Sudye Cauthen's Southern Comforts

WAKING UP IN THE FLOODPLAIN

2011-06-24T12:56:00.001-07:00

Dear Reader,

I am slowly being dragged into the 21st century and I celebrate every little milestone. Actually, the North Florida Center for Documentary Studies, Inc. website genius, Victoria Van Arnam, is dragging me and, so, today's milestone is really hers.

My prizewinning essay, "Waking Up in the Floodplain" is available for downloading at amazon.com; IT COSTS 99 CENTS. The essay chronicles hours spent in and around my stilt-legged house in the floodplain of Florida's famous river during the flooding, winds, alligators, canebrake rattlers, and several other surprises that arrived with the hurricane, Jeanne, a few years ago. It was a phenomenal experience for me, a moment-to-moment survival exercise; it was also difficult and very beautiful. Enjoy!

scauthen
24 June 2011

BOOK EVENT IN HAWTHORNE, FL

2011-06-06T10:16:00.000-07:00

THANKS TO THE LABORS OF GUYLENE RESUE,

I'm looking forward to meeting friends of the work, THE SALVATION OF MAGGIE RIDER: Stories from Nokofta

and SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place at:

2 P. M. Hawthorne Branch Library, Hawthorne, FL - Saturday, 11 June 2011

The HAWTHORNE BRANCH LIBRARY has partnered with the

HAWTHORNE HISTORICAL SOCIETY which will host a RECEPTION immediately following the reading.

I'm looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones. This is my last scheduled event for the calendar year 2011.

MEMORIAL DAY - SUWANNEE RIVER -- 2011

2011-05-30T17:40:00.000-07:00

Nice breeze below on the deck. Dark comes on. It was a pretty day and here's Robert Baxter's memorial photo:

NORTH TO READ MAGGIE RIDER IN GEORGIA!

2011-03-17T19:59:00.000-07:00

Stood under a tree in the dark tonight, a tree in front of the Annette Howell Turner Center for the Arts, there near the fountain that babbles out of a brick wall, although tonight it wasn't dribbling. The place was heavy with wisteria scent, however; it hangs over the entrance, makes entering unforgettable.

I was studying the tree which was almost imperceptibly leafing out, its hairlike (or threadlike) growth only a weak stubble along its limbs. Took me a few minutes to notice the tree's trunk: Chinese Elm, know it anywhere.

[Grumble, grumble here bcs I can't download a photo but YOU MUST SEE THIS, so go to WIKI and dbl click on a photo of the elm's bark. Go to Shutterstock + Chinese Elm photo + "bark" and see this for yourself or at Wikipedia ask for Ulmus parvifolia]

I didn't read from the book Maggie Rider there tonight, but the tree was gorgeous against tonight's moonlit sky; wanted to pass that on. As for the reading, thanks to Mr. Eric Mathis at South Georgia Regional Library, I'll be reading at his institution on the 2nd of April, a Saturday not far off.

Come to Georgia, dear Reader. We'll have a good time!

scauthen
late wednesday night

PERSONAL SCULPTURE

2011-03-11T14:54:00.000-08:00

(dbl click on photos, please)

I picked up this book, PERSONAL SCULPTURE, by Geoge H. Meyer (1992) at our branch library in WHite Springs this afternoon; the library was my final stop of several, including the front door of Spring Street Antiques (shown above). I'd been around back, photographing what I assumed was the worst of the damage from Tuesday's fire; after all, the water oak had demolished the back half of the roof and set the fire, scattering blackened furniture and silverware all around. Howard Tower who, with his wife, Patti, owns the property, was poking through the trash beyond the "GET BACK" rope between us.

Howard said this was "an act of God"; but in White Springs we have lost our beautiful shop--this lovely museum where light fell through yellow glassware, shone on cases of old silver, lit jewelry queens must have worn--an especially hard happening since, already, in the past few months The River Diner with 4 seasons of Suwannee Valley painted on its walls went out of business; the family grocery run by the Stormants closed and, earlier, Janet Moses had shut up her artsy and curious shop. Even the consignment store I'd thought would do well in these hard times folded. That left the fire station, the post office, and SPRING STREET ANTIQUES, always a welcoming place, whether I bought or not, the prettiest establishment on the main drag, and in a house that had survived the 1911 fire that took out dozens of houses and hotels.

There are still concrete yard sculptures on the grounds, undamaged, but Howard says they will sell the lot, the house is ruined. I got quite a shock when I walked around front; at a distance it had appeared intact but, up close, everything beyond its purple door was black. Fire might be said to sculpt, though I don't think the charring of wood here was as deliberate as the creation of what we usually call sculpture. Here, the timbers are shiny and ringed as though bitten by the teeth of the fire. That's a leap, but look at the proof:

On the day of the latest tsunami and one day after the news that, at the state capital, putting golf courses into state parks like Payne's Prairie and San Felasco Hammock is being considered, the sad fact of this burning house which held so many beautiful things--this black shell--doesn't put me in the mood to credit a god. But maybe I'm just discouraged by all the other damage collecting on the planet. Seems to me humankind creates a lot of misery, all on its own, though often we give credit to God. This is not in any way to disagree publicly with Howard who meant, I believe, that he accepted the event completely. Would that all our disasters were so patiently embraced.

In this book I picked up are many beautiful sculptures--handmade walking canes: one twisted like a handbraided bread, another with glass eyes embedded, eight small snakes climbing the big snake of the cane itself, the handcarved neck of a guitar, a topless mermaid as the handle on a cane. Canes of willow, maple, beech, polychromed and not, some with names, though rarely. All these designs were made deliberately, over centuries, their shapes and sheens various, imaginative, surprising. I photographed the upturned bottom of the water oak that slammed Spring Street Antiques and took it down. Didn't see a single deliberate mark on it, anywhere, and the photo isn't interesting enough to put here.

There's so much I don't understand, just grateful for eyes to see what's going on, to take in the beauty along with the pain and be glad of the seeing. Speaking of which, here's 2011's first red tulip, opening downstairs this morning:

WILD! THE WILD YELLOW MUSTARD*

2011-03-08T17:38:00.000-08:00

(dbl click on photos, pls)

Too tired yesterday, coming from Live Oak, to capture these sights for you, so just before dark tonight I struck out, north on CR 25A. Drove past the small houses, the large houses, the horses, this field of wild yellow mustard

and rows of dried cornstalks in a darkening field. Was I documenting the coming of spring or the end of winter? It all goes so fast.

And I probably drove too fast. Checked my tires when I got back and will check them early tomorrow because I parked on the shoulders of the road; in my experience, that's not a good practice. But how else to get the red samara,

the sun dropping like a fiery pendant into the Florida horizon?

Such an enlivening occupation, photographing sights we drive by and often don't notice. Glad I took the time; it made my day.

*CORRECTION: Even though it is commonly called mustard (probably because it looks like mustard greens gone to seed), this plant is actually WILD RADISH,Raphanus raphanistrum L. (Thank you, Allen Tyree.) See http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fw032

THE NEW RULING CLASS

2011-03-04T18:05:00.000-08:00

WHEN THINGS DON'T GO RIGHT

. . . maybe they'll go left. What a strange week this has been! A huge paperwork deadline I nearly killed myself for, then got up the next day and looked at the calendar and realized I'd met the deadline a day early!

Still, piles of paper everywhere. Sometimes, I just stack them at right angles and pretend I know what's there.

THE RISE OF THE NEW RULNG CLASS in Atlantic Mag quotes one of the jet set's richest who suggests that for every American who falls out of the middle class, 2 or 3 people in other countries get to move up. This challenges me quite a bit, my thinking, I mean. Especially since the jet setter's situation only gets richer.

I'll back off that subject and just stop for the photo of a "volunteer." When locals call a plant this, they are indicating they don't know its name and they don't know how it got here. This sweet item grows in clumps at the entrance to my house.

Now, March. That means 1/6 of 2011 is gone.

SPRING, SPRANG, SPRUNG!

2011-02-28T15:07:00.000-08:00

I don’t think you want to hear about the frustrating interruptions, those writer’s complaint become cliche’. Maybe, though, a brief report on the hundred gray limbs of bare trees scribbling at the sky beyond my desk window, or a glimpse of the first unfurling green fern—a bracken

—and the tentative opening on the Opal Miller Worthy Memorial Pear Tree,

pink pistils visible only with the zoom lens, the brief shouts of green from all around the yard

and, wonder of wonders, the Yellow Jessamine in yellow puffs against the lightening of the sky; maybe you would like to see these.

Signs of spring are here but, in contrast, the cypresses on the opposite bank of the Suwannee--even though they have today's last sunlight--stand in dark opposition to a change of season.

The wisteria, too, holds tight its buds, its brown ropes of vine, not giving, not yet.

And, here, in front of me, oblivious to the changing of winter into spring is His Royal Highness, King of Lot 22, Thomas Branford Caramel Cauthen:

CLEARING THE DECKS! THE CALENDAR!

2011-02-27T17:19:00.000-08:00

CLEARING THE DECKS, THE CALENDAR!

Jan and Feb are a blur; please, let March not be a blur. Let it be discrete hours within discrete days, each opening like the first magnolia blossoms on Fraternity Row at Ole Miss, those plate-sized white blossoms I stole for a grand occasion.

TODAY, I saw this little fellow in the roadside grass:

Within each day of this hallowed March, let me write something worth the time and trouble and insistence and frustration incurred in clearing the March calendar to make possible that writing.

THIS AFTERNOON SPENT WITH JOSIE MICHELLE WATKINS ON THE DECK:

I have everything here that I need: eyes, brain, hands, keyboard, IMAGINATION. I have characters walking around this house, talking to themselves. They are saying things about having been neglected far too long. I am afraid of mutiny, certain they consider abandoning me for some more faithful writer, one who got her books all written and published when she was younger, never letting anything get in the way.

[Photo of white blossoms by Robert Baxter of Suwannee Bend in north Florida]

BEYOND MY WINDSHIELD:

2011-02-25T18:46:00.000-08:00

SPRING, 2011
RED MAPLE SEED PODS

MAUVE OF THE REDBUD TREES

WHITES OF THE PLUM TREES

YELLOW PINE POLLEN 1/2 INCH THICK ON THE WINDSHIELD ITSELF!

COME SUNDAY! Meet MAGGIE RIDER & FRIENDS & hear LLOYD BALDWIN'S MUSIC

2011-02-18T20:16:00.000-08:00

J Rifkin on Human Possibility

2011-02-16T19:37:00.000-08:00

"If human nature is materialist to the core--self-serving, utilitarian, and pleasure-seeking--then there is little hope of resolving the empathy/entropy paradox. But if human nature is, rather, at a more basic level, predisposed to affection, companionship, sociability, and empathic extension, then there is the possibility, at least, that we might yet escape the empathy/entropy dilemma and find an accommodation that will allow us to restore a sustainable balance with the biosphere.

A radical new view of human nature has been slowly emerging and gaining momentum, with revolutionary implications for the way we understand and organize our economic social and environmental relations in the centuries to come. We have discovered Homo empathicus."

SURPRISE! OLD ASSUMPTION IS WRONG!

2011-02-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

THE RACE TO GLOBAL CONSCIOUSNESS---as our resources are running out.

Don't miss this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g

OH, ISN'T IT BEAUTIFUL?

2011-02-15T17:06:00.000-08:00

The world, this Florida-on-the-Suwannee, late-afternoon world, I mean; all movement and color, gnarled oaks' limbs dipping in the wind. The wind, invisible presence that it is, amazes me. At end of day, from under an electric blanket, I survey the blue and saffron ribbons criss-crossed by the dark lines of the trees' arms against the sky. On my queenly couch 12 ft off the ground, I lie back and watch the day wind down; it has been a day of egg-yolk yellow pansy faces, a raking of pinestraw adn hanging of laundry, stripes of sunlight on the boards of the deck, one small wren pecking at the window after I came in.

Far in the west, the sun lowers itself, inch by inch, toward the forest of the Florida interior that is my horizon. At 6:00 P.M., it illuminates the greens and golds of the stained glass window Mama got from the Alachua Baptists' old yellow brick church when it was torn down in the 70s. Mama's 1918 baptism was the first inside those yellow walls.

Although I grew up in the countryside, my love of the natural world must have been reinforced at First Baptist where I sang songs like "This is my Father's world/I rest me in the thought/Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas; His hand the wonders wrought."
[]

Indeed, this evening I couldn't help wondering just how often observers must attribute the invisible stirrings of the wind to God. Years back, a neighbor here on the Suwannee confided that she had prayed Katrina away from us; mmm, I thought, probably shouldn't tell that. What should one tell? How much?

Tonight I'm paying homage to my beginnings, thanking the Baptists for that song I sang so demurely, never picturing hurricanes, alligators, or canebrake rattlers, never realizing I would come to love the power of storms as well or better than placid days of sunshine. But, I do; I love the surprise, the danger, the reminder that I am small, just a part of the whole wide world, a speck in the cosmos. Or is it cosmi? Cosmoses?

My childhood sureness is long gone, but my wonder, my delight in mystery, my curiosity are far more thrilling than I ever could have dreamed, standing next to a window inside the yellow church with gold and green shadows falling over me.

IT'S A PARTY! introducing MAGGIE RIDER & FRIENDS

2011-02-10T12:07:00.000-08:00

EVENT: 20 FEB 2 pm. ALACHUA LIBRARY. We are FIRM for the book event. Lloyd Baldwin will be there with his Old Time Tunes. Refreshments.

GLORIOUSLY GLUM DAY ON THE SUWANNEE

2011-02-07T11:11:00.000-08:00

Listening to the long, fat drops . . no, plops, more like the thickness of pancake batter than rainwater, falling softly, steadily, in lines of clear, fat elliptical circles from the edge of the porch roof, each drop mirroring this world of deck, river, trees, the cat, Thomas, on my chest, the cardinal's bath; but this is a fake picture because it doesn't show the squirrels, my personal tribe of two million that for the moment are out of sight.

The cat adjusts his position, obscuring the paper on which I am scrawling these words and I push him down. Looking over his back, I continue writing from beneath an electric blanket on my cozy porch couch. Thomas settles; clearly, he thinks I am his.

The sky has melted and is falling, soaking the roof, the ground, sending tinny sounds from the birdfeeder. Holly, pine, oak, blackgum, birch, and sweetgum, a few yellow faces of pansies in their pots; this is a gloriously glum day on the Suwannee.

In this cold I am wearing not a feathery boa but, in addition to the blanket, a hat and this live furry drape. Otherwise, the raindrops large as hands and their wet chill would go all through me. Thus protected, I can experience weather I'd otherwise shudder at and turn away from.

. . . . It's stopped and I've come to the computer. Out the window in front of me crystals hang from bare limbs. I hope you can see them in this photo, looking north from my front door. I took it just for you. Double-click and you'll be here.

scauthen
7 Feb 2011

THE MUSIC COMING AT ME

2011-02-06T17:56:00.000-08:00

They say it's the visual music of spring--these red, winged seeds (R. Baxter's photo) on the maples, high against the sky. Heard a preacher say this morning that mockingbirds and pecan trees are also signs of spring; not only the legendary groundhog. And as gray and cold as these sunless days are lately, one could almost wish for spring to be here tomorrow. Except for one thing: as the poet A. E. Housman put it in this poem below, every spring that comes is one less left for me to experience.

