A “CITY OF EXCELLENCE”

Marquis de La Fayette

When I’m out “vagabonding,” I’m sensitive to the energy of a city and am curious about the economy that has helped develop that energy. This past week-end, we visited our good friend, Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, a retired English professor from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who recently moved to LaGrange, Georgia. It was our second visit, and we were again impressed by the energy and diversity in this city of 30,000.

LaGrange is situated in the foothills of the Georgia Piedmont, and in 2000 it gained recognition as “Intelligent Community of the Year” along with larger, bustling cities like Toronto, New York, Singapore, and other large metropoles. It has also been named a Georgia “City of Excellence,” which I think typifies this distinctive city. Once a textile center due to the plethora of King Cotton plantations, it has morphed into an industrial and commercial center housing carpet tile manufacturing and the major assembly plant for the KIA automobile industry.

Taste of Lemon Restaurant

Like other burgeoning cities (e.g., Chattanooga, Tennessee), the investments of wealthy philanthropists have created centers of culture in LaGrange that are largely due to the donations by philanthropic foundations — in the case of LaGrange, the donations of the Callaway family foundation have resulted in outstanding cultural centers: two art galleries, a symphony orchestra, a ballet company, an opera company, a Biblical History Center, and other cultural sites. New Iberians in my home town of New Iberia, Louisiana may be interested to know that LaGrange even has its own Mardi Gras Krewe called the Krewe of Mask, which sponsors a Mardi Gras Parade in February each year.

Mary Ann @ her new house

We missed the International Festival and other activities honoring the Marquis de La Fayette, a Revolutionary War hero who impressed George Washington by crossing the Atlantic and fighting in the War for U.S. Independence. La Fayette left his wife on their country estate near Paris to participate in this war after visiting Georgia in 1825. While visiting, he observed that the topography resembled that of LaGrange, his wife’s estate in France — hence the name of present-day LaGrange, Georgia. We did get a snap of the statue of the Marquis while walking in the beautiful town square. The Marquis penned lines that seemed to have imprinted on its residents and contributed to its recognition as a city of excellence: “The welfare of America is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind; she will become the respectable and safe asylum of virtue, integrity, tolerance, equality, and a peaceful liberty.” 

We attended an unusual art show at the LaGrange Art Museum that featured the work of French Symbolist artist Eugène Anatole Carrière. The exhibit contained portraits of Gauguin and the poet Verlaine in monochrome and covered the top floor of the museum. We ascended via an old elevator that the docent asked us to imagine as one that took us to a loft in New York City, but she gripped my arm tightly when she glimpsed my anxiety at boarding the carrier. The artist Carrière is reputed to have influenced Pablo Picasso’s renderings of mother-and-child works, and the exhibit showcases “Kodak Moments” of Carrière's wife, daughter and sons in which the subjects are winding wool, lying down, embracing, praying as depicted through the eyes of a family man.

The Callaway Foundation donated the former Troop County Jail to the LaGrange Art Museum, and when we stood before the Victorian structure, we had difficulty envisioning it as a former prison since the building resembles an old castle. We laughed about the tower being an innovation after the architecture of Brit towers that sequestered those who were to be beheaded. Art Education has become an objective of the Museum, and more than 300 classes of workshops and gallery lectures are conducted in a building called the Center of Creative Learning, a center dedicated to various educational art programs.

Private gardens abound in LaGrange, and Mary Ann keeps pace with gardening enthusiasts in the area; within four months, she has cultivated beds of lantana, Vinca, Ixora, azaleas and other flowering plants skirted by pebbles and growing near a screened porch she had commissioned a carpenter to construct within the few months she has lived in this city. Potted plants line the entry way to her beautiful home near West Point Lake, and we visited two garden centers where she threatened to purchase more flora while we searched for a statue of St. Francis for my herb garden at Sewanee, Tennessee. 

The present mayor of LaGrange has been touting the construction of a walking trail in LaGrange as he feels that the walkway will create greater community connections, but I think that the friendliness and diversity we encountered as we moved about the city indicate that community connections are already well-established in this city committed to excellence.

Photographs by Victoria Sullivan.

THE TRUNK

In a sermon I delivered Sunday about the story of Christ stilling a storm that threatened his life and that of the disciples, I mentioned Hurricane Lily, a big wind slated to hit New Iberia in 2002. At the time of the anticipated storm, the word went out that there wouldn't be enough body bags for victims of this hurricane when it hit New Iberia. But when the hurricane did hit, it seemed to come right up to New Iberia’s door and just stopped, a dead wind totally rebuked. It was a miraculous event and faithful Roman Catholics in the city declared: “That wasn’t the wind you heard from Lady Lily, it was the sound of Rosary beads clacking.” They took credit for their prayers stopping the awful wind at the door of the town. It was no small miracle and one that locals said probably rivaled Christ rebuking the wind in Mark’s Gospel.

