March 25, 2005
En Route to Sea Grove, near Pottery, N. C.

“How about if my baby in my belly died and you were the only one who knew. O.K.? Let’s p-tend.” Ah, the whispered life of four-year-olds. Then just as soon all attention goes back to the tandem grooming of their matching white unicorns. Bindi and Kaelyn, mirror image Ackermann’s in so many ways. Sharing toys, “Oh Honey, what have you been doing today. I’ve got to brush your hair again; it’s so snotty today. Are you ready for your lessons? You know I’m so angry with you, my daughter. Now I’m snuggling up with you cause you ate a good dinner and I’m giving you a candy an tomorrow we’ll go to Disney Land and get you a lot of candy. But you’ve got lemon in your hair.”

Meanwhile, we’ve got ideas of death and dearth of our own. A nice big headstone with one name, Bland. A white poaching bloated deer roadside. A new spring lawn mowed down. A magnolia so wanting of sun that it might lay back to branch. A foot walk’s worth of daffodils so bright, but waiting to be trod or parked upon. A pretty yellow house with a crescent of matching workshops and a sign, “Faith Cabinet Works.” God in every drawer I suppose. A hollow laid low under that fettuccini of gray hair again. “It must be the Kudzu,” I remark to Ilse, hoping she’ll notice that I’m doing well in my schooling of flora that she’s so good to give me. I continue, “It must get all over its host in that embrace and then smother, smother until it’s host dies and the tangled Kudzu with it.” She parries, “Or it’s just hibernating.” And we pass on.

Ducks on rain ponds shriveling slowly toward summer. Goat mothers laid up sideways like child-sized mounds. Sleeping calves, their heads turned back on resting shoulder blades, as if broken back says my city eye, cowering from the lucky butcher. All the fields, now cute with small sheep or one Brahma bull, are all fields that might be battlefields – O! How I long for more history. A cute little white kitty in a jumble of its own cranberries, fetal near the centerline. A lonely A frame mobile home with big windows and no one in it. In fact, that’s the deathliest part, not a soul to be seen anywhere except for one corpse of a woman dragging from a butt on her impoverished porch off the lee side of her strip home. Rusted bus hulls beside foundering hay lofts. Empty parking lots of churches, Solid Rock Baptist Church, Kind Cross, White Steeple. A graveyard with is stones all festooned in ribbons and flowers like so many winners at a pony show. A wrecking yard outside Jugtown. Hulls upon hulls giving unto clear-cut swaths of the reddest earth.

Everywhere and everywhere, mobile homes, as much a blight as the Kudzu. The placement of a mobile home upon the land almost certainly ensures the withering to mulch of any other structures of ancestry still on that chunk of lot. There’s an amazing lie being passed down to the new generations, one that says vinyl will keep out the elements forever, the chicken coop will keep, the shed is leaning and don’t never mind, pappy’s old place is gone swayback too, and with pappy still in it – ain’t it all how it really looked! – and don’t you never mind no how. Yes, some houses, though so empty with neglect, looking like they must somehow be inhabited despite the tilt and toothlessness of the lost mortar between old timbers and you’d never think but for story books some old hobbit would therein lay up but for the small smoke rising from a bent chimney.

IMG_1976, originally uploaded by MeenoPhoto.

Imagine the susurrous rustle when there was leaves and when there were fields of sleeping soldiers.

IMG_1918, originally uploaded by MeenoPhoto.

I’ve got to imagine this was a favor, built in plumbing…..

IMG_1833, originally uploaded by MeenoPhoto.

Virginia Tech has been watched over by these trees since it was a military acadamy, a fortress two thousand feet up the Appalachia spine.

IMG_1910, originally uploaded by MeenoPhoto.

How I sympathise with the Gentle South and the North’s school taught moral superiority. Hell with it, I’m a California Man.

IMG_1937, originally uploaded by MeenoPhoto.

We bring our own trees for fruiting, and how our magnolia blossoms!

IMG_1897, originally uploaded by MeenoPhoto.

From this here Godhead do all my waters flow. I am a blue jacketed aggressor swarming on a single stead toward this belle on her bellum porch. Fortunately, she’d have me.

IMG_1889, originally uploaded by MeenoPhoto.

Venus and Birth et al.

March 24, 2005
Virginia, just the bottom edge of it heading back to Chapel Hill

6:45pm on a small road, our favorite kind, the kind that make America so kind, toward Mt. Airy, Maundy Thursday, Spring making long and lingering of the light, still blue and suffused through these easy rolling Appalachians as if it mighten’d get dark at all. A young white calf breaks into a run towards its mother, that stiff high assing cow’s canter.

From Floyd in the last of the cool and butter warmed sun before the sun goes lower in the fine haired trees like the trees that you might find in Robert Penn Warren’s mind when he conjures up Cass Mastern’s time beneath them, quietly at his journals at night after war “by the dying campfire in some bivouac while the forms of men lay stretched on the ground in the night around and the night was filled with a slow, sad, susurrous rustle, like the wind fingering the pines, which was not, however, the sound of wind in the pines but the breath of thousands of sleeping men.” And we follow along through all these trees southward toward the N. Carolina boarder where instantly things want to be farmed and pushed down flatter and then at a bend you come across the most impossible lawn ornament acre, a sloping hillside parcel rising up to the horizon and the trees with gray sculptures waiting for homes and finishing. You can buy any genus of creature from griffin to gargoyle to mermaid birdbath or even a life-sized baby elephant; and if you accord the vendors any influence over’n yer aesthetic you’d paint that big mother pink. And as we descend through this flattening canyon toward Flat Rock there must be something to the rock in the soil here – everywhere, different species of rock, like India with its regional cows and sanctities – because, though none as fantastic and choked as that high country plantation of lawn fancy, there seem to be more of these types of awkward and front yard littering cottage industries using the goods of the earth for their kitsch quaint wares. And why not? It’s more and more like the Far East here with its homey and regional redundancy of commerce, whole villages given over to batiking…. Only there is a massive dearth of cottages here. Mostly it’s box homes with siding, and oftener an old beautiful place that’s crumbling to sod while a single-wide sits idylly by as the frontage anchor to a vortex of all life’s broken litter, just trash strewn everywhere in the post plastic era when the effluents will outlast the cultures that spat them out. The funny thing about all the pottery-esque lawn decoratives is that there are none to be found on any of the lawns of any of the homes anywhere for miles. How, in this regard, do they know any better?

Then just as the dark completely falls it’s Mt. Airy, the mythical Mayberry. Andy Griffith has a playhouse here, a parkway, several waterworks and an electric utility. It is in actuality the place where all things come to be reborn after death. Wherever they may die, they have hope of resurrection here in one of the two thousand thrift shops in the town of 500 people. Ilse and I make a pact to come back the two hours on the 52 some time soon for treasure hunting.