The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,
One season ruined of your little store.
May will be fine next year as like as not:
But ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.

We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

It is in truth iniquity on high
To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave,
And mar the merriment as you and I
Fare on our long fool's-errand to the grave.

Iniquity it is; but pass the can.
My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;
Our only portion is the estate of man:
We want the moon, but we shall get no more.

If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours
To-morrow it will hie on far behests;
The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours
Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

A.E. Housman

For my part, I'd rather it come on a little more slowly. I'd rather spend a few more weeks contemplating the severe black lines against the sky that are bare limbs, those "tangled bine-stems" of Thomas Hardy's poem, "The Darkling Thrush."

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

For green, today I settled for the loblolly pine,a line of Christmas tree shapes near the end of the driveway. I snatched a handful of needles, crushed them, and held them to my nose; yessir, just as I thought, the scent hauled me back to the holidays when I was small, when my sister and I crawled on our hands and knees into the glorious scent of that magical time. Pinus taeda--

INTRODUCING MAGGIE RIDER & FRIENDS

2011-02-05T19:53:00.000-08:00

North Florida Center for Documentary Studies, Inc.
PRESENTS THE BOOK
THE SALVATION OF MAGGIE RIDER: Stories from Nokofta

SUNDAY 2:00 p.m. 20 FEBRUARY – ALACHUA LIBRARY

Alachua native and author of Florida Book Award Winner SOUTHERN COMFORTS Sudye Cauthen
Music --Refreshments
Readings from Maggie Rider, Southern Comforts, and her
next book, Voices from the Place of Our Remembrance
North Florida Center for Documentary Studies, Inc. – www.sudyecauthen.com - 386-397-1284 – cauthen4196@earthlink.net
Visit us on Facebook and at sudyecauthen.blogspot.com

NOTICE OF EVENTS: 12 FEB - ALACHUA, FL LIBRARY

2011-02-05T19:43:00.000-08:00

WRITE. WRITE IT NOW!
Tips, Tricks, and Techniques for the Writing Life

This is a workshop about incorporating writing into our busy lives: how to keep the words coming, whether poetry, fiction, or nonfiction; exercises to sharpen skills of observation; openings and closings. The creation of memoir and its rewards, syntax, tone, flashbacks, and the centrality of yearning. The value of timelines, recognizing soft underbellies, and feeding the muse. We will come away excited about language.

SOUTH, TO BREVARD: SAMARA, SAMARA, and BLUE SKY

2011-02-01T16:21:00.000-08:00

I was gone 3 days, 2 days on the road, 450 RT miles of road construction, devastated countryside, highways, interstate traffic, road repair, subdivisions, McMansions crowded like peas in a pod.

Florida was a beautiful state once and I suppose it still is, in places, for those who fly in and stay on a beach but I, and thousands of others, who live in the interior, have to fight one another’s cars for access to our waters and legendary sunsets, for the sight of Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis)

the Red Snapper (Lutjanus campechanu)

and Great Barracuda (Sphyraena barracuda)

. The roads I traveled were thick with cars driven by some who live here, some who merely visit, and those, like me, who realize what we are seeing as we rush up and down the state isn’t what we came for. It’s not the Florida that’s advertised and it’s not the Florida that used to be, most assuredly not the one where my grandparents wintered on Marco Island in a little fishing cabin lit by oil lamps.

Driving U. S. 1 toward the "Space Coast," I passed through many small communities decorating each end of their city limits with imported palms: Are they importing the Everglades and Florida Silver Palms, the Florida Royal, the Washington Palm, bringing the "Florida look" of advertising north? Every time I observe this replacement of natural landscape with palms, I wonder who has connections at the road department. Palms have, I suppose, become synonymous with “Florida,” but, honestly, we do have other trees.

Mostly, I saw cars, traffic lanes, food franchises, and gas stations, but I did twice pass over the vast blue of the St. Johns River; and, oh! how I'd like to travel its length with Bill Belleville, author of RIVER of LAKES: A Journey on Florida's St. Johns River. I also drove twice through the

potato fields of Bunnell where, on either side, rows of green plants alternate with rows of black soil, one site on this route that’s stayed the same over my lifetime. Someday, I’ll drive Hwy 100 and see condos in those potato fields; maybe actors decked out as Timucuans, paddling their dugout canoes in the St. Johns, posing for tourist photos.

I made this trip—averaging 30 mph on the way down to Brevard County—to see a convalescing friend, my father-in-law, Lee Covell, who came with Northrop to FL from California for the Snark Program of the 1950s at (what was then known as) Cape Canaveral. When Covell helped build John Glynn’s capsule for the first manned flight, he and his coworkers made history. I briefly worked in the space program myself, long ago during its early, glorious first days. I watched Neil Armstrong blast off on his trip to the moon and in 1967 I stood, transfixed, in my infant son’s room, hearing on the radio that astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee had just died in a fire on the launching pad.

It happened that during this recent visit I was in Brevard on the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, that day in 1986 when, on the TV screen, a space capsule in a smoky sky broke in half. This week, in between news reports of street demonstrations in Tunisia and Cairo, commentators repeated the names of those who died in the Challenger; again and again, I heard Ronald Reagan say of the astronauts that they had “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”

Covell is still verbally quick and humorous, but he’s fighting for what’s left of his health and independence; shuttled to appointments on weekdays, he falls asleep with his head on the dining table, suddenly, in the middle of a sentence. For his country, he fought in the Pacific during World War II, and considers himself lucky to have been hit by a grenade, awakened on a hill some distance away, and sent home, alive. I wonder what he would make of world events now--the riots in Cairo today, the tank that swung into view on the TV screen as I ate my restaurant breakfast.

I am overwhelmed by the sense that history's tides routinely sweep me onto a beach, pull away, then lift and drop me again. Lee Covell’s memories of Titusville, Cocoa Beach, and Melbourne in the early 1950s are even older than mine. He was there when beachfront went for $35 an acre, before the Indian and Banana River bridges were cluttered with traffic and motels mounted fake satellites on their roofs, when the Apollo 12 astronauts drove Corvettes, and Covell’s grandson was allowed to order speared hummingbirds at Bernard’s Surf.

I was young once and so was my father-in-law; in fact, I realize now that he was still young when I thought him old, when we first met in 1961. The old could tell the young how beautifully the land once lay before us, the rattle of palms in the wind and the plop of large fish off starboard. Though I saw no ocean and very little natural landscape, as I drove I did look up as much as I could into the swath of blue above the road and on both sides saw the silver tops of bare trees interspersed with red samara, the winged seedpod of the Red Maple.

Those scarlet flags were everywhere I went, silver, red, and blue, above and on either side of me, up I-95 and inland on 100, all the way home. Over all those cell phones, the torturous traffic, airplanes, construction equipment, and moldy roadside motels, I am firmly imposing the memory of those maples flashing their red tops against a pure blue sky.

BRRR COLD FOR MY BIRTHDAY

2011-01-12T17:10:00.000-08:00

It’s brrrr cold outside, but I decided to walk, anyway. No time to look for my gloves. I just wound the mauve cashmere scarf my friend Eva sent around my neck and stuck the red hat on. Down to the mailbox and back with a load of mostly worthless mail; a birthday card from Frank Martin, showing an old lady leaning on a stick with a donkey trailing along behind her; the card read, “Just because you’re old, doesn’t mean you can’t have a fine ass.” That’s debatable, but it’s true tomorrow is my birthday. I figure this is as good a time as any to resume blogging.

After the mail, I gathered the laundry from the line by the river which, below me, was all black and white—and cold. I’m certain it’s cold down there. When I glanced toward my squirrel proof (new, 8’ pvc slathered with petroleum jelly holding up a pizza pan) bird feeder, I noticed at its foot a rock that seemed to be moving. Or a shape within the rock was moving. No, flexing his wings, a pigeon precisely the color of fieldstone stepped out of that rock and began to peck up bits of corn at the foot of the feeder.

Down what I call old river road (meaning it was here a hundred years ago, well before paved CR 25A), I found what I’m always looking for, the tracks of deer. In this case, the deer wasn’t crossing from left to right or right to left as I usually see but, instead, its tracks proceeded straight down the middle of the dirt road, headed toward the dead end, right where people often enter the Florida Trail. I wondered if she had been racing away from something, perhaps a vehicle or even another animal. I got pretty cold, following along and, finally, when her tracks veered off into the woods between the old road and the new, I started back.

There were winds in the trees, the old road completely shadowed and as cold as I cared it to get. For some reason, I looked to the left where the tracks had entered the woods and saw there, in the shadows, the shape of the head of a deer. That head lifted, then stared. For a moment, the beloved was watching me.

A USUAL DAY - 25 AUGUST 2010

2010-08-25T17:18:00.000-07:00

He--or she--and I'll never know which--lived almost long enough to see tonight's silk sloughing of the sky, how its rinsed-out peach color fades as it falls below the tree line on the west.

As I started out in the car this morning, I saw the body of an infant white-tail deer--the smallest I've ever seen that close--at the side of the road, clipped, I assumed, by a car as the babe attempted to follow its mother across County Road 25A No blood, no guts, just a precious small brown and white creature, only its face on the pavement's edge.

The shoulder of the road is steep right there, no place to pull over. No cars in my rear view mirror so I pulled into my nearest neighbor's driveway. Off she went, my friend, Khrys Kontarze, to drag that baby away from the road, from those who would hit it deliberately, just as they do turtles and snakes, just to be hitting it. Yes, that happens.

Not long ago a buck was left lying half in the road, his antlers removed, two bloody stumps where they had been sawn off.

This morning's precious deer, brown and white, slender-legged and just a baby, really; he undoubtedly saw the yellow partridge peas that dot these woods, must have seen those red and yellow leaves drifting down and surely caught the scent in the air that presages what Floridians would like to call autumn.

The deer may have noticed the red seeds in the browning magnolia pods, the pointed yellowing stars of the sweetgum. If he were here now, he'd hear the owls calling, catch sight of an orange-red flash that's a cardinal launching off the pear tree. He could see now that the sky in the west is all burning coals behind the green lace of water oaks and blackgums.

This morning he may even have seen the vehicle that hit him. I hope it was quick.

HERE I AM, AFTER ALL

2009-03-08T09:14:00.000-07:00

Book Cover for TSOMR by Artist JOHN RICE of Live Oak

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HERE I AM, AFTER ALL--AFTER SIX WEEKS OF ABSENCE and what is my excuse? Make that plural: besides my all-embracing disaster with the old computer (which included the loss of 3,000 photos), I offer the explanation that I was supporting a new venture, the launching of The Old Florida Journal by native Alachuan Will Irby and his sidekick Tate Mikell of Archer. You can get to OFJ online (http://www.oldfloridajournal.com/ and quite soon its second edition will be out. "Mostly True, Always a Good Story," we read on the journal's cover, a painting with the feel of Art Deco, one created by Tate's brilliant sister, Grace Mikell (see the OFJ cover online). OFJ's second edition features the Plant City area and its annual strawberry festival. The first featured the area around White Springs and here's what I contributed:

WHITE SPRINGS: “A little town with a little river washing by its southern skirts . . . .”

Turn off I-75 and enter the town by way of CR 136 or alternatively, come north from Lake City on US 41 (or south on US 41 from Jasper). In the fall of the year in damp, roadside places, the cypresses turn bronze; Magnolia grandiflora’s seedpods redden. And maples and sweetgums scatter leaves of apricot, flame, and plum over the frost-browned shoulders of the roads. In February, Grandfather Greybeard flashes white along the river’s banks and the winged seeds of the maple drift into pink puddles that hint at the coming of spring.

Many years before I arrived in 1995, the late artist Theron D. Gaulding came this way with his notebooks and paints and a singular ability to see into the past He captured in nineteenth-century style a sense of White Springs that lingers yet. Copies of some of his works are displayed under polyurethane on the tabletops at the Suwannee River Diner:

I wandered the world over, seeking my meaning . . . . And then,with faltering breath I came upon a little town, with a little river washing by its southern skirts, and Live Oaks with beards of moss and birds nests lining its main street. And I started breathing deeply of fresh country air. The years passed, and the world drew farther away.

One hundred years ago this nondescript north Florida town was crowded with pilgrims whose coming for the healing waters of the sulphurous spring inspired the construction of a three-story bathhouse and 15 hotels, 14 of which burned in town fires. Only the Telford Hotel remains. Like Gaulding, I sometimes feel that:

My horse and buggy mind would have fitted more congenially then than now, but destiny brot (sic) me here.

Today, beneath its surface of shops—antiques, a grocery, four eateries, a Dollar Store, and Suwannee Hardware—lay stories rich in detail and implication. And like Theron Gaulding, I can squint and see the moving shapes of long ago. One particular story illuminates my own deepest reason for being here. Although the “miraculous” waters of the spring account for a relatively recent and busier time, it’s an ancient story that speaks subliminally to all of us Legend has it that for untold years Native American held sacred all terrain within a seven-mile radius of the spring. Within this area no one could be hurt or mistreated in any way because, it was said, Timucuan Indians pledged to protect with their lives anyone, even the occasional stranger, who entered there. They called this space “the peace ground.”

In more recent times, thousands of people have come to White Springs for the ritual Florida Folk Festival, the oldest state-sponsored folk festival in the country. Here local churches and civic groups offer up buttermilk and sweet potato pies, chicken pilaf and barbeque, cornbread, biscuits with cane syrup, mustard and collard greens, perhaps a taste of venison, and the sweet iced tea with which southerners haven’t yet kicked the habit of washing everything down. The festival, like the coming of hopeful invalids to healing waters, is also a ritual of connection and restoration. We in White Springs most certainly live in a sacred place. And I’ve hardly mentioned the river, the foremost reason anyone ever stopped here.

The Folk Festival is reincarnated in abbreviated form on one Saturday of each month when a large room set up with chairs at the Telford grows thick with locals and visitors arriving for our “White Springs Folk Club.” There musicians like Jeanie Fitchen, Rod MacDonald, and Pierce Pettis extend the tradition of Florida’s famed troubadours Will McLean, Gamble Rogers, and Don Grooms. And on the first Saturday of each month, Stephen Foster’s “Art in the Park” and evening coffeehouse open for visitors and performers whose arts and crafts, music, stories, and jokes not only amuse, but more importantly, draw us into community. The churches also get people together and to some extent, so do the Hamilton County Commission meetings up at the county seat of Jasper. Gaulding, too, spoke of people coming together, of hearing:

. . . . the little sounds of a little town all these hundreds of years . . . the unchanging life . . . [The river which moved along] to lap the sandy fringe of a little peninsula and hear the joyous carefree laughter of boys swimming.

Last year’s Christmas parade wasn’t as sizeable as others I’ve seen, but what’s amazing is the number of people lining the main drag meeting each other for the first time. Ride down Spring Street and you’d estimate the town’s population at 500. Come to the parade and you’ll rub elbows with nearly half of the 14,000 who live in Hamilton County, most of whom trail the parade into the park with donations (two canned goods or a toy). There for all to see is a splendiferous show of small, white lights stretching from the top of the carillon’s 97 bells (the world’s largest tubular bells) to the ground 200 feet below, encircling stout live oaks, and illuminating the path from the entrance gate to Nellie Bly’s kitchen where free hot dogs and Cokes are served up along with the music of people like May Frances Marshall—God’s singer if ever there was one.

