FROM MY WINDOW OVERLOOKING THE BACKYARD

 

Don’t know whether a bird in hand is worth two in the bird bath or not, but we don’t have any problems with our stone bath in the backyard inviting in even one feathered friend because it’s always empty — on purpose. I mean, most Louisiana bird baths should be re-composed as planters, backyard decor, or something other than hold a place where immodest birds flock to bathe naked daily. In reality, if water is left in these stone bowls, they draw in Louisiana mosquitoes the size of horseflies, and mosquitoes draw in rats and snakes. Right?

Half the time, the bowl of our bird bath in the New Iberia back yard lies upended on the ground, but a hurricane isn’t the cause of its upending. Judging from the population of raccoons, an armadillo, marauding dogs and cats around us, I think that the bath is a target for some animal game called “tip the tub.” Most of the time, the bowl lies on the ground looking as if it’s anticipating becoming a planter we should fill with vegetation that will survive backyard shade.

Our smaller bird bath in the yard at Sewanee, Tennessee, isn’t often visited unless it’s filled with purified water, and I think the birds have taken on some of the “entitled” aspects of the clergy/scholars who live in that rarefied Sewanee atmosphere. They turn up their beaks at ordinary rainwater. Most of the time, in both locales, New Iberia and Sewanee, we don’t fill the bowls of the baths because squirrels come calling if they see the water. We’ve caught Squirrel Nutkin swishing his tail in the Sewanee bath several times — and we won’t comment on pesky squirrels that inhabit both Louisiana and Tennessee yards... but I’ve been known to threaten to order a b-b rifle similar to the one I gave my brother Harold on his 7th birthday and …

Well, hummingbirds don’t drink water, and I’m partial to that species of bird life, so I’m thinking of planting coral bells, columbine, or coreopsis in the upturned mouth of the empty bird bath at planting time. The red blooms will look great against the background of the new cedar fence at which the hounds next door bark despite the wall’s impassive, uninviting stance.

 

Photograph by Victoria Sullivan

 

 

LIGHT IN A GLASS ROOM

Glass porch in the morning

The glass porch in our Louisiana home is my favorite room. True, the glass is smudged with bayou country grime from lack of care during the months we are away. Or perhaps the glass is cloudy because the porch is a place friends have visited to tell some dark stories about broken relationships, illnesses, quarrels — the glass porch has often housed usual and unusual tales of human tragedies.

However, this four-season indoor/outdoor room also holds the hopes for new perspective…it is a living room with a better view. Sometimes I go there to write, but the room doesn’t invite labor or action. I frequently fall asleep sitting in a comfortable wicker chair while the sunlight beams through on my winter-pale face.

The room also houses a few of the glass pieces created by Karen Bourque, a talented Church Point, Louisiana artist, and adds to the idea of inspiring joy in this life, albeit smudged with our tragic stories.

All homes should have such a room, perhaps now more than ever in this time of Covid. I went into the glass sanctuary this morning to share in the grief of my dear friend, Kathy, who lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, and who just lost her sister, Mary Kay, to the dread Covid disease.

Wicker chair on glass porch

The glass porch is also a place of prayer. Another smudge has appeared on the glass, and another prayer goes up for Kathy’s release from suffering. The sun fills Karen’s pieces with light in this small blessed space, and I ponder the idea of glassing in our little front porch at Sewanee. However, the porch faces dark woods and only collects shadows…and spiders.

Vickie Sullivan’s photographs capture the essence of this space on a cold winter morning, and I wish that I could say, “Come and sit awhile,” but this open-to-sunlight room doesn’t tolerate masked visitors!

 

 

CHAPELS

Convent of St. Mary, Sewanee, TN

At one time, New Iberia Louisiana’s premier artist, Paul Schexnayder, and I thought of producing a book about Episcopal chapels in Louisiana. He’d illustrate; I’d do the text. However, we both got caught up in work for other books, and all that remains of the proposed volume are the rough texts for three chapels, two of which I've attended in Louisiana and another one in a non-Louisiana region, Sewanee, Tennessee.

This morning, I discovered the notes for texts about two chapels that would’ve appeared in the volume dedicated to Episcopal chapels. At this stage of my writing vocation, I doubt if I’ll get around to writing the aforementioned book, so I decided to share the notes I made in a “chapel blog,” beginning with one labeled "Lagniappe," the non-Louisiana chapel at St. Mary’s Convent here in Sewanee, Tennessee where I worship regularly and sometimes preach six months of the year.

