HERE I AM, AFTER ALL

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

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

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

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

(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

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

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.