Gaulding never mentions Cokes or hot dogs, but reserves his greatest admiration for the nonhuman:

Gnarled Live Oak . . . beautiful to behold . . . dark green lace against the sky . . . heralding the warm Southern spring with its blaze of crimson . . . . The trees, as in human vanity, not content with beauty enough, drape themselves with breeze-blown ribands of Spanish Moss. And amidst this quiet, gray-green loveliness, birdsong . . . a river unchanging in a world of change. A little respite from the headlong rush.

The river’s movement is:

Like adolescent youth’s mixed eagerness and apprehension at sudden venture into the strange, the uncertain. It knows not yet of the winding course awaiting.

Evidence of the river’s power abounds: at the post office and in farmers’ fields, the ever-changing depth of the river is discussed. Though we most often speak of its soothing powers and of the peace found in watching “water that’s always, always moving on,” there’s nothing like six inches of rain or the advance of a hurricane’s winds to change the focus of talk from the river’s peaceful properties to its destructive ones. Whatever the river’s level today, in as little as a week many of us could be canoeing in and out, or worse, find ourselves submerged. At flood time, we count trees, doors, dead animals, the red-striped backs of canebrake rattlers that float in on the river’s currents.

Our county that abuts the Georgia line boasts Big Shoals, Florida’s largest whitewater. It offers biking, hiking, and camping trails watched over by barred, screech, and barn owls. The ubiquitous titmouse, chickadee, and wren are joined in spring by the yellow-washed Pine Warbler. Opossum, armadillo, cottontail, squirrel, coyote, otter, sometimes black bear, and the ghosts of panthers scamper and lumber through our woods. In the dark of night the guttural voice of the tree-climbing Common Gray Fox proclaims his finds; in the daytime the woodpeckers—red-cockaded, pileated, red-bellied and downy—do their work. All of this and most beautiful of all, the white-tailed deer, belongs to the Suwannee that was once called “River of Deer” by Spanish conquistadors.

This body of water that arises in southern Georgia’s Okeefenokee and curls its way over to the Gulf was earlier named River of Echoes by Native Americans. Its current name was chosen by Stephen Foster for what became Florida’s state song. “Suwannee” means something particular to all of us and yet, the same to all. For like many of the planet’s bodies of water, this ever-changing river is a place where modern-day Theron Gauldings sense the numinous, the mystical meeting of inner and outer that (depending on the individual mindset) offers a sense of peace or sends chills up the spine. The river anchors our stories and earliest memories; it is the water into which our children leap from rope swings, the key to our welfare, an ever-changing reminder that we are subject to forces larger than ourselves.

Gaulding saw behind the folk festival and the turn-of-the-century tourist trade; imaginatively, he retraced the very creation of the land itself:

Through . . . years of primeval mist . . . a world before people . . . . a watery vast . . . dotted with small islands, ancient pines and gum-trees protruding up out of flush underbrush . . . when Florida was still under the Sea, the Gulf Stream, swinging from farther westward, and those millions of hurricanes from out of the southeast corner of the Continent . . . all those millions of years ago . . . a little spot of Earth forever unchangeable. I’ll close my eyes and see Dinosaurs wallowing in the murky ooze, and perhaps a Sabretooth Tiger . . . .

The Suwannee’s tannin-tinted waters and the white sulphur spring that flows from the springhouse are givens. Though residents can go for weeks without actually looking at the river, we move within its cloud of meaning, our deepest reason for being here this force that brought musicians, invalids, Native Americans, Theron Gaulding and many others—including me—to a place in the Suwannee River Valley just lately called White Springs.

Old Florida Journal is available online and by subscription -- 12 issues for $25--at http://www.oldfloridajournal.com/

AMONG OTHER WONDERFUL DISTRACTIONS IS THE PROGRESS TOWARD PUBLICATION OF The Salvation of Maggie Rider, a fictional work to be published by THE NORTH FLORIDA CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES, INC. The book's expected out by the time we gather at the High Springs Branch Library in September to deliver a copy of SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place in honor of Elbridge G. Cann, High Springs' esteemed editor/publisher from many years ago. El's modern-day counterpart, editor Ron DuPont, has just purchased the HERALD. Congratulations, Ron! Congratulations, High Springs! TSOMR's manuscript is in the mail on its way back from NYC copyeditor; local prizewinning artist John Rice has created a cover for this new book; see the cover at the very top of this entry.

scauthen
www.sudyecauthen.com
386-397-1284

WRITE FROM THE HEART

2009-01-07T20:04:00.000-08:00

STARTLING winds today; they came in hurricane-like gusts although the sun shone down like summer. The chair on the deck fell toward the river but I took advantage of those winds; I washed and hung on the clothesline a king size sheet and an overlarge bedspread. They never hung straight but flapped like flags and dried in an hour. Beyond the clothesline, the Suwannee's waters rushed backwards in the winds.

THE DEER TRACKS I saw yesterday are gone; somebody from the county road department scraped the far section of River Road this morning. Across the way my shooting neighbor let loose a volley that was mercifully short, appropriate I suppose for my day of paperwork that reached all the way back to October. Where does it come from? Every citizen needs a secretary. However, I do have mail to look forward to because my friend Merri McKenzie told me today she has written me a note, a snail mail note, that great and disappearing luxury.

I READ A DREADFUL, long opinion piece predicting everything but blood in the streets for 2009; actually, maybe a little of that in addition to a sharp correction in luxuries and real misfortune at every level. My response? I'm implementing tea parties, time outs for my friends and me. I can't solve the global, national, or even the state and countywide crises, but I can make tea and serve cookies and bring together lovely people who mean so much to me. And I can hope that while we are together we won't even think of the deprivations to come.

TIME TO TURN OFF THE PUCCINI Arias CD and dream of good things. The huge white blossoms of the large hydrangea I bought in place of a Christmas tree still dominate the room in their gorgeous pot from Mississippi.

BETWEEN THE HANGINGS of laundry and the shuffling of paperwork today, I found time to finalize a poetry workshop description (WRITE FROM THE HEART) we may offer at Stephen Foster Folklife State Park (the actual title's longer than that but this suffices if you want to check out our programs, events, and workshops online). SF Park is a world unto itself; come visit. Come for a First Saturday or check the web for other offerings.Buy gifts made by Suwannee Valley residents.

HAVE A GREAT EIGHTH DAY of 2009.

scauthen
www.sudyecauthen.com

THE MOON, A GOLDEN BULGE

2009-01-06T18:17:00.000-08:00

At river, on deck, nearly 6:00 p.m. Light leaking from the east; the only brightness shines above the tree line on the west. A wind comes, warning of a weather change, maybe rain tomorrow on these white banks with brown weeds; river so low we begin to wonder just how low it may get. Yet the pink samara--winged seed pods--I noticed earlier today have pinkened the branches of the maple trees with yet another reminder: spring's rains that, after hurricane season, are the likeliest time of year for flooding. Still, only moments ago I tamped the last of my forced grape hyacinth bulbs into the ground between the yellow pansies on the house’s south side. I do this with bare fingers because there is, I swear, something restorative about digging in the dirt, something that means more to me than the condition of my nails, a sense of connection totally foreign to any concern with manicures.

With dirty hands I sit on the deck watching my world turn silver. The woods are already dark, insects chirr, only the white strip of river beach and the sky above the trees on the west hold any light at all. And this white page in my notebook; I can still see its lines.

I twist around, look east, see the moon, a golden bulge beyond the halfway mark, its unfinished edge toward the east. The chirring grows; the volume’s up. Through the dark spiking fronds of the palmetto at my side I see water lit by the moon. Dark, unmoving, this silvered spot mirrors the thin black arms of moss-filled trees on the opposite bank.

It takes so little to feed me. Only the light and sound of the world, this still perceptible bit of wildness. Tonight's first star appears through the branches of the water oak overhead. The oak’s branches and those of the pine and black gum wobble against a gray sky with fast-moving clouds. I want to live forever.

STILL CRAZY, AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

2008-12-31T16:42:00.000-08:00

I'm hearing Simon and Garfunkel again: "Still crazy, after all these years." Well, yes, I am, and especially so after the "holidays." I haven't been getting better at them, but I've got a new plan for 2009 that I'm implementing with a vengeance.

First and foremost, there is going to be no more waiting for things to "slow down," "clear up,"for time to expand so I can do the things I love but haven't been doing. In 2009 I am taking on time: time and delay and procrastination and waiting and "worry."

Here's a response from my friend Anne Steel who wrote to comment on the Dec. 6 post in which I quoted my friend Norma on the subject of "worry." Here's Anne:

Hello my friend!
I have a response to your blog of December 6 in
which your friend says "We worry, we worry, we worry, and then
we die." It is a poem by 14th C Persian poet Hafiz,
in a book of his poems sent me by my sister-in-law
Donna this holiday. Here it is!

THE SUBJECT TONIGHT IS LOVE

The subject tonight is Love
And for tomorrow night as well,
As a matter of fact
I know of no better topic
For us to discuss
Until we all
Die!

Love,
Anne

****Part of my email conversation with Anne included this poem by Matthew Arnold, a poem I've always loved, one never more appropriate than it is tonight, 31 December, 2008 (though you might want to lop off the final two lines):

DOVER BEACH

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;--on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the {AE}gean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

**************

THERE'S A REASON I'M GIVING you these two poems together: they say the same thing. Arnold and Hafiz are reminding me of what I learned (I thought so thoroughly at my mother's deathbed) in 1991: there is no more time for anything but love. Look at the news, look at your friends and neighbors aging, suffering, dying, your world torn apart with violence; LOOK IN THE MIRROR. When you're listing priorities in the midst of all that's difficult, there is but one answer. Do as Alachua's Deacon Lawson said, practice this "religion of love" everywhere you go. Don't stop. Stuff every free minute or crevice with love. Don't stop. Don't stop. Don't stop.

[Learn more about Hafiz at www.poetseers.org/poets/14th-century-poets]
[Learn more about Matthew Arnold at www.poemhunter.com/matthew-arnold/]

NORTH TOWARD GEORGIA

2008-12-06T17:45:00.000-08:00

(A late posting for) Sunday, 16 November

“What we do with our days is, of course, is what we do with our lives.”
---Annie Dillard

LATE SUNDAY MUSIC, AND

all day long the sky is gray
until the last moment, when the sun comes, striking
the undulating folds of the cypress
across the river, gilding the tree’s sculpted flanks.
The light moves, taking the fine white sand
at the edge of the Suwannee, dark waters lapping
at the white, a small blue heron, an infant lizard scattering
sand as he races for cover beneath yellow pansies
licking the ground: all this, against
the longing of an oboe, soft hoot of owl.

I wanted to relive the drive to Valdosta Mary Alice and I made with Larry Westmoreland just before he died last year; Larry got his B.A. at Valdosta State about 45 years ago. I visited his alma mater in October, but I wanted to go back because of Larry. I shouldn’t have been surprised that cold November morning a week after our initial trip when Mary Alice called to tell me Larry was gone. After a thousand 911 calls, ER visits, open-heart surgery, and the ever-present syringe he’d ask us to check while we waited for our orders in restaurants, I’d grown nearly as cavalier as he was about his health. Most of his friends probably took Larry for granted; he was always there for us, eager to share our good news or lighten our loads with laughter. One-on-one with Larry we got a quality of attention most of us never found anywhere else. Larry could, on occasion, worry as well and as intensely as any of us, but most days it seemed he opened his eyes on worlds of possibility and, before rising, calculated that day’s possible glories how many of them he could grasp. This was on my mind as I set out north, toward Georgia, last Sunday afternoon.

Readers sometimes say they don’t believe I actually write so much in the car; I do, though. I write everywhere; Friday I took notes during a funeral. There’s something about the rhythm of a moving car—and maybe the fact of driving without passengers—that lifts old memories up, silhouettes them against the windshield’s light.

Sunday, along 154th Ave., I traveled past the new neighbor's fence line marked with a long row of small Xmas-tree shaped cedars, then past the place where I always slow because I once hit a small dog I’d mistaken for a shadow; the dog lived. To the east, a favorite tree, the one I passed on my five daily trips between my house and the trailer park where I lived while the house was being built. I know this tree and its field—a Sassafras (albidum)with arms lifted to the sky, its lower branches lopped so the cows can’t chew them off; I know this tree in winter, spring, summer, and fall. Once, it was my daily walking destination; when I got there I actually ran my fingers over the tree’s bark before turning back. I may do that again, now that a certain scary pit bull has gone to live elsewhere. On the right, I pass Jerusalem Cemetery, its graves with photos of the deceased, some with plastic wreaths; Mr. Odeen Cook’s young daughter lies there, along with some of the Scippios, early settlers in Florida’s Hamilton County.

Swift Creek is on my left, then I go north on U.S. 41. It’s 2:00 p.m. at Genoa (pronounce it Jen-oh-uh); no autumn color yet, but the white stacks of phosphogypsum, a byproduct of the naturally radioactive uranium and radium dug out in the processing of phosphate for fertilizer—a billion tons stacked in Florida—rise on the east, as improbable as ziggurats in this landscape. (Many thanks to my generous librarian for her help with the chemistry.) A friend who daily drives this road closes her windows and air vents as she passes. On the leafless Chinaberry trees, drying seeds dangle like golden raisins in the afternoon light.

I drive from home to Jasper to Jennings, listening to the first half of the score from The English Patient whose central male character is remembering his life in painful and erotic fragments. Jasper’s old Main St. buildings would be beautiful if they were restored; it’s rumored this may actually happen. I pass cows placed like statues at even lengths along a fence line, a place selling grave monuments, a pawn shop-music store, a Dollar General, a young black man in bright yellow, Veterans Park where U.S. flags flutter from dozens of crosses, a house with three pumpkins on its front steps. “Jesus loves you/He is coming/Get ready” I read as I cross over the Alapaha that, to my horror, is only white sand imprinted with the tread of off-road vehicles. A half mile of rusty cypresses off to my left, then a dab of yellow, a red streak, and on both sides of the road a fluffy white fullness in bushes as tall as small trees. “Great Florida Birding Trail” a sign says and I come upon the Jennings Bluff Cemetery in the Upper Alapaha Conservation Area. On my right are postmodern irrigation lines, huge metal spiders, long legs splayed across fields.

I turn onto F O’Connor’s Misfit's road (in "A Good Man Is Hard To Find") by which I mean silence and absence of light on white sand shadowed by tall trees that curve from both sides and intertwine. There is no way to turn around and I remember that I am a white-haired woman in jeans. I have ¼ tank of gas and there is a limb in the road I get out and remove, remembering I am an American who suffers the lure of the road and, what’s more, prefers overgrown roads of dirt; just because I might be mistaken for a little old lady is no reason to stop driving these roads now. There are hickory and sweet gum the colors of cured tobacco and red wine; further on, the road’s low places are covered with baseball-sized rock.

At the bottom of 31 wooden steps a bit of emerald green algae floats in the cold water of the river and I discover a shimmer on the water like oil heating in a hot skillet. At Jennings Bluff I make a mental note to tell my son that if/when I ever go missing he should have the authorities look down the less-traveled dirt roads, expect hog panel gates and the twists and turns that so often mean I’m getting lost. The sun slants down as I start back to the dirt road that preceded the dirt one I am currently on, turn left, and come upon Jennings Bluff Cemetery and the JB Plantation which is closed with chain and padlock. I am interested in the dates on the crumbling grave markers, but I don’t get out. I’ve just passed a guy in a pickup truck.