But the story about faith and miracles listeners seemed to enjoy most on Sunday centered on a trunk that came across the ocean from Sicily. This past week I visited with a friend who had moved from Lafayette, Louisiana after retiring from her work as an English professor at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette to live near her son and his family in LaGrange Georgia. She had bought a beautiful home in a wooded area there and furnished it beautifully. But what attracted me in her carefully-appointed study was a huge trunk that served as a coffee table in the spacious room. The wood and the leather straps on this trunk had been restored, and it stood out among all the trappings. “It belonged to my grandparents,” my friend said. “All they owned was in that trunk when they left Sicily and arrived at Ellis Island. They never forgot the crossing and their early settlement in Bessemer, Alabama where my grandfather established a Mom and Pop grocery. It’s a reminder of how blessed my family is today because of their courage and faith in crossing over the ocean.” 

I kept eying that trunk, and the thought came to me that it was one of the metaphors for the sermon I’d preach on Sunday. Those Italian immigrants, who were devoted Roman Catholics, must have endured many storms and possessed strong faith when they crossed over and became rooted in this country. They must have believed that the struggling neighborhood in Bessemer would become a refuge for them… and it did. To that family, becoming established in this country was a miracle not unlike the one in Mark’s Gospel, one wrought by faith and symbolized by the huge trunk which held their faith and was passed on to several generations. However, as the poet Anne Porter wrote: “[perhaps] all their desperate long journey [had been] lost in joy and utterly forgotten…”

After I arrived home in Sewanee on Tuesday, I wrote the sermon and, then, this poem that will probably be included in a new volume of poetry I’m writing entitled Tracks.

THE TRUNK

She finished her morning prayers,

stepped down the gangplank 

and bent to kiss the earth.

She knew how it was to speak with God.

She had watched olives and grapes grow,

sitting in a courtyard beside a stone house

just large enough to hold her dreams

before she left the warm air of Sicily.

She recalled how she’d become bound,

heavy, like branches laden with fruit,

gazing out at dust and shadows,

finally making life inside a dream

and packing it away in the wooden trunk,

shutting it against pretending

there was no purpose for her.

Surely, she had thought, there was more.

I would like to see inside the trunk, 

imagining green bottles that had held olive oil,

wine corks, worn shoes, hardened and toes up,

fringed shawls of hope… and hopelessness,

visions of a world where her children 

would become less restless,

could live where freedom

had built a village exceeding the old one

and she could make good soup

because her pantry held all the ingredients,

not like the Old World

and scarcely enough to make scent.

She hardly recognizes the loss,

the shift in landscape that much past, 

except when she opens the trunk…

and lets someone out to tell her story.

RESURRECTION FERN

Resurrection Fern on tree along Jump Off
Mountain Rd., Sewanee, TN

In the spring before Easter resurrection, the old live oaks in New Iberia, Louisiana begin to show large clumps of fronds unfurling that become green and show signs of new life – the resurrection fern, an epiphyte fern that clings to its host tree branches, comes to life, and to me, it is symbolic of the resurrection of Christ. During dry, winter periods this epiphyte fern becomes a grayish brown and looks as if it has shriveled up and died. However, the plant can lose up to 97 percent of its water content and stay alive. A few rain showers lately have caused the fern to unfurl and transform into the bright green that forms on our old oaks. Some plant experts say that the fern can stay in a dried-out state for 100 years. 

In 2014 when I was writing Between Plants and People, a volume of poetry about the interrelationships between people and the plants around us, I asked Dr. Victoria I. Sullivan, a botanist, to take photographs of the plants I wrote about for the book. At the time, I was spending my half year on The Mountain in Sewanee, Tennessee, and Sewanee was experiencing a gracious plenty of dry weather. When I decided to include a poem about resurrection fern, we searched every habitat on The Mountain and couldn’t find a “model” for the poem. We finally decided to drive some distance to Savannah, Georgia to find this fern that reproduces by spores, not seeds. We knew that Savannah has a plethora of old oaks — also, we were often known for suddenly deciding to embark on a trip just to recover a detail for our writings, or to satisfy a yen for peaches or apples… we were called to live up to our rep for uncovering serendipity on such trips. 

Resurrection Fern on Live Oak, Savannah, GA

We walked through the streets of Savannah and finally found a dried up specimen on a venerable oak in the parking lot of a legal firm where we were chased out by a guard but not before we had taken a few quick snapshots. We then drove back to Sewanee. The trip clocked out as a twelve-hour round trip, and when we had recovered, we were told that a patch of the fern grew on a tree not more than five miles away from Sewanee! It was bright with green life, and the intrepid botanist took a photo. Both the green specimen of the fern at Sewanee and the un-resurrected fern in Savannah appear on a page of Between Plants and People. 

Resurrection fern doesn’t steal water or nutrients from the old oaks and cypress on which it most often appears, and it has the distinction of having been taken into outer space aboard the Discovery space shuttle so that space travelers aboard could observe this plant at zero gravity. The fern was able to effect resurrection even without gravity and was named the “first fern in space.” 

The resurrection fern is an amazing plant, and when spring rains begin to fall, or at Eastertide, you might want to look upward at topmost tree branches of our ancient oaks to witness an awe-inspiring resurrection. This member of the plant world has withstood many droughts and seeming-deaths but remains alive and healthy. I’d say there’s a message therein! 

Photography by Dr. Victoria I. Sullivan