Angel at Convent of St. Mary, Sewanee

The chapel at the mother house of the Anglican Sisters of St. Mary, Sewanee, Tennessee was designed by Architect Robert Seals and consecrated in 1988. It was constructed of native stone similar to many of the buildings here in Sewanee, and the following text (after revisions) would have appeared as lagniappe about a noteworthy Tennessee chapel in the volume featuring Louisiana chapels:

They teach us about living in stillness with the One who guides a community that follows St. Benedict’s Rule. The Sisters, dressed in their unadorned blue jumpers with white blouses, wake up to a gray world of mist, praying the words of St. Benedict: “Let nothing be preferred to the Word of God.” At 7 a.m., a bell that was transported from their original Mother House in Memphis and placed in the tower of the stone chapel, calls them to Morning Prayer and the Eucharist, two of five offices they celebrate each day. 

    The white-walled chapel is the cathedral of our faith where we feast at The Table with this group of disciplined women. A cat lurks in the hall; an aging dog curls up on a cushion beside the Prioress’s chair and frequently goes to the altar to receive a blessing. Through the clear glass window behind the altar, mist rises over the rugged steep overlooking the Cumberland Valley. Outside, a black locust tree welcomes rain now pattering on the blue tin roof. The downpour drenches a garden of roses where a miniature stone angel sits on a swing, surveying her domain. 

    At the plain oak altar with a cross carved in center front, we gather for The Eucharist. On this particular day, the scent of Easter lilies, incense, and candle wax from the Resurrection celebration mingles in the chapel, along with the fiery words of a presiding priest who exhorts us to practice inclusiveness and justice. 

    The Sisters not only offer the world their prayers for all people, they include us in the chanting of Psalms and the Eucharist, then serve us breakfast in a refectory with windows on every side where they look out at a world they praise daily. Hospitality is part of their lifework. They began offering the sacramental life to mountain people on the Feast of the Transfiguration in the 19th century and have kept their doors open to all people since that time. The Sisters are kinswomen of the Order of St. Mary once led by four Sisters, known as the Martyrs of Memphis or Constance and Her Companions, who died nursing victims of a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee in 1878. 

    At early morning Eucharist, Sister Mary Zita, a Filipino nun, sits in front of me, a sock cap with a star design on it atop her head. She is silent, bent over her prayer book. She joined the Order of St. Mary of Sewanee after Prioress Sister Lucy of St. Mary of Sewanee went on a mission to the Philippines where she visited this religious order in the mountain province of Sagada and recruited the little nun. 

    “Life,” the Sisters would say, “is best lived in community. The Community is a microcosm of the Church. We live in dependence on God for all that is needed, using what is given with care and simplicity as stewards of God’s gifts. Let nothing be preferred to the Word of God. The altar is the home of our abiding.”

My notes about this chapel end here, but for those who wish to know more about the Sisters of St. Mary at Sewanee, Ten Decades of Praise is available in the library of the Convent of St. Mary, Sewanee, Tennessee. Also available is my book entitled In A Convent Garden, poetry about the Sisters.

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan

A RAINY DAY — Dismal?

Figure lurking behind tree?

My favorite essayist, E. B. White, once penned a short column for The New Yorker in which he reported that the weatherman had forecast the day as one that would be “rainy and dismal.” White said he regarded that forecast as one that produced the demise of the era of pure science and the dawning of the day of philosophical science. Dismal? Perhaps for the philosophizing forecaster. White further said that this forecast showed the weatherman had been spending too much time indoors and “to the intimates of rain, no day was dismal and a dull sky is as plausible as any other.”

Today is a rainy day on The Mountain here at Sewanee, but it isn’t a dismal one. The plants have been thirsty for far too long, the last of the corn crop in the valley needs watering, and I’m not into predicting the impact of rain on the human spirit like the weatherman in New York. The stony ground here is drinking noisily. Unlike the muddy ground of my native Louisiana, we seldom experience flooding at Sewanee, but continuous, heavy rain sometimes causes trees to loosen their roots and fall.

I looked out this morning and saw darkened tree trunks, thinking how happy they appeared to be after showering all night. At breakfast, I went to the dining room window and saw what seemed to be a shrouded figure hiding behind a white oak, but the dark figure turned out to be only part of the tree that had lost a branch. (Evidently, we’ve been watching too many mysteries on television that probably influenced my first impression of a figure lurking behind the tree).