On the "English Patient" CD's ninth track (as I am thinking of the nurse’s decision to help her patient out of his misery with a few extra pills), two wild turkeys step aside to let me pass. I emerge from my mini-adventure and turn right, again headed north. I pass many churches, the latest the Church of Christ at Oak Grove opposite a garden of winter greens, straight lines against pink earth; this is not where I came in but that’s the way it often turns out when I venture off road. Soon, I pass over the state line and cruise through Echols County, Ga., and into Lowndes County, passing naked limbs of trees knotted like silver fingers against the sky. I am nearly out of gas, but spot Inner Peninsula Road and turn in at a Swifty Mart with an oddly rooted tree, large and delta-shaped, one corner of its triangle red and the rest still green. I often see this with pear trees. I am 55 miles from home and after gas and a stop for cheesecake and coffee, I turn at Victory Church and sail on past white fields of cotton toward I-75, thinking of Norma Herndon’s response when I called to tell her of Larry’s death: “You worry, you worry, you worry, and then you die,” she said. I think on that, jot notes for my poem.

scauthen
www.sudyecauthen.com

Prophesy

2008-11-05T18:47:00.000-08:00

This comes from my 1988 interview with African-American Letha Wright DeCoursey who here quotes her grandfather, the emancipated slave, Brisker Blue:

"Bottom rail's gone rise."

sc
www.sudyecauthen.com

Richest Woman in the World

2008-11-04T10:05:00.000-08:00

Robert Baxter’s Sunday Shot

Copied from journal for November 2, 2008
[Tomorrow is the 15th birthday of my granddaughter, Ashley Danielle Hunt.]

I have been wordless for nearly two weeks. Now, finally, the words come and exultation surges through me, delight because my writing "fast"—my fast from writing—is done. It ended abruptly; I have laid down my book-–Doris Betts’s good book—and uncapped my pen for this sudden rush of syllables onto the page, for my seeing this room and myself as if from a distance. Now my two-week depression will fade.

There is so much to be glad for—-the reds and greens in this room, these books, and the blood galloping in my veins. Writing loveliness down is my way of praising creation and I am best fitted for exactly that (and perhaps not much more). When I don’t sing, my word-bag's contents dry up; thanks to Betts, here I am at my old writing table (that’s been to Mississippi and back) over which I have spread a red cloth of deep roses and wines and on this cloth sits a pile of notes for that unfinished paper, “The Idea of Sacred Space at White Springs,” a black-spotted conical shell I can’t identify, two horribly-scribbled pocket calendars, and a small spiral notebook like the ones I habitually carried as a child.

There’s also a stack of other people’s books: Wendell Berry’s essays, the oral history of White Springs Barbara Beauchamp put together, Mahon’s book on the Seminole Wars; The African-American Heritage of Florida; the most recent Chattahoochee Reivew, Robert Louis Stevenson, and that’s not all; my elbow rests on Janson’s thick History of Art I study over coffee each morning and, looming over me, a treelike swatch of green elephant ears destined to die under frost if I hadn’t cut and brought them in. They dominate the room which, already, is decked with three vases of palmetto fans, its windows crowded with herbs and young avocado trees.

Robert Baxter’s Suwannee River photograph shows exactly what we see immediately before the odd, trilling bird soars upriver; what I was staring into when a deer appeared, swimming downstream; the look of the river immediately before the mourning dove calls. The river is low now and mirrors the roots of cypress trees on the opposite bank. Although they haven’t yet flown into Robert’s frame, it’s easy to imagine birds all around—the cardinal, titmouse, and jay that watch me sip coffee on the morning deck, a pure surround of birds. Faraway (very far, thank goodness), a small roar of traffic from Interstate 75.

In the November-December issue of Orion, I just read a piece (p. 64, "Silence like Scouring Sand," Kathleen Dean Moore) about Gordon Hempton who has marked with a small red stone one square inch where “he can listen for 15 minutes” and hear nothing humanmade, except the movements of his pencil on paper. Hempton is making it his business to preserve a spot of pure silence; well, not silence, just a quiet that allows him to hear a bird on the wing, a leaf rip loose from the branch of a tree. The article says there are very few places—in this country and perhaps on the planet—where it’s possible to sit for fifteen minutes without hearing another person or something manmade. That “silence” is what most of us at Suwannee Bend were looking for when we first came.

The farmer’s market is not far away, nor the stage where during the Florida Folk Festival May Frances Marshall belts out powerful gospel songs. Here, I can catch the drill of the woodpecker as well as those of two mosquitoes, watch skimmers ski over the surface of the water. I can study the orange berries of the palmetto, the no-red-on-his-tail hawk, watch for alligator, deer, egret, duck, the doglike, slither of an otter.

I could hide behind these towering elephant ears (see picture above); in fact, the entire southwest corner of the room is hidden from my view. It’s grown cold outside, another winter coming. The holidays rise before me like fresh, white index cards; thank god I can write, can sit here surrounded by riches. The richest woman in the world.

YOUR SPARKLING KINFOLK

2008-10-28T16:26:00.001-07:00

All photos in this blog come from Robert Baxter, resident genius of Suwannee Bend.

Two nights ago a friend and I ate beans and rice on the deck by the river while dark dropped down around us and stars lit up the Suwannee River’s punched-tin sky. There were so many stars! I once had a rule that I didn’t go inside until at least ten stars appeared; I should implement that rule again.

Now it’s cold, rumored to get near freezing tonight and that’s nothing short of stunning for Floridians just coming out of a long, hot summer, six months of broiling heat that makes you forget what cold ever felt like. As I studied the river Sunday evening, an unidentifiable bird with some white on him flew upriver, whistling. In less than a minute he came back by, headed downriver; same sound. I have never seen that happen before. Maybe he was looking for something; maybe he was calling to it.

On 25A in the dark last night, a whitetail deer skittered across the highway in front of me. Seeing deer and the hope of seeing deer on that 25A drive north have sharply reduced the speed at which I drive. There’s some worrisome logging going on along that county road, woods thinned out like hair on the heads of customers Daddy barbered with his thinning shears. The thinning shears had uneven teeth; they cut some hair, but not all, and that’s what happening now down the road.

25A is a less quieting country drive than it was when I started driving it to Live Oak a year ago. There are new houses and several stands of pine gone. Not an actual subdivision yet, not as far as I can see. The family garden with tall sunflowers is bare and the roadside sales of fruits and vegetables have disappeared. People are still selling, though; that same unforgettable sign hanging from a mailbox reads “Moving Sale – Furniture.” The sign’s placed as though hurriedly, in between packing the boxes of a family that must get out quickly. I wonder what that’s about but do not stop. Further along, on the other side of the road there’s an auction of farm equipment. I can’t name most of the red, yellow, and orange behemoths parked there; I find myself wondering if these two sales are a response to our economics at the moment.

Last Saturday I took part in the Healing Day at Stephen Foster State Folklife Center where chiropractic, massage, yoga, and tai chi were offered along with a lecture on nutrition, Jamaican plate lunches,haunting guitar music from a park ranger, all under the orchestration of Walter McKenzie who lives in White Springs. I was there to speak about “The Idea of Sacred Space at White Springs.”

“The Idea . . . ." isn’t finished, lacks focus, needed organizing, but still I was fascinated with my subject and figured throwing out the paper’s material sans conclusion or anything else one expects with such a topic might be useful. Kind people said it was thought-provoking; I’ll work on it some more. There are many definitions of “sacred space” and I was leaning toward the notion that it’s all sacred, whether or not we recognize the holy right beside us or beneath our feet. After all, isn’t Mother Earth holy, every inch of her, and by extension, her people and our kinfolks, the stars?

FALL COLORS

2008-10-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

Here's photographer Robert Baxter's Sunday photo of fall colors along the Suwannee.

John Muir wrote that Florida has only two seasons, summer and hot summer, but I'm unwilling to leave the word "autumn" up north. Having suffered through our long, "hot" summer, many of us greet cooler, breezier days with enormous pleasure. The seasons mark change and this year the season is about more than a change of weather.

Coming home from Live Oak in the dark Friday night, I was startled to see two lit jack o'lanterns the size of Volkswagen Beetles. There are quite a few country yards decked out in orange and black, witches, cats, and scarecrows. There's something else I'm seeing more and more often this season. I am surprised by the things I see people selling as I pass by their trucks, tents, and signs like one Friday evening at a mailbox that read: "Moving Sale - Furniture." I'm certain there are more roadside sales than ever before and I'm pretty sure I know why.

************

As happy counterpart to these sober roadside thoughts, my friend Wendy Garrison's CD was playing as I drove. Wendy and two other women in Oxford, MS, call their new band "Maybelle's Lovers"and the music on this CD testifies to their love of movement and sound; I sure do like that slide guitar.

Here's a poem from my first fall season (2002) in this stilt-legged house on the floodplain of Florida's Suwannee River:

NO REASON TO MOURN SUMMER

The voice of an unknown bird,
a grate severing night from sunrise,
scratches at the sky and I leave my bed,
lean southeast over the porch railing
just as he rasps again. No movement
along the limbs of the oak, the cypress, the pine.
River so low, I can’t see it. Again his voice lifts
morning’s soft face.

A mile away on the Florida Trail,
translucent stems of Indian Pipe
force their way out of the ground, white
flowers left by a ghost. Mushrooms litter
the sides of the trail, white as the muscle
in God’s own eye. The orange flames
in the fallen needles of the pine, muted now;
the ferns will soon lie down, flattened and brown.

But this is no reason to mourn summer,
not when trillions of jewels will flash
in the upturned purple bowl of night, come dusk.
In the bird’s call I hear all of this and the generosity
of the day spreads out before me. Like doors
opening on leather hinges in some ancient cloister
this new voice heralds
the glad strangeness of large hours.

"Four and Twenty Blackbirds/Baked in a Pie"

2008-10-07T21:20:00.000-07:00

Seriously, a squad is circling the house. Yesterday’s cutting of the dead tree has triggered a convention of birds: 3 kinds of woodpeckers came at once, including the small black-and-white striped, downy woodpecker. There were two of those and woodpeckers with red on their heads in two versions, also cardinals and brown birds of all kinds. This morning, black birds zooming past the windows. Maybe they are migrating. These are not starlings. I’m going downstairs and take a look.

****

Downstairs I see that the tree was rotten at top and bottom. In fact, its rotted bottom sticks out of the ground like a scraggly tooth, broken off, uneven. I kept this tree as long as I could because it attracted woodpeckers but the rain of Hurricane Fay so saturated it that it fell and was caught in a net of grape vines. Nobody could walk there until it came down.

BEING CARIBOU: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd (by Karsten Heuer)

I just turned the last pages of this astounding book that, in the way the best books always do, hurt me with its beauty.I have never left any fictional character more reluctantly than I leave the caribou that have filled my mind for two days. As I read, I became caribou, too, a knot in my throat at the thought of leaving this herd for civilization, not wanting any break in the oneness of my travel with Karsten and Leanne who went with the caribou through wind, rain, snow, rivers, ice, bear, wolves, past fleabane, and through mountain passes.

When Heuer speaks of the necessity for closing down in order to navigate civilization’s roads and lights and sirens and phones, all of that, he speaks of going back to civilization as moving “toward hurry and disconnection,” which is how I feel in front of a tv or a computer. We have fallen out of Eden and into pizza and television and our lives as consumers, something never dreamed of by our ancient ancestors who in a time and place now nearly unimaginable must once have run with the caribou in a fluid oneness that left nothing out, not the trees or the sun or the clouds or the bugs or the cold and heat. I know we had that oneness once; otherwise it would not have been possible for me to be caribou myself for these two days. Karsten Heuer has captured not only the wildness of the Alaskan caribou herds; he has documented the wildness within us, too, that dimension of oneness we all long for.

RIVER OF GOLD

2008-09-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

It looks yellow, everything--ditches, trees, the light . . . no, the light isn't yellow. The light is clearer than summer light. And maybe the trees, their leaves, at least, aren't yellow but amber and tangerine. This is a golden river tonight; I don't think it's been called this before. River of Echoes, River of Deer, yes, both of those; Florida's Suwannee bears those names, sure, but anybody sitting here on the deck right now @ 6:30 p.m. could probably be persuaded by the sight in front of me to adopt this new name.

The river is low again, all white beach and exposed cypress knees that only weeks ago were under 12-15 feet of water. At high water in the rains of Hurricane Fay, most of what I can see here was covered.

Tonight's light falls through greens and golds, the delicate leaves of the river birch, lace of cypresses, and the starred shapes of palmetto fronds. Even the gray of the Spanish mosses is white in this light, the sun at 45 degrees in the west.

I don't usually follow popular culture but I will never forget where I was sitting earlier today when the news of Paul Newman's death appeared on my computer screen.

Below the deck here some small creature dimples the water with movement and the sound of "glug, glug." Far away in what I almost fail to notice, the great ruff of interstate traffif moves on, that little fish jumps again, a squirrel cries faintly, and there's a faraway bark from a dog. Almost October, the fall of the year 2008.

ANNOUNCEMENT - Bringing the Book Home

2008-09-10T13:10:00.000-07:00

This photo, courtesy of Michael Curtis@Greene Publishing, Madison, Florida.

At 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, 13 September, I will have the immense pleasure of bringing SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place home to the community from which it came.

Saturday is important, long-awaited, because this book belongs to the Alachua community. It also belongs to High Springs and to the larger North Florida Community. I am so looking forward to being in Alachua. Come and meet the people of the book--Cellon, Herndon, Horner, McFadden, Hill, Traxler, DeCoursey, Everett, Spencer, Lee, Washington, Dampier, Richardson, Frazier, Wallace, Lundy, Moorer, Escue, Cherry, Welch, Lawford, Bryant, Watson, and Potano Woman. Please JOIN US for music furnished by the Greater New Hope Missionary Baptist Church Mass Choir headed by Gussie Lee; Introductions by native son, Will Irby; a showing of the video, "This Place, Alachua"; Refreshments furnished by the Friends of the Library, and a reading/signing of SOUTHERN COMFORTS. See you there(at Alachua's newly-remodeled Branch Library)!

Hurricane Fay

2008-09-05T21:23:00.000-07:00

Summer is leaving me. At midnight the sky is black, stars out, one lusty frog ratcheting the hour away, and it smells like summer, the end of summer: a squished stinkbug, curtain of crickets in the background. When the magnolia’s pods are turning red and the holly berries gain color, roadsides are one yellow fringe, and a distant field of tobacco is a golden ribbon rippling against the horizon, there’s not much summer left. For some reason, tonight's cooler temp, the sound of the wind lifting the branches of the birches, then letting them drop and the rhythmic trickle between the trees, remind me of this poem by William Butler Yeats:

The Ragged Wood

O hurry where by water among the trees
The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh,
When they have but looked upon their images -
Would none had ever loved but you and I!

Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed
Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky,
When the sun looked out of his golden hood? -
O that none ever loved but you and I!

O hurry to the ragged wood, for there
I will drive all those lovers out and cry -
O my share of the world, O yellow hair!
No one has ever loved but you and I.

After the liatris (Blazing Star, see three photos above) had opened in a downpour and I’d resigned myself to its swift disappearance beneath the rising Suwannee; after laying in candles, sardines, soy milk, and enough canned goods to see me through a period of No Shopping; after my friend and I painstakingly carried the lawn furniture and croquet set halfway up the elcctric tower so it wouldn’t float away; and after we moved 67 pots of kalanchoes, coleus, aloes, ferns, and amarylis bulbs to the upstairs porch, SRWMD posted a bulletin saying the flood is off: the anticlimax to the anticlimax that was the storm, Fay.

