Fragments From Floyd

This. I want to remember this, I find myself saying of some fleeting combination of setting and internal state, some uncommonly memorable and simply ordinary moment that would otherwise be forgotten. Drop a buoy out here, now, I tell myself. Set a pile of stones on the trail exactly there. No one else will come back to find them, but you might, someday when you need to remember.

It comes from knowing there will not be many more of them, now that summer days have become a rhythm that only seems to go on forever. We take our evening meals on the front porch almost every night during the warm months. We fix our plates from the pots on the stove, just the two of us jostling for position at the big bowl of salad greens (some years, our own, but not this one). We spear a chop or chicken leg from the cast iron skillet, scoop up the vegetable of the day and toss a couple of cups of dry kibble in the dog bowl to throw him off our trail long enough to get situated on the front porch love seat facing the barn, the garden and the high road that disappears around the bend, west toward Daniels Run.

Last night, the butterfly bush was the meal's visual feature, teeming with swallowtails. Most now are without their swallowtails, tattered like loved books, lethargic, going through the motions, and motion left largely to some thirty skipper moths, that are always in a hurry. Surely they use as much energy as they gain from the nectar they take from the same white tubular flower just visited by the previous skipper not a half minute before. But nature knows best, I think, and before the dog came 'round from his quick meal on the back porch, I dug into mine: fried chicken, cranberry dressing, rice and gray, quartered tomatoes (little yellow plums) with Annie's Green Goddess dressing, and a medley of beans and peas, about which there is a story.

Our garden failed this year--totally failed--the greater disappointment since it started out like one for the record books. First came the hail storms and winds; then more than 10 inches of rain in three days brought a blight to the tomatoes. The moles and finally the deer laid waste to what was left. Only a dozen sunflowers survived. I lamented our losses here on the blog and someone was listening--someone I did not know a year ago, who knows this place far better than we do, their family place. She and her brother offered us an afternoon of bean-picking over at their family farm in a part of the county where we lived before we moved to Goose Creek.

Ann and I climbed in the truck one late afternoon this week, rising into the slanting sunlight that had left Goose Creek in shadow more than an hour earlier. We followed a familiar road between 221 and the Parkway, and turned into the long drive up to the brick house set well back from the road. We followed our friends up the four-wheel pasture that rose gently back and forth across the contour lines, climbing two hundred feet to the garden at the top of the ridge-a fenced fortress that had successfully kept out both the deer and the grazing cattle. In a half hour, we had the bucketsful of four varieties of beans and peas it would take to fill the canner twice. But here, I'll confess, I was thinking more about where I was than about our purpose there. While three bent figures picked, I pondered, taking in one more small moment, a geographic mental snapshot to hold for a rainy day when we cannot climb mountains.

In my ten years of driving the county roads, I've imagined myself transported magically to the peaks of so many Floyd County ridge tops where I'll never go. Beam me up there, Scotty, so I can see what this valley road looks like to the hawks and buzzards. Lift me higher to gain perspective, to put our tiny house and valley, our busy spinning lives into the larger context of county, country, planet and cosmos. I won't see the view from most, but I was blessed by the perspective from this one hilltop garden, looking down for a short moment on wooded ridges of summer leafery, on emerald greens of pasture corn and cut hay and the lines of lazy county roads winding in and out of view, a thin piping across an upholstered tapestry of blue ridges.

This. I want to remember this: the kindness of friends, the sweet air of summer front porch meals, the failed garden, the butterfly bush and the heron that fed in the creek over by the barn while in our deep valley we enjoyed the bounty from a high and beautiful place. It is so little, and it is so much, and I don't think now that I will forget.