasing away the butterflies. Or, as I've told you, it is not so much the butterflies that get him riled as their shadows. In the picture, look where he's looking. It is high noon. The shadow is at his nose, directly under the insect.

The most absurd part of his OPD is this: when he loses the shadow, he has this theory that the creature has gone underground just at that point. As you see here, out yard is pocked with localized excavations just exactly where those pesky burrowing butterfly shadows have disappeared from view. So far, he has not pulled one out from below the surface, where the grass used to be. But it's early in the season yet. You just wait.

Posted by fred1st at 8:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Imagination is a peculiar place of the mind: a balmy desert island; a glowing cavern deep in the earth where dragons live; a jungle populated with talking animals. These places exist in childhood when our imaginations form much more of our understanding of how things could be than later experience informs us of how things, in fact, really are. Life is either much better or much worse in imagined places than the place where we live. Places that are worse than where we live make us happy for our own warm beds and even for our scolding mothers who are much more to be desired than the green-complected witches who lives beyond the dark forest in that other land. Better places--even if in a land far, far away--allow us to tolerate the annoying younger brother and the bully who lives at the end of the block, because someday, we'll be kings or knights or super-heroes; we'll find chests brimming with rubies and doubloons in a land of eternal sunshine and perpetual desert. Maybe then, we'll live in those imagined places, happily ever after.

Imaginary places are future places we have never been--beyond, above, below, or within other realities. We place our greatest hopes and greatest fears in imaginary places. Then we grow up, grow old and perhaps, lose our imagination, and too often, our hopes.

Once upon a time, after the boy had grown up, moved away and learned what science said the world was really like; after he had a family and a house--had lived in many houses, really, in many different places--he began a new job in an empty office. They told him about the warehouse where cast-off things were stored; he should go there to see if there was a desk or chair or goose-neck lamp he could use.

In a far, dark corner of the dingy old warehouse, covered in dust and obscured by filing cabinets and tall bookcases, was a picture on the dull water-stained wall. It was unlike any other picture the man had ever seen. In it were trees and sky and water--ordinary things, to be sure--but the man swore that he could see himself in the picture. Not really see himself as much in it as from it. He could enter the picture and look all around him--up at the sky, down into the water, at the plants in the forest that he knew by name. He remembered as a boy, in the land of his imagination, he knew of a place just like this one. The creek was full of fish. Under every log, a brightly colored salamander lived. Brilliant birds sang in the trees. And it was always different, each time he went there. The light shimmered in the leaves overhead--first leaves of spring, then late summer. At one moment it was sunny and fair, the next cloudy, threatening, smelling of rain.

And he knew he must have this imaginary place, inside its frame, above his desk in his new office.
It remained there on his wall for him to see, every day--good days and bad: days he was happy to be where he was and days he longed to find his place, out and far away from the jangled congestion and unpleasantness of noise and clutter; away from cities, hiways and shopping malls. He hoped someday to find this place where he spent so much time each day in imagination--on the banks of the silver creek under golden trees with the ever-changing sky overhead.

In time, he moved again. "One last time" he told his wife. And they moved into a small cabin in a beautiful country place. But it was not yet home to him. While he enjoyed his walks along the peaceful lane down to the edge of the mountain where he could see forever, there was not a trace of his beautiful creek with the silver sky that he knew from the picture. It now hung on the wall of their modest cabin. They had almost given up hope of finding the home they longed for. And just when they gave up struggling to find it, it found them.

At first glance, it was not a place the man even wanted to stop and inspect. The old house looked as if it might fall in from neglect. The land had been beautiful at one time, but the most uncaring of loggers had left behind little of that beauty. "No, No!" insisted the wife. "This is the place". She brought the man back many times over the next few days to see what it was there that called to her. One day they walked on the land through briars and tangles along a grassy road that had seen few if any travelers in many years. It followed the slender valley further and further back where the valley grew narrow. At last, they rounded a bend where the forest had grown tall and escaped the logger's axe. The trees arched over the creek. The creek full of bright fish glistened as if it were made of polished aluminum. Shadows dappled the dark earth under the grand old trees. And all at once, he knew.

"This is the place in the picture. This is the forest and creek I have dreamed of since I was a small boy. This is the country place I longed for all these years while the picture hung on my office wall, both taunting me and giving me hope that there was indeed just such a place." They moved to the place and they live there to this day. The picture is there, too, across from the hearth, above the old piano where its travels have come to a pleasant ending.

The man wondered the day he first saw the creek of his dreams--wonders still--had he not held this image in his mind and in his heart so tightly and with such hope all these years, would such a place as this have become real at all? Would this peaceful valley along the silver creeks even have existed for him to find? Did this place come into being by the power of imagination? This is a thing that he almost believes, and something that he will never know for sure.

"Imaginary Places" is the biweekly topic at Ecotone this time around. This is a true story where imagination finds reality. The picture above hangs over our piano.

Posted by fred1st at 5:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)