Meanwhile, the river rushes past, carrying jetsam and flotsam, mostly pieces of trees and an occasional paper cup. For months I could not see the Suwannee from inside this stilt-footed house. Then, viola! Two Friday mornings back I woke up, walked into the kitchen, and saw out the window a river twice its usual width. Fay played with us, taunted the residents in every county of this state but, hey! that,writes my friend Ron Cooper, is how it is with the riparian way of life.

Small price to pay for the privilege of drinking morning coffees on the deck at the edge of the water, for the changing golds and greens of sunset as summer’s red globe moves westward, lighting up the channel of the Suwannee in front of my house, turning cypress skirts pink, gilding the hanging mosses in the trees on the opposite bank.

I’ve retrieved my car from my neighbor’s property, 20 feet higher up. No need for the canoe. This time. My helpful friend who bore the heaviest plants upstairs offers, “Could we leave them until after the hurricanes?”

ERRORS

2008-08-05T18:46:00.000-07:00

This has been a strange day, not one of my favorites, and I’m not quite sure why. Maybe it’s because nothing has felt completed and there’s a stack of documents, notes, and mail on my desk that’s just a little higher than it was yesterday. On the other hand, I can hear the frogs outside and that’s worth a lot. Also, Narrow Fellow came back upstairs; right this minute Thomas is sniffing at the front door. I think he must be able to smell the snake (Southern Water) out there. Well, that snake’s harmless; I wouldn’t be so cavalier if we’d been visited (three times now, and that’s merely what I’ve seen) by a poisonous viper. This snake is so unassuming that I reached out and moved the white rock he was lying against that was amplifying the glare from my camera. Narrow Fellow didn't like my moving the rock nor the camera's flash.

I assume he came back for the eggs in last week's abandoned nest but I was too busy and too close and he turned tail, quite literally. Look how in one photo he is climbing over himself backward to get away from me. In his other photograph I’ve just spotted him, his whole length rippling over three wooden pieces salvaged from the felling of a pine. I love the ripples of the second photo but, disinterested in artistic poses he turns and slithers away. (His head, at furtherest point from the camera, is white.) I'm sorry these photos are in wrong order, but sometimes that's how interactions with my machine go and how its interaction with the blog site goes, etc. I hope you, Dear Reader, have better luck.

Today's Tuesday; Saturday I stopped by the side of the road to look over these enormous squashes being sold out of the back of a pickup truck by two young Hispanic men, Lazaro (from Cuba) and Richard (from Miami) whose English far surpasses my Spanish. I didn't buy anything, but they didn't seem to mind; these are enormous vegetables and I hope they sold.

Oh, Patient Reader, Please sort out these photos and understand that the two at the top of the men selling squashes from the truck belong with the paragraph immediately ahead of this apologetic one. You begin to see, I suppose, why I say this has been a difficult day. "Nothing finished," I said when I started, but I will have to let these photos stand as they are, at least for now.

I wonder if my difficulties here mightn't be related to what I saw described in the recent Atlantic article titled something akin to "Is GOOGLE Making Us Stupid?" Well, yeah, it begins to look that way. Simultaneously uploading photos while doing email while watching a movie on the computer just might account for my frustration.

Thanks for your indulgence. I hope you have a good night.

GIFTS

2008-07-29T18:57:00.000-07:00

I've often said to Mary and Ivey Harris that I'd like to see a newborn calf; my daddy never allowed me to see one as it was being born though he did let me see them when they were quite small and once my sister Emily and I watched while Daddy lifted a midget calf up to nurse at its mother's teats. It's been a long time, so I was delighted when Mary called at midday to tell me this brand new donkey they've named "Peaches" had been born in the night. She has big ears, white on her snout ("snout?"), and gets around like a human baby just learning to walk; that is, she gets around quite shakily.

Driving Swift Creek Road to the Harris Farm I punched on some music and immediately the smoky, unforgettable voice of Mr. Ray Charles filled the car. "Georgia," he sang, "Georgia . . . on my mind." There's a really special song at the end of the tape Charles shares with Willie Nelson, but I kept playing "Georgia," over and over, and wondering why in the world I didn't think to mention Ray Charles last night when I wrote about visiting Madison, FL. Although he was born in Georgia, not only did Ray Charles grow up in Florida's Madison County, but his CD was what I'd plucked from the stack and put in the car for my drive to Madison four days ago.

Thinking about this, I remembered the posthumous movie about Ray Charles I saw a while back; I detest that movie. Wanta know why? Because when somebody like this man gives the gift he gave, it's sacrilege to portray him in the sleaziest possible way. It happens a lot, doesn't it, especially with the "rich and famous?" But aren't there sleazy scenes from anyone's life? Would you like to be remembered for your weaknesses when, as a matter of fact, in spite of your handicaps you succeeded in delivering your singular gift?

I've had this discussion before, in graduate school where some southern woman writer was being dissected for her sexual preference and childhood traumas while her gift to us went unmentioned. I've even sat through classes that treated William Wordsworth* the same way but Wordsworth expresses his distaste for this approach better than I can:

*THE TABLES TURNED

          UP! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
      Or surely you'll grow double:
      Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
      Why all this toil and trouble?

      The sun, above the mountain's head,
      A freshening lustre mellow
      Through all the long green fields has spread,
      His first sweet evening yellow.

      Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
      Come, hear the woodland linnet,                             10
      How sweet his music! on my life,
      There's more of wisdom in it.

      And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
      He, too, is no mean preacher:
      Come forth into the light of things,
      Let Nature be your teacher.

      She has a world of ready wealth,
      Our minds and hearts to bless--
      Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
      Truth breathed by cheerfulness.                             20

      One impulse from a vernal wood
      May teach you more of man,
      Of moral evil and of good,
      Than all the sages can.

      Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
      Our meddling intellect
      Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
      We murder to dissect.

      Enough of Science and of Art;
      Close up those barren leaves;                               30
      Come forth, and bring with you a heart
      That watches and receives.

Wordsworth was my first favorite poet; I met him in 1962 and, through his poetry about the English Lake District, recognized and fell in love with my own North Florida woods, Burnett's Lake, the tendrilled green of all leafy things in Alachua County. I left the University of Florida, married, worked in Brevard County's space program, and finished my B. A., finally, 12 years later, in 1974, at The University of Central Florida in Orlando (where I encountered a poetic genius in the person of Bob McCown). By the time I entered graduate school in 1990, poetry was no longer valued so much for beauty, truth, and facility in language as it was for hints at its author's take on political issues, albeit many of them ours and never discussed in the author's lifetime at all. This was a huge disappointment; I'd wanted to plunge in again where I'd left off with Nathan Comfort Starr, my first genius professor, but there was no pool to plunge into.

Eudora Welty works against that politically conscious grain by praising the natural world. We do see her characters' problems and faults, but we are not allowed to forget how gorgeous the moment can be, if only we situate ourselves squarely within it. She is a lyricist and lyricists sing.

I'd love a contrary comment on this. Have at it, friends, but if you pass a newborn donkey on a dirt road, turn up your Ray Charles and sing out. Sing out loud, as loud as you can.

IT HAPPENED AGAIN

2008-07-28T19:37:00.000-07:00

About 6:00 p.m. this evening, I met this narrow fellow* not "in the grass" but descending the stairs. I believe he is the same Southern Water Snake (Mangrove race, the Nerodia fasciata of the Colubrid Snake Family) I met as I climbed the stairs about 10 days ago, shortly after Mrs. Carolina Wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus, Wren Family) laid three lovely eggs in the nest she and Mr. C. Wren had built in the planter full of spider plants opposite the front door. This poor couple has had a time of it: first, they built a nest downstairs and I, not knowing it was in the wooden cube I picked up, managed to dump the entire nest onto the ground. They probably thought they'd be safer upstairs, so days later they were weaving back and forth with bits of pine needles and pieces of string. I meant to give them a wide berth, but the first time I dared look into the nest, poor Mrs. Wren flew straight up into my face, frightening me and probably herself. I have not seen the birds since.

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,--did you not,
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,--
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

*See more about Emily Dickinson and her poetry at http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/

Besides this narrow fellow on the stairs, another party for the book happened last Friday night, in Madison, FL, that lovely southern town with handsome courthouse, 19th century mansions, three rivers nearby and many first magnitude springs, The "Four Freedoms Monument" commissioned by FDR to commemorate the death of Madison's Capt. Colin P. Kelly, the first hero of World War I, and the building right off the square that houses Janet Moses & Co. where 70 people turned up for a reading so congenial, so warm, I felt we were dancing. (See more of Madison at http://www.madisoncountyfl.com/county-information.aspx) We were serenaded with Florida folk songs from the Willinghams of Jasper, FL, the food was ambrosial, and our conversations lasted hours after I'd finished presenting SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place. Lastly, here is my B&B hostess, Rae Pike, showing off her replica Confederate dress jacket.

ANNOUNCEMENT

2008-07-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

ANNOUNCEMENT: Reading/signing at Newberry’s Branch Library on Saturday, 19 July, at 2:00 p.m. Afterward, I hope to see a bit of contemporary Newberry where my grandfather, Malachi N. Strickland, delivered rural mail nearly a hundred years ago. Although I wasn’t born in time to visit my grandparents in Newberry and knew only their Alachua home, we sometimes visited their Newberry friend, a Mrs. Marable who allowed me to climb up into the wide arms of her backyard fig tree.

I had a beautiful walk this morning while the tall, green grasses along River Road were still covered with dew. Found a running deer’s tracks and the Partridge Peas, (Chamaecrista fasciculata of the Pea Family) are thick with yellow blooms. Many of one of my very favorite wild things, the Swamp Hibiscus (Hibiscus grandiflora of the Mallow Family),have opened the petals of their lovely white faces so that their scarlet throats can be seen. This plant is related to Turk's Cap, the Hibiscus so often planted in flowerbeds on south Florida lawns and the commercially grown cotton plant that I first examined in the Mississippi Delta. I am happy when it appears here each year.

The Party for the People of the Book

2008-07-04T08:57:00.000-07:00

June 26, 2008

Something wondrous happened Sunday; I went to a party for the book, SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place.The invitation from our hostesses, Dottie Price and Merri McKenzie, read,“The Book’s Having a Party,”and, indeed, it did have quite a party. Mary Elizabeth Knight Irby, Arthur Spencer, Jr., Vada Beutke Horner, Leoris Richerson, Steve Everett (of Gainesville), and Gussie Lee were here in White Springs at the Suwannee River Yoga Studio where we were fed better than any bride at her own wedding.
Also from Alachua, representing Tommy (the fox hunter) and Huldah Malphurs, his mother (with whom I baked Communion bread in Ch.5) were Fay Malphurs Vaughn and Peggy Malphurs, daughter and daughter-in-law of Huldah.

I introduced our special guests by reading snippets from their sections of the book. To my astonishment, when we ran out of chairs, the rest of our audience of more than 50 people dropped to the floor and sat, motionless, through the entire reading. I had no microphone and, yet, we could have heard pollen falling. Janet Moses, who drew the book’s wildflower motif, the Linaria canadensis, more commonly called “Toadflax,” was also on hand. I’ve never been to a reading anything like this one which came together miraculously, as though perfectly rehearsed. At the end, the people who bought books went about the room, requesting autographs from the People of the Book. Linda Gafford thought of that; I just wish I'd had my copy so I could have got those signatures on mine, too.

At this rate, summer will end shortly. The days unfurl so effortlessly. Sun up, sun down, a little rain in between that cuts the heat, this afternoon from 95 to 65 here on the deck where’s it actually a little nippy. A light jacket would not be uncomfortable. I hear the interstate this minute (is there a single spot in Florida where one doesn't?), an unremitting drill on pavement, perhaps more trying in this quiet place than if I were driving I-75 myself.

I finally had to admit the blue men’s work shirts that have been my daily costume since I came to White Springs are worn thin enough that they might shred and fall down around my ankles as I’m walking along the street. I went into a second hand store for replacements and came out with two wild Hawaiian shirts, the length of mini-skirts. They are very happy and I plan to wear them all summer long. I’ll buy some more work shirts, but cheaper ones next time; I shouldn’t complain of their $30 price, though; after all, I have worn these two nearly every day for two years.

Mmm. A mosquito on my cool deck. Beyond the sounds of semis, my imagination reaches, all the way back to Sunday afternoon’s party when Suwannee River Yoga was decorated with handmade baskets and quilts, reminding me of the Bellamy Road Exhibit of 1988 when Bellamy Road folks gathered in a similarly decorated room at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

In celebration of the museum’s Tenth Annual Heritage Day, Betty Dunckel Camp invited me to create an exhibit based on my interviews along the Alachua-High Springs length of the Bellamy which is part of Florida’s historic Spanish Trail, a path worn by Pleistocene mammals, barefooted Native Americans, the Spanish, French, and the English, then early Florida pioneers and the slaves they brought with them.

Chicks, Ducks, Pups, and Watermelons

2008-06-17T12:57:00.000-07:00

Saturday afternoon, somewhere between I-75 and Downtown Live Oak, I turned around and went back to these roadside vendors who I wish now I’d asked whether they make a practice of setting up for sales in 95 degree heat or is the current economic situation their inspiration.
But I didn’t think to ask; I was too busy admiring the pale, buttery fluff of the Peking ducklings (raised for eating), absorbing the fact that when grown the toes of one chicken will be covered with feathers.[feathers growing on toes] )

I considered buying Guinea chicks, which would roost in my trees and make good substitutes for watchdogs, but the seller, Terry, who also sells dogs, assured me Guineas would not stay out of my neighbors’ yards.
I exchanged cards with Brenda Welch who was selling Chihuahuas, Dachshunds, and miniature Dobermans. Brenda is from O’Brien where her business is known as

“Brenda’s Lil’ Joys”

. She answered a lot of my questions and exchanged cards and I asked how much a puppy costs.

“Three fifty,”

she said.

“Gosh, that’s an awfully good price for a dog, three dollars and fifty cents.”

“Three-hundred, fifty,”

she answered.
There’s certainly much that goes past me.

Reading on the internet last night about the pleasures of solitude I saw where somebody, explaining why many people actually enjoy being alone, says that without distraction these people can more closely examine details. I would like to think so, but isn’t this the same as not seeing the forest for the trees?

UPDATES: SOUTHERN COMFORTS, DDV, & NFCDS, INC.

2008-06-15T16:03:00.000-07:00

The State of Florida Department of Education just posted its Summer Reading Series and included SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place on the list. Before I leave the subject of awards for Florida books, I want to recommend The Swamp by Michael Grunwald, a masterful and highly enjoyable study of Florida's history; Grunwald won the Gold Medal for Florida Nonfiction last year and he deserved it.

Now that the book tour's been suspended for the summer, I'm tackling the next book, DON DOMINIC THE FIFTH. I'm amazed to find how much of it I had already written; I'd put it away in 1994, some of its files were mildewed, but I'm sorting it out and finalizing its prospectus.

NFCDS, INC.: Please do check the website www.sudyecauthen.com (about to be updated) and/or my blog which you can reach from the website. In near future, there will be a second blog devoted to UPDATES on the work of The North Florida Center for Documentary Studies, Inc. (now incorporated as a not-for-profit); the new blog will be reached by link from the website.

IN THE DITCH

2008-06-13T10:45:00.000-07:00

If you were driving between Jasper and Live Oak yesterday afternoon, perhaps you saw a woman in a black and white striped dress lying in the ditch taking pictures; that was me, admiring the Gaillardia pulchella Fougeroux. Coming home I stopped to photograph a lush garden with sunflowers on CR25A.

Reader, I have not served you well; in recent weeks I failed to report on the flowering of spring shrubs, flowers, and fruit trees. Among this spring's wild plants that have already blossomed, dropped their seed, and vanished are sheep's sorrel, toadflax, the wobbly-headed Cinnamon Fern, and the wild blackberries and huckleberries I ate from along my driveway. Along our county roads I spot signs advertising U-PICK blueberry operations. Our Suwannee Valley Blueberry Farm right here in White Springs has a luscious crop of organic berries. "A bumper crop" this year,, says owner Mark Quitero.

I have passed whole fields of dandelions, admired the chartreuse fruits of the Saw Palmetto, Serenoa repens (Bartr.); untangled myself from Catbrier, smilax lavafolia Linnaeus); and passed many tall, white spires of Spanish Bayonet. The purple Spiderwort, Tradescantia ohiensis Rafinesque I first learned in my Alachua backyard has come and gone, along with the white bells of the Dwarf Huckleberry, Gaylussacia dumosa Andrews; also the Anual Phlox, Phlox drummondii (Hooker) which spills its colors like blackberry pie a la mode along roadsides. The Fringe Tree, Chimanthas virginicus Linnaeus on the opposite bank of the river dropped its delicate white handkerchiefs within days of their appearance; here on Lot 22, the Chinaberry has shown its lavendar, and the Mimosa is blooming now, also Swamp Mallow and Passion Flower.

TRUE HEAT

2008-05-07T19:51:00.000-07:00

A busy fish today. He has jumped—a fat, plopping sound—twice in five minutes and, of course, gives me no warning beforehand so that I can see him. He disappears so quickly. And I, immersed in Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, can only hear him. Why do fish jump?

I suspect True Heat begins today with the predicted 88 degrees and I hold out slight hope for more days like yesterday and earlier, days of sunshine and cool breezes, and low humidity. I was close enough to last year’s Bugaboo Fire that I now realize low humidity has its downside, but only an idiot could fail to appreciate these glorious green and gold days of new growth on every limb and branch along which caterpillars—yellow and orange, horned and not—creep, the cries of birds both far and near, the house of twigs hanging from the nearest palmetto frond.

I must sound like I’m on vacation, sitting here with binoculars, books, and coffee, writing it all down, even the small olive lizard who has stopped before me and marvelously inflates the orange goiter on his throat as though to warm me the hawk is coming, the river will rise, this ethereal weather will wane. Why am I writing all this down, anyway?

I describe this scene because doing so intensifies its effect. Putting it on paper mirrors the inscription of it on my brain, which is why I scribble. This is the reason I encourage others to write. Doing so brings the sharp tips of the palmetto’s fans into focus as I look more closely. It sharpens my hearing so that I know a bee approaches, though it is still out of view Here comes an interesting bird, batting its white wings, a bird with a voice like a slide guitar—more than one long note, something more complicated, bluesy.

I got interrupted, reading the Otto book. Found it pretty dense and, anyway, isn’t it possible either that everything is holy or nothing is?

Last night I saw a wild hare in the driveway, also one on the county paved road. This evening I went out onto the deck just before dark, sat down, and observed directly in my line of sight a female deer, frozen in position on the opposite side of the river. She stared at me for all of 30 seconds, then snorted and flew, springing from one place to another in leaps that took her six feet off the ground.

Now I am working on “pupa” and “chrysalis.” I am trying to find out what creature lives in the minute twig basket that dangles from the very tip of a palmetto’s frond here at the edge of the deck.

scauthen
www.sudyecauthen.com

Blue Needle

2008-05-04T19:26:00.000-07:00

BLUE NEEDLE

Beside the deck where I am drinking coffee, a fish jumps. Across the way, a blue needle of a bird appears on the opposite bank, stalking deliberately along, one slow step at a time. He could be counting steps, but he is staring steadily at the water. As though he has just heard “about left,” he turns, dimples the water with his bill, stands straight, shakes his feathered head, threads his way between the roots of a cypress tree, and resumes his march. When I move, he rises into the sky, curves over me, and flies away. I go inside for a second cup of coffee, come back with binoculars just as the bird’s double appears, flying upriver, wings beating, black head pointed straight east.

At this early moment of the day it is near-wondrous to picture the hours ahead as fully conscious ones, gifts as pristine as the white beach Blue Needle strides along, as mysterious as the furred caterpillar climbing my chair’s front leg toward a destiny he is not thinking of, lost as he is in the moment. What I don’t like to slip into is the unconscious part, when the brain goes numb with clerical tasks and I plod on, forcing myself to complete paperwork, slit anonymous envelopes, record information while the day drops away; it happens. Just as any friendship is forever informed by one’s initial impression, this one morning on the deck plays within the context of mornings that have gone before. The birds’ medley twists through these newly green trees, knotted with the all the dancing lights, squirrels, otters, and fish I've seen over more than ten years.

I sit on, under the delicate, white bells of the Highbush Blueberry, Vaccinium Corymbosum, surrounded by a United Nations of birds: “I told, I told you, I told you” says one and, hardly audible, an answer comes-- “Wait, wait, wait,” followed by the sharp warning of a red-tailed hawk as his shadow crosses the deck. The birds keep on, sprinkling their songs through bushes and trees.

The second fish of the day jumps, and circles within circles appear, casting mirror-like shadows onto the lowest limbs of the trees leaning out over the river. There goes Blue Needle, headed south, one step at a time. At the foot of the bank a wild dark wisteria twists its way toward a hummingbird. The river is low, maybe at about 52’, not worrisome at all (since 77' is flood stage). The relative humidity is the lowest it’s been this year; this is Eden, you understand, Eden where leaves of plants I could label pinnate, palmate, bipinnate, and tripinnate flourish between my chair and the river. One of this morning’s messengers, a small dark bird with a black bill, appears. He is unknown to me, nameless. I wish I knew his name but I can’t throw nets of words over every single aspect of Nature. And perhaps that’s a good thing.

Rock Dove

2008-04-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

I must have been reading a magazine or washing my hair or inventorying ant beds each time this bird appeared; the i.d. book says he is common here, but until today I'd never set eyes on him. The Rock Dove is 11" of oak bark until he moves slightly and the sun glints neon on the dark gray hood that reaches to his shoulders. Against the limb of the oak tree he was nearly camouflaged, his dark gray head and neck flashing greens and purples, his dove gray back, white body, pink beak and feet, and his yellow eyes surprised me. I often see a more familiar pigeon, but this one, never before. He sat in the elbow of the oak's limb for a long time, occasionally snapping his head to one side, giving me long enough to go for the two bird books and my binoculars. I watched for an hour, and he never left the tree but, then, as I turned to put the books back, he spread his black-banded white wings and fluttered to the ground where last week I'd dropped some seed, sat there as though he might have decided to try nesting. A little while later I saw him stand up and toddle toward the river in the odd gait that must have inspired the descriptive label "pigeon-toed." Sort of a delicate waddle from side to side, looking like a wind-up toy.

I thought I'd seen the last of him, but ran downstairs and put out corn where he'd been and, an hour later, I saw him sitting on top of the pile of corn, not eating it, just claiming the spot. He didn't move when I walked toward, then away from him. At a distance he looked like a ceramic decoy, a perfect porcelain bird. The book says: "ROCK DOVE (domestic pigeon) Columba livia." This common, introduced pigeon of farmyards and city parks has a white rump and (except in white birds) a dark terminal tail band. Wing tips collide on takeoff. Glides with wings raised at an angle. Nests on buildings."

I hope our new Rock Dove breaks the rules. I hope he/she stays here in the country and eats piles of corn while he's sitting on it. He chose a good day to visit. I was outside doing nothing but admiring the cool breeze and the sunshine on the deck, all that green hanging over the river, loving the low humidity that's such a rare treat. This was the kind of day you memorize and, so, I have memorized the whole 11" of our Rock Dove. I want to learn more about him and the one photo I found doesn't look like what I saw.

In the garden, tomatoes and snapdragons are blooming and a long line of lettuces is fattening. Pink and red amarylis buds are opening. This year's wisteria is more lush than last year, but has no flowers. On the river bank, wild wisteria is blooming in fat corsage size clumps whose sweet scents drift all the way to the house.

Notes From 3 March Flight to Key West

2008-04-13T20:53:00.000-07:00

THE IDEA OF ORDER, APPROACHING KEY WEST

The whirl and vibration of propellers, along with our pilot's emergency instructions, are a buzz behind my orange earplugs. This Beech 1900 is vulnerable, its skin no thicker than mine, the sheeting on its wings held together by rivets no more impressive than upholstery tacks. I am hungry, working on a headache.

We leave Gainesville, FL, headed toward “a bright sunny day of +80 degrees” in Key West." The vibration of the plane forgotten, I look down on three lakes, three more lakes, a boat trailing a white tail behind. The strips of floss below are roads between neatly combed woods I surmise are planted pine.

On my (road) map, Archer, Bronson, and Chunky Pond* show. We cross I-75, fly over cattle that glint like metal filings in squares of tan and mauve, then houses of hunter green, olive, khaki, and pink; some of the houses have very few trees. On the wing out my window, blue panels open; I wonder if those metal rivets could pop loose.

The many subdivisions we pass over are iconographic, elaborate patterns of red tile laid in mathematical precision, then interrupted by the scrimshaw of the Suwannee River, a black ribbon scrolling toward the Gulf. Already we are dropping to the southwest, to Tampa. No coffee or pretzels on this flight; below us, long lines of ants on the north and southbound lanes of I-75. A bit of turbulence.

As the pilot announces our landing at Tampa/St. Pete, I see that the gray areas surrounded by green are cypress forests and the coastline is bejeweled with houses. Ball fields, construction sites, the windows in those houses. I am praying for the pilot's loves, whatever they are. We have each done something dangerous today.

Change of planes and I am in the sky again. The Sunshine Skyway, a curved eyebrow above water, doesn't bother me; I was far more nervous driving it in a car .

Below me, a geometry incised, it appears, by someone with a very long tool; then deep water over bands of chartreuse, the grid again, blue sky, houses crowding the water's edge, cloverleafs. From another planet we may look like we know what we're doing.

Captiva and Sanibel, a palette of green, brown, and chartreuse, then mauve patches of differing shapes that remind me of frescoes on old walls, bison in the caves at Lascaux. All one gleaming, iconic loveliness and, though it's a worry, right now I can't condemn people with houses situated on
fill for wanting this beauty every single day. Below: water and boats gleam like dimes tossed into a North Florida spring.

Florida Voices, Florida Changes

2008-04-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

A NOTE ABOUT THE BOOK: Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place has been nominated for the 2008 Lillian Smith Book Award.

Florida Voices, Florida Changes

"Glimpsed" is the operative word in the 1996 piece printed below. One almost must search for the landscapes known even fifty years ago. In my 2008 travels about Florida, I've been astounded by the numbers of new dwellings, the thousands of orange barriers lining miles of roads being reconstructed, the bridges, the tourist stops, the billboards.

I dug out this piece (see below) written a dozen years ago in order to compare how Florida seemed to me then versus how it seems in 2008 after visiting cities to the south and in the panhandle for book readings. In 1996, the state had 12,938 million residents and it now has in excess of 18,349 million; hurricanes George, Earl, Charly, Charlie, Francis, Ivan, Rita, Wilma, and the infamous Jeanne have borne down on us. In 1996 the state registered 129,000 housing starts and in 2006, we had 165,000. I first got interested in these statistics when I drove the Florida Turnpike for the first time since 1998. Florida is under far more of a strain than she was when this piece (see below) was written in a duplex on Terrace Street in Tallahassee where I lived for fall semester, 1996, before bolting to the woods in Hamilton County. I went back, of course, but eventually I was able to build here on the river where I might easily be accused of "hiding out." But now, because I've been traveling, I know what’s going on in the rest of the state and it’s startling.

This weekend I'll be at Debary Historic Site (10 a. m., Saturday, 12 April) where I hope to be involved in a spirited discussion of what's happening to Floridians, the place where they live, and what we can do about crowding.

One good thing: people are talking about Florida's environment, growth, development, and our future. More on this subject when I get back. Here's the 1996 piece:

VOICES FROM FLORIDA*

Florida is now home to many peoples, but her earliest languages were spoken by the hunter-gatherer tribes of pre-history, the Apalachee, Yustega, Utina, Potano, Ocale, Tocobago, Ais, Calusa, and Tequesta. These were the Floridians who met those first explorer-conquerors of the New World. “La Florida,” the Spanish named it “land of flowers.”

These peoples ate clams, trout, and mullet. They wore blue beads and were of Asian descent, but they wrote no books and their voices were never taped. Decimated by European diseases to which they had no resistance, the first Floridians are found now only in the archaeological record and in the descriptions of European diarists. However, in the graffiti on a boarded-up wall at coastal Cedar Key, an anonymous author has given them voice:

Tall we were, splendor was in our persons, comely our women, our waters
bountiful. Life was joy in our cedar-scented islands under the cloud-drifted
sky. Then came the ugly pygmies with their bright hard shells and devil-stone
knives, their demon-driven vessels rising up from under the edge of the sea.
By pure evil they triumphed over us. The plague that spread from their souls’
sickness that robbed us of our children, that stole away our beauty, brought
us to an end . . . .

Despite theme parks and tourist beaches, the unspoiled Florida, the Florida of her first peoples, can still be glimpsed.

*Copyright Sudye Cauthen,15 July 1996

ENDNOTE: 10 April 2008 - Sunday at 2 p.m. I'll be at the Micanopy Public Library at the southern end of Alachua County, not all that far from Cross Creek where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote Cross Creek in which she said:

If there be such a thing as racial memory, the consciousness of land and water lie deeper in the core of us than any knowledge of our fellow beings. We were bred of the earth before we were born of our mothers. once born, we can live without mother or father, or any other kin, or any friend or any human love. We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shriveled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.

UPDATE on the book, SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place

2008-03-07T16:06:00.000-08:00

While I was in Key West this week we got word that SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place has been awarded the Bronze for Florida Nonfiction by FLORIDA BOOK AWARDS.

The Gentle Fireworks of Spring

2008-02-15T08:31:00.000-08:00

Some Notes:

29 January 2008:

Evening, and robins, wild and fat, clutch the tallest shoots of the huckleberry bushes at river’s edge. They sway and dive. The 75’ space between house and river throbs with robins. These puffy-chested, red-breasted robins clutching the tips of the tall pines are swinging in the wind.

This evening the trees at the river’s edge are a little less naked than when I wrote a few days ago about the samara of the red maple, small bits of pink, thrown like silken flame onto Hwy 41. Now, I carefully work my way down the river bank to see if any have fallen from the Florida Maple at the river’s edge.

Thomas flies past me and runs straight up a tall water oak that leans out over the water. “Careful. Water,” I say, reassured by the thought I’ve never yet seen a cat in the river. I have seen logs, boats, kayaks, inner tubes, canoes, people, fish, otter, snakes, alligators, small turtles, and once a white tailed deer swimming past. Thomas comes down in his own good time and is sprawled here beside me now, in case I need help with the spelling of “cat.”

***
Sunday, 10 February 2008:

This is too much: here I am, having just written about the wonders of cold weather and there’s a bee buzzing the new huckleberry blooms beside the river. It’s 5:00 p.m. and splendid on the deck, light whitening the upper reaches of the west sides of tree trunks, limbs, branches, and twigs all grayed out on the north and east. Close to the ground, the tree trunks are in shadow, the black gum especially dark.

The bee’s buzzing stops and I hear a mewling, maybe the cry of an infant squirrel. The black berries on the smilax move in the wind as the bee drones from one bell-shaped flower to another, blossoms so small that ten could easily fit on my thumbnail. Along the branches of the wild azalea and curling vines of the wisteria, I finger nubs that will unfold into leaves.

Here, trees, bushes, and palmettos all lean toward the river. In strong winds, dead trees fall forward, the cracking of their wood sudden as thunder. Such a tree lies only a little way from where I am sitting. I heard it rip and crash from inside the house during a high wind, perhaps last Tuesday, the night of tornadoes in Tennessee and Mississippi. The broken tree is now a heap of huge splinters, lying on the Suwannee’s bare, white beach. The bee returns, circles my head, slows before my face, considers whether or not I am a flower he can drink from.

The sun’s an inch from falling out of sight behind Suwannee River Water Management woods and only the tip top of the black gum here beside me is lit. My own shadow extends the width of the deck and ten feet beyond, dissolving into the thick piles of coppery straw fallen from longleaf pines. Thomas appears frozen in place; he's my watch cat and alerts me to the presence of fox and deer.

***
13 February 2008:

While folks in other parts of the country are sloshing through horrid (magnificent) winter snowdrifts, in North Florida we are counting the winged samara bearing the seed of the Florida Red Maple ((Acer rubrum) that sprinkles them down by the river in early spring. The two halves of the samara are delicately joined, as fragile as an insect’s wings, and a deep rose. Under the gossamer covering are the maple’s seeds.

Primary colors: Driving today along the road I saw the year’s first blue-lavender blur of toadflax, Linaria canadensis. On the roadsides, whole bushes are curled over with the vines of the Yellow Jessamine (Carolina Jasmine, Gelsemium sempervirens), and the two reds of sheep’s sorrel and the Florida Maple.

At Suwannee Springs near Live Oak, I stood on last year's brown palmetto fronds and prickly sweet gum pods , to photograph the long crack in the wall of an old springhouse built, along with hotels and private cottages, when these springs were a tourist destination (from the Civil War until the 1920s). A branch of Florida Maple hung just in front of the camera, its unopened samara, points of red. The Black-eyed Susan (Rudibeckia hirta), phlox, Horrible Thistle (Cirsium horridulum), and Blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium) will soon be blooming.

The curly red plant on the sides of the road is called Sheep Sorrel (Rumex acetosella) and that may be what the ground-feeding songbirds are eating, also the rabbits and deer. In folk memory, Sheep sorrel represents the language of parental love. Think about that when you pass a whole field of cream-of-tomato red soup. Observe how it spreads.

***

UPDATE On The Book, SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place

2008-02-10T14:58:00.000-08:00

SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place (available from the University of Georgia Press and at www.sudyecauthen.com) has been nominated for The American Book Award, The Florida Book Award, and the Florida Historical Society's Samuel Proctor Award.

Lizard, Cat, Cold Porch

2008-02-10T11:46:00.000-08:00

Blog Sunday 10 Feb 2008

I believe this is Sceloporus undulatus, an Eastern Fence Lizard, this fellow Thomas has brought in. Thomas, of course, doesn’t know “lizard” and thinks this is a toy, his own toy. I praise Thomas for his amazing lizard catching skills and, while his eyes adore mine, I snatch the lizard and hide him behind my back. Out on the stairs, I place Sir Lizard on the top of the stair’s banister: dark brown stripes on his sides, neon blue on belly and throat, a really astounding blue.

Mr. Sceloporus isn’t moving and may have internal injuries, so I set him down in bannister sunshine. Ten minutes later, I open the door and he looks exactly the same, a miniature dragon, toes splayed, but unmoving. When I step toward him, he comes alive, scurries along the banister, and pauses at the edge of the upstairs entrance as though considering a jump. I pull the door closed behind me, lock the cat door so Thomas can’t get out, and give Mr. S. some time.

This day is why people move to Florida: full sun, slight breeze, 70 degrees at 2:00 p.m. It doesn’t get any better than this which is why, last night, I undressed for bed on the dark, screened porch. I wanted to feel the cold and remember it in summer when even the screened porch is almost too hot for stepping out on though, not, I suppose, too hot for shucking one’s clothes.

When I built and moved into the house in 2002, I resolved to live without ac, a notion I endured for less than two months, during which I remember wearing nothing but bathing suits and large scarves. So now there is ac and, as with every other comfort I can think of, something has been gained and something lost, which is why I take outdoor showers in the summer and sometimes sleep with the porch doors open on our coldest nights.

A certain measure of discomfort is invigorating. In fact, I know of a man who has for many years taken all his baths outside, cooks outside, and eats from his own garden. He does have a phone and a TV, though, so he is only a partial Spartan. If you think on this for about five seconds, you will realize that, in attempting to keep things simple, this modern Thoreau stands a little closer to hundreds of thousands of people he’ll never see anywhere but on his tv screen, folks for whom a drink of water is a gift and a bath, unimagined. When I was undressing on the cold porch, it seemed to me that in the night sky each star grew whiter and more distinct and, in embracing dark and cold, I had joined myself more surely to many things I could not name or even see.

Mr. S. is gone, invisible, has left us, but in the feeder below three pine warblers with yellow wash across their backs peck out a beat, small, feathered drummers, keeping time.

The River Casts Its Flambeaux

2008-01-27T14:31:00.000-08:00

27 January 2008 -- my son's birthday; he's forty-two.

Hard to believe so many years have passed that, until just a moment ago I had never looked through binoculars and witnessed oak leaves transformed into cat's eyes and emeralds, bare stems and branches laced into ethereal lattice. This is too early, really, for me to be on the deck with binoculars. I usually do sunset here, and it is only 3:00 p.m.

The various sizes of cypress knees, through the binoculars, appear to be nested like Russian dolls on the opposite bank. It is a little cold and very sunny. Thomas is here, too; he's sensed I'm leaving tomorrow morning and, so, sticks to my side.

Below, the sun is so bright in the water it's unpleasant. I squinch my eyes and look beyond the sun's reflection, further south where the water has divided itself into kajillions of crystals, each many-faceted: water become jewel; it took us a long time to see this, that water is precious and prized beyond any other jewel but air.

The train whistles over on SR 41, always melancholy, reminding me of other places, people far away, Jack Nicholson as Francis Phelan, riding the rails in the movie, Ironweed.

On the opposite bank, bright sunlight brings fire to the longleaf pines; small miraculous mirrors dangle from the oaks. I must have been forty-two myself before I could see the beauty in a leafless tree, how its form was freed, arms lifted to the sky. And, because I was so late appreciating winter and because we have it for so short a space each year, I am jealous now of these winter days and want them to pass more slowly.

As much as I love springtime, I want to shout at the Florida maples, now all flame along the roads, Slow down. You are coming too fast. You spend your beauty too quickly. Let me look at you.” And to the wild huckleberry bushes and the pink-lipped film of the wild azalea, I want to shout at them, too, and insist on slowing time.

Let me see you open, huckleberry; do not open while I am sleeping or my back is turned. Open one blossom at a time. Wait a month or a year because I know this is one less winter, another winter gone. Ah! Mr. Housman; one season less of my mortal store.

The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux

The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away,
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers.
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May.

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot,
One season ruined of your little store.
May will be fine next year as like as not:
But ay, but then we shall be twenty-four.

We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

It is in truth iniquity on high
To cheat our sentenced souls of aught they crave,
And mar the merriment as you and I
Fare on our long fool's-errand to the grave.

Iniquity it is; but pass the can.
My lad, no pair of kings our mothers bore;
Our only portion is the estate of man:
We want the moon, but we shall get no more.

If here to-day the cloud of thunder lours
To-morrow it will hie on far behests;
The flesh will grieve on other bones than ours
Soon, and the soul will mourn in other breasts.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

---Alfred Edward Housman

UPDATE on SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place

2008-01-21T11:20:00.000-08:00

Sold out at Goerings Bookstore in Gainesville on 13 January with a standing-room-only crowd; so many old friends, I thought for a moment I’d stepped into a “This Is Your Life” episode. Also, on 19 January at Brooker Creek Preserve in Tarpon Springs, a lively discussion of Florida’s environmental problems and how we can honor one another’s opinions by “agreeing to disagree.” On Sunday, the 20th: calls from my Cauthen cousins saying they love the book; it means something to them.

*****************************************************************************************************************************

"YOU WILL NOT WALK THIS WAY AGAIN"

On New Year’s Day, 1 January 2008: I drove the back way to Live Oak, listening to “Robert Cole” (see note below), a song about a young boy, waiting for his ninth birthday.

“Hey, little man,” the song begins, “ . . . . tomorrow’s your big day.” It’s his birthday, but the singer speaks of “a swell of shame and sadness.” The song’s refrain tells us,

“I am your mother./ I told your oldest sister, your baby brother,/ your dog, Champ, and your best friend/ that your name is Robert Cole/ and tomorrow you are nine years old. /But you, you will not walk this road again.”

Driving past the last of the bronzed foliage along our winter road, I wiped my eyes, shut off the CD, stopped for coffee.

The man facing me from the next booth in Waffle House could have been Harry Crews’s younger brother, or maybe Harry himself, 30 years ago.

“Well, at least you got a roof over your head,” the man said to the woman whose face I couldn’t see, a woman whose red hair was caught up in back with a gleaming aqua clip.

“I might get married again,” she answered.

In “Robert Cole,” the parents fight. His father has left his mother on her knees, cursed, and said, “My life is mine,” then speaks to his young son about family, sacrifice, and children. Over and over in the song, Robert’s warned by father and mother not to walk the blacktop road that burns his feet. Robert Cole will be walking a different road. No longer a child and without a father at age nine, he won’t be hop scotching along a hot tar road, but remembering tire tracks “that’ll lead you down and round to where a car’s off in the ditch,” evidently his father’s car because now Robert Cole is “the one to take my daddy’s place,” and “ . . .. I will not walk this road again.” Cole’s father has died violently and made age 9 forever the demarcation between childhood play and the “heavy load” of an adult understanding, the knowledge of loss and how pain twists within a family.

After the woman said “I might get married again," the Waffle House man nodded, pushed the one coffee cup across the table, toward her. The late afternoon sun lit his face. A young girl with dark eyes who must have been seven or eight years old crowded in beside the woman, twisted around so her back was to the man, stared into my eyes.

When they got up to go, the man lifted a sleeping girl to his shoulder, a girl I hadn’t seen; so there were two children. Carrying a paper cup with a straw in one hand, the woman followed along behind the man. The staring girl followed too, but with her head twisted back, looking backward through her large brown eyes.

This little girl, wherever she was going, she wasn’t coming back here again. Her eyes never left my face. Out in the parking lot, the girl and her folks climbed into the cab of a moving truck. “BUDGET: Moving Up” ran in red letters across its length and fastened behind were a red pickup with no license tag, two German Shepherds inside that were wildly ricocheting off the windshield, a red Craftsman tool box in the truck’s back bed, and a child’s bicycle. Anybody could see this was a big move: the first week of the New Year; school wouldn’t start for another week.

“Please tell your mother/your older sister and baby brother/your dog Champ and your best friend/that your name is Robert Cole and tomorrow you are nine years old/But you, you will not walk this road again.”

That long moving truck with the man, woman, two girls, pickup, dogs, tools, and bicycle pulled out onto the highway, crossed the lane heading back to the Interstate, and pulled into a Shell station. I followed them and watched from the parking lot nearest the station.

They finally pulled out and headed toward the Interstate. I watched both ramps, one going east to Jacksonville, the other leading west to Tallahassee. A house trailer and a LOOMIS security truck followed them.

A long time passed before the trailer and LOOMIS truck appeared on the I-10 overpass, “Robert Cole” was playing again on my car stereo, a piano tinkling delicately. After the fireman calls “This one’s torn to hell” we realize the unrecognizable accident victim’s face is that of Robert Cole’s father. The boy sings on, telling how innocence was hammered out of him, how, on the morning before his ninth birthday, he lost one life and was catapulted into another. Over and over, we hear the words

“ . . . . sister/brother/father/mother/dog/best friend”; the familiar, now lost borders of a child’s world.

***

NOTE: Brent Best, on JUST ONE MORE: A Musical Tribute to Larry Brown, a Great American Author.
See http://www.bloodshotrecords.com/album/bloodshotrecordscompilations/293

The reenactment of the Civil War's Battle of Olustee (which was won by the Rebs) is a few days away and here's a gentleman setting up for customers.

BLACK DEER

2008-01-09T17:39:00.000-08:00

9 January 2008 and a brand new year in which already we have had 85 degree heat, 10” icicles, rain, sun, and, today, some of the most beautiful clouds I’ve ever seen. Tonight, I have the ac running.

I don’t think this blog is well-focused and I’m probably going to give it a new name; let me tell you what I was thinking when I started this: Almost everyone lives fast; we hurry, there are stacks of emails and blinking phone messages, more snail mail than we’ll ever get through. Since I can sit for at least a few minutes every single day on the deck by the Suwannee, observing its life and examining whatever thoughts wind their way into my head, I hoped it might be meaningful to share this experience with people who can’t routinely have it. I want the blog's readers to see how it is living here (as simply as I can, which turns out not to be nearly so simple as I’d intended). Although I haven’t a TV or clothes dryer, I do have a merciless computer with email and a telephone, and I want to respond to both because what I am trying to do (see www.sudyecauthen.com) is important to me—all of it, however, springs out of that one hour on the deck, usually at sunset, each afternoon. Here’s an earlier blog I failed to post that I submit now because it starts out as a morning entry and includes deer. I didn’t want you to miss these deer.
**************************************************************

Wednesday, 11/28:

Before 8:00 a.m. I was sitting with coffee on the upstairs porch from where I could hear the interstate’s roar. This displeases me; I would like to think I am in a remote wood but some days the wind blows all that racket in this direction. It’s 60 degrees, very damp, and the laundry I left on the line overnight is still hanging there. My cat, Thomas, is watching a squirrel leaning toward the bird feeder; I growl at the squirrel; he knows my sound and scampers off. A band of white light is spreading in the east, beyond the gnarled oaks that stretch their mossy arms over the grave of the cat, Isabella, d. 2002.

In spite of the traffic grinding along, I am gladly sitting in this cold and damp, considering the day. All the leaves are gone from the Opal Miller Worthy pear tree, at most there are 2 mph wisps of wind, the light in the east has suddenly disappeared, which is strange as I’d expected it to lift and spread; but no, a still, gray day.

9:08 a.m.: a bright burst of sunlight and the day is born, just a little later than usual.

* * *

I drive 24 miles through the wines and golds to the gym: jacuzzi, laps in the heated pool, and jacuzzi again, then back through the colors of fall, 2007, and about five miles from home two dark brown deer, Odocoileus virginianus, leap across CR 25A in front of the car. I slow down; I am determined never to hit a deer. They are an omen, though; I know that much. I don’t remember ever before having seen dark brown deer.

Writes Richard Nelson, author of HEART AND BLOOD: Living With Deer In America, "I felt that we were more alike than different . . . .” and “ . . . we should always keep in mind what the philosophers and elders teach: that while knowledge dispels some mysteries, it deepens others.” (HEART AND BLOOD, p. 9)

Online I find a deer site and discover that in winter deer’s hides often darken. Those I saw were does, the darkest I’ve ever seen. I don’t think I can ever get enough of seeing them. A few months ago, two fawns cavorted each morning at my mailbox—too close to the county road--and when I called Florida Fish and Wildlife they told me to leave them alone. Local hunter, Ivey Harris, said he’s seen black deer and albino deer. The Harrises hunt and they eat venison, which I’ve tasted. However, besides being food the white-tail is for me a sacred animal, a messenger from another plane, a reminder that I’m ignorant as heck about any such plane.

There were deer tracks on my friend Larry’s grave; a good sign, I think.

When Cousin Leon and I went up to Jasper to the hardware store, he pointed out a bag of deer attractant called “Deer Cocaine,” a name reminiscent of the headlines on grocery store tabloids. As instructed, I dutifully dug a 4 x 4 area and sprinkled the white powder onto the ground, but I’ve yet to find a single track. However, I did find tracks in the winter rye beneath the front door entrance.

This evening has been devoted to prying open my wee brain on the subject of websites. My evolving website’s a long way from being what I want and I find I don’t have the vocabulary I need to explain to the designer what I have in mind. It goes slowly. The work goes slowly, but the time goes fast. Sometimes I set the timer and when it rings, go downstairs and stare at the river for a few minutes. This is nothing like that first year, the year of Alone, On The River This Spring when whole poems rose from my throat and fell onto the pages of my notebooks, the year when I first found the wild huckleberry and the ghostly white Indian Pipes that grow nearby on the Florida Trail.

GUNS AND ONIONS. 27 December 2007 [Ron Hunt, my son's father, would have been 67 today.]

2007-12-29T09:08:00.000-08:00

12/27/2007

On the deck.

Someone I wish would go away is firing a revolver upriver—not into the river, I hope, but it surely sounds that way. And now a boom. Ouch. Shotgun. The birds sound alarmed and I could be, if this keeps up.

Am I alone is thinking silence preferable? Well, maybe I don’t mean “silence.” I sure didn’t like it in the sensory deprivation tank I tried out. No, I want to hear leaves unfastening in the wind, geese honking their way south, birds chirping at the feeder. A volley; someone got guns for Christmas.

Just as housing developments follow the seeker of solitude, so does noise follow she who feeds on quiet. Another volley; Pakistan’s B. Bhutto died today.

I meant to sit on the deck here beside the river and remember backwards to Mary Harris’s onions I spent two hours with this afternoon. I wanted to recall my childlike delight in rolling back and forth her wire contraption that finds and collects pecans on her back lawn. More shots. The baby squirrels are crying. I left Mary’s and drove south on 41 to the gas station for milk, amazed that only days away from January we still have whole trees that are red and yellow; this isn’t winter, but John Muir’s “summer.” (Muir said Florida has two seasons, “summer” and “warm summer.”) I was resigned to losing this color when it rained a few days ago, but my surprised eyes feasted on burgundies and cherries all the way to the buttermilk aisle, then to the foot of my own driveway where one yellow tree’s leaves glint like coins in the afternoon light.

Mary had set (planted) her onions too deep. These are Vidalia* onions, some of the best onions in the world a man in Georgia discovered were mild and sweet because of less sulphur in his soil, back in 1931. Mary’s onions needed the soil worked away from the bulb at each plant’s base, she told me yesterday. She said I couldn’t do it by myself, but I did. I dug around the base of, maybe, 250 plants, enough that my right arm got tired and I switched to using my left (always meant to practice that, anyway) long before I got finished. Out there, in the dirt, my mind dug right along with my fingers: Daddy coming in from the field and how Mother never did get him trained to take off his boots outside the front door; “Beans, Heat, Sweat, Breeze,” a piece I wrote about cultivating a garden 20 years ago and never published; I thought, too, of that line in my book, “This lovely dirt to which we all belong”; I wonder if, when Mary reads the book, she’ll object to that. After all, she says our bodies will be restored in Heaven. Well, I tell myself, maybe she’ll look on that sentence as meaning we temporarily belong to the dirt—and then to the stars.

It’s dark now and the shooters have gone inside. Those stars will be out in a minute.

*The State of Georgia owns the Vidalia trademark. You can read all about its 14,500 acres of Vidalia onions at http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-961&hl=y

MR. YOUNG'S TURNIPS

2007-12-22T08:38:00.001-08:00

Saturday, 15 December, 2007: I drove the back road to Live Oak: a black, tornado-like sky all the way. Stopped at WalMart, then going into the city I passed a covered stand filled
with beautiful turnip greens. On the way back, I asked Mr. Quincey Young, whose stand it was, if I could take pictures. He said I’m the first person to do that, and, yes, so I did. Got pictures of Mr. Young, an older man working with him, and several shots of his admirable produce. Told him I was too lazy to cook turnips, but I sure admired his, that I document connections to the land in this area. What else does he grow, I asked.

“Okra,” he said, and asked if I had a business card.

I furnished the card and asked if he makes his living, farming.

“No! This is not about money,” he answered. “No, I drive a truck.”

On the back of my card he saw the picture of Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place, me on the front cover perched on what’s left of my father’s corral at the old farm that now belongs to someone else.

“This you?” he asked.

“Yes, I’ve been interviewing the great grandchildren of African slaves and the descendants of white pioneers, digging at an archaeological dig . . . .” I gave him the rundown.

“How long you been doing this,” he asked.

“Did my first interviews in 1960 for the High Springs Herald.”

Quincey Young laughed. “That was before I was born.” You know, he said, “You might want to talk to my wife’s grandfather. He’s 88, remembers the Depression.”

“Yes, I might.” I got Mr. Young’s phone number. Now, to cook those greens.

KEEPING WATCH, SQUINTING DOWNRIVER

2007-12-22T08:15:00.000-08:00

Saturday, December 15, 2007: Tomorrow night the temp’s supposed to drop to 28F, but last night it was 65F at 9:00 p.m. Outside, no “Lucy,” but her diamonds popped, one by one, out of the darkening sky while frogs serenaded a new sliver of moon. 13 December 2007—eleven years since I dragged my raggedy trailer here in 1996. I’ve never kept watch on the deck without being rewarded and as I watched dark come on last night, waiting for my treat, a bird or an alligator, I knew something would show up. Finally, I spotted a white comma standing half a mile away in the Suwannee’s black waters. The white curve told me I was watching a heron of some kind, I just didn’t know which one.

It grew darker and I nearly gave up and came in. I was squinting downriver, hoping he’d feel my eyes on him and actually move when, just as the leaves on the water oak curled into crystals, while the furred ribbon of a squirrel rattled down the big cypress, as I was determinedly ignoring sounds of breakage in the foliage across the river in order not to take my eyes from my find, he lifted off and flew straight upriver, yellow feet dangling 20’ higher than the deck. I don’t think he even knew I was there.

That bird made my day. I’d been feeling ornery after a long conversation with a woman about her husband’s death, the ups and downs of their marriage, and how she, like everyone else our age, is inundated with Medicare paperwork. Thank god for the bird.

His yellow feet tell me this was Snowy Egret, Egretta thula* which, according to my bird book “during courtship sports long, lacy plumes on his back, chest, and crown.” I have seen such plumes once, but on another heron, the night crowned black heron Aunt Nadine fed bits of “weenie” at her back door when I visited Nokomis last May.

Nadine, too, lived alone, but vibrantly, and she’d still be there at age 94, dreaming up recipes and snipping pieces of hot dogs for her heron, but on October 1 she left us. My daddy’s baby sister and I learned late in life that we shared a love of the natural world and for the last few years I slipped colored leaves and dried wildflowers into the notes I wrote her. When I walked, I wasn’t walking just for my health; I was on the lookout for what I could send.

Outside today we have more squirrels, I swear, than moss, but momentarily they have allowed a cardinal to come to the feeder. Whoa! Two birds with black and white stripes on their chests. Got to get the binoculars and go.

89F at 5:00 p.m., 14 December 2007, on the deck: fish plop, dogs bark, images of white clouds and blue sky appear on the black surface of this slow river. I am looking for Snowy Egret. Fortified by the last of the Kashi cookies and a cup of milk, I have gathered laundry from the clothesline and taken up my post here, where the sky makes quick changes: the moon, a slightly fatter sliver than it was last night with a white whiff of cloud drifting over its curve and, to the west, blends of peach and gold. To the east, upriver, the water is glass. The dogs stop, a fuss comes from nearby squirrels.

This time I have the binoculars and zoom in. I’ve seen a smaller squirrel, but it was a flying squirrel; these two are the first babies I’ve ever spotted, furry ribbons whipping along tree limbs that hang over the water. Gold glints beneath them. Now I see three—three tiny heads—crammed into a hole in the hollow tree. Orange sherbet in a blue sky, white wisps gone, another volley from the dogs. Three pops from a faraway shotgun, then echoes. I count ten pops in all. The sherbet is now tangerine. I don’t see my white comma on legs.

The sky turns gray, the moon egg yellow, and I am reminded of Thomas Hardy’s “tangled bine-stems [that] scored the sky.” This Suwannee sky is a lattice of leafless limbs that speaks of winter. I slap a mosquito off my knee, think of the coming cold. Black lines of limbs and vines, carved on a sky of pearl. Friend owl offers one “whoo.”

Dark, and an old vehicle slugs past, or is that a plane? From the opposite bank—Suwannee River Water Management Property—I hear somebody in an off-road vehicle, somebody with a loud mouth, a teenage male, most probably, or several teenage males. It’s Friday night. They move on, away from me. Night insects start up. No Showy Egret. “And heron, as resounds the trodden shore,/Shoots upward, darting his long neck before.” (William Wordsworth, from “An Evening Walk,” 1787, 8, & 9)

*The snowy egret breeds on the Atlantic, Pacific , and Gulf Coasts and is found in some inland areas. On the west coast, it winters from California south to South America and on the east coast from Virginia south to the West Indies. (http://www.nhptv.org/natw@works/) (http://www.assateague.com/sn-egret.html)

LARRY DELL WESTMORELAND

2007-12-19T18:48:00.000-08:00

December 7, 2007: In desperation, I am back in front of this computer screen, intent on writing my way out of frustration; the book’s situation is a worry: there are, to my knowledge, fewer than twenty copies available for sale in the U.S.A.; a man out west called the other day, saying he’d found a copy. The other copies are on a boat somewhere in the Pacific and I don’t see how they can arrive from China in time for the Florida events scheduled to begin mid-January. “Oh, well,” a more experienced writer friend says, “Publication is punishment for having written.” It sure does feel that way.

On the other hand, it has driven me here, to the keyboard, this fountain of renewal I turn to when there is no other escape from anxiety: this explains most of my output. Writer Paul Varnes (Confederate Money) says that for him “writing is fun.” I’m glad for Paul, but that’s not my experience; I like having written, but most times the actual work, the not knowing what words will appear next on the page (quite often nothing like what Wordsworth meant when he spoke of “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; . . . from emotion recollected in tranquility”; no, not poetry. Sometimes I get only words. But the great thing I want to tell you is that it always helps me get back where I belong: here, waiting for the story.

I have one and it explains the anxiety: In only ten days I have read in three places (two of which didn’t have books and one—that sublime southern bookstore, Square Books, in Oxford, MS—where the books showed up only five hours before the signing/reading). During this same ten days, my lifelong friend Larry Westmoreland moved to another dimension, a tumultuous reunion with an estranged family member surprised and delighted me, I canoed in north Mississippi, stayed in the homes of three different friends, memorized the look of Oxford’s streetlights coming on at sunset as I listened in Warren Steel’s car to a CD of his Baroque organ music, sat on a panel at the thirtieth anniversary celebration for the founding of The Center for the Study of Southern Culture and ate fried catfish in front of Barnard Observatory on the Center’s University of Mississippi lawn.

I first saw Barnard Observatory—not yet restored to its antebellum glamour, shutters hanging loose and curtains flying from its windows, during the Faulkner and Religion Conference of August, 1989, when I investigated the Southern Studies Grad Program, then flew home and put my Alachua house up for sale. One day later, a man I’d never heard of called and arranged to buy the house without even driving over. The rest is history; the rest is Southern Comforts: Rooted in a Florida Place, teaching at UCF, LCCC, NFCC, FSU (and its Ph.D. program I haven’t completed), the building of this house on the Suwannee, the losses of Ron Hunt, Laura Newman, Thom Mannarino, my Aunt Nadine, and Larry Westmoreland.

Born in High Springs in 1941, Larry graduated from Santa Fe High School and Valdosta State University. He grew up to love history and people and he always had time for his friends. He traveled to Europe and lived in Belize, was fascinated by the metaphysical, most of which he decoded from materials put out by the Southern Baptist Convention in whose shadow he grew up and for all of his 66 years he continued to interpret and reinterpret his King James Bible and subsequent versions of holy writ. A friend (said to be able to see into the past) who passed through High Springs a year ago last spring observed Larry and me in conversation, then announced that many lives back we’d been friends; I was a nun and he was a monk.

But you don’t have to look that far. Larry and I loved the dirt back roads of Alachua County, the always flexing boundaries of Waters Pond in Gilchrist County, a shot of good bourbon, theorizing about the lost Spanish mission of Santa Fe de Toloca, and he loved his Pall Malls. He probably didn’t love his inherited weak heart, the fact he was orphaned before he started public school, his hundred emergency room trips brought on by the sugar lows of diabetes, or the cruel and secret reason that prevented his ever having learned to drive a car. His friends drove him: Davie, Mary Alice, Cindy, Bill, Kim; we drove him everywhere, including our dash just a year ago through the reds and yellows of North Florida, to Valdosta, with the car windows open so that as the colors rushed past, so we could better follow the winding loops of the wild yellow grape vines that ran like garlands through the plums and apricots, the tangerines and wines of Autumn, 2006. And we visited him wherever he was, including the Woodlawn Nursing Home which called Mary Alice at 7:00 a.m. on November 6, 2007, and told her that he was gone.

Less than three weeks later, North Florida’s fall colors are almost gone. The roadsides have reddened and yellowed and a brisk wind teases the leaves on my pear tree out back, loosening its translucent amber slivers. Larry, student of European History and opera, graduate of Valdosta State, a gifted mimic who quoted the Romantics at parties, the man who always and forever would stop whatever he was doing to speak with or listen to any friend—my friend who talked me back to Florida when I was near collapse in Mississippi in 1994, the friend of my youth who drew me home: gone, kazam! And I hope without pain. He had a lot of pain, but never mentioned it, drank coffee at all hours, went blind and took up music--arias and show tunes--with an even greater vengeance, was there in High Springs for my No Book Book Event on November 4.

What a great audience Larry and those other 52 souls were, what energy between speaker and listeners. A few hours after I learned of Larry’s death, I called his cell phone: “This is Larry,” he said, inviting and easy, pulling me to his chest, gathering me again into his arms, into the gladness that was Larry Westmoreland.