I looked for birds that seemed to have disappeared from our yard during the last few weeks and which we’ve tried to lure on site with filled bird feeders, but they’re still absent from the woods behind us. Yesterday, we saw two giant crows grazing in the back yard and wondered if they had scared the smaller birds away just as they’d attacked a squirrel on the fence. My friend Susan Entsminger in Colorado says that perhaps the birds have begun their winter migration already, and I’m hoping that such a natural occurrence has taken them away. 

Sister Hannah at the Convent of St. Mary asked for permission to read one of my bird poems for an environmentalist program she’ll coordinate this winter while we’ve flown further south, and I was pleased to pass it on after she reminded me the poem had appeared in my book, All Love. It’s called “Watching the Wrens”:

Where have they gone?

Infant wrens, directionless,

fluttering into a blue ocean,

their mother pushing, telling them

to expect welcomes from the unseen.

The nest now an untidy hanging,

twigs, leaves, declarations of love

twisting in the wind

beneath green painted eaves,

secure and shadowy.

Them thinking how good it was

to be fed, making noises

to call someone home,

hoping nothing would change

if they opened their beaks

and received the message:

soon she will let you go,

and you must let her go,

singing as if you knew

where you are going… 

A BIT OF BIRDING

Bird Bath in Our Yard, Sewanee

Instead of singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” this morning, I think there should be a new refrain: “Where Have All the Birds Gone?” For the past several days, I haven’t seen any of our usual visitors to the bird bath, even after we cleaned the bath and filled it with reverse osmosis water (water that contains no pesticide, herbicide, or arsenic and which the birds usually love). When I step outside, I hear only one faint “cheep” coming from the vicinity of the thrasher habitat by the drive. The wooden fence on which they love to perch is woefully empty. Of course, the weather has been sweltering for The Mountain, but warm temps haven’t altered their behavior during the eleven summers we’ve been living here at Sewanee. We suspect that deadly pesticides are being used on the campus vegetation and have caused the demise of our lovely friends but were told otherwise the other day. However…

Perhaps we should do what a former friend of ours did while she resided in New Iberia years ago. She captured two well-known birds and caged them — a mockingbird and a blue jay, two birds that she claimed could sing louder than any outdoor members of their flock. Emily, who was a male mocking bird, lived in the kitchen of Sally’s home and serenaded visitors with an enthusiastic variety of notes, often repetitive ones, interspersed with imitations of the blue jay that resided in her bedroom. We appreciated Sally’s enthusiasm for the caged birds that seemed not to mind being eccentric, not “resting upon the air, subduing it, surpassing it, are the air,” as John Ruskin once wrote about our feathered friends.

Sally developed a new hatching project during the time that she housed the caged birds. A friend brought her three round eggs about six inches in diameter, weighing from two to three pounds apiece and asked her to incubate them for hatching. They weren’t blue jays or mockingbirds and were an unusual species to have been born in old Louisiana — ostriches. Now, an ostrich egg hatches within 40 days. The mama ostrich sits on them all day while the papa sits up nights keeping them warm. If the egg doesn’t have a mama or a papa, an incubator is a good stand-in. Sally, a scientist who researched mammals, had access to an incubator in a lab that kept the eggs at 98.5 degrees Fahrenheit, and Sally turned them daily.

The eggs, when hatched, were to be returned to the owner who'd launched Sally in this hatching project. But we worried a lot about their loyalties. When birds hatch, they go through the process of imprinting. The person around when the birds break through into the world and who handles them at birth becomes their natural caretaker.

Now Sally’s blue jay talked to her every morning, and her mockingbird delighted her with a song in the evening, but somehow we couldn’t visualize the long-necked ostrich, which can take 15-foot steps at 40 miles per hour, whizzing through Sally’s household without causing some disruption. We submitted the advice to Sally that on the 40th day, she should stick her hands in her pockets, call in a handler and vamoose in 15-foot steps at 40 miles per hour to escape imprinting the newly born. 

Flamingos in Chinese exhibit, Huntsville Botanical Garden

The last time I visited Sally’s home, I didn’t see any evidences of baby ostriches and actually, the caged birds had been liberated. I was glad that they’d been set free. Meanwhile, I’ll keep watching the bird baths and sit on the porch listening for the cries of beloved birds. I hope that they’ll want a bath soon, or at least they’ll come and sit on the fence surrounding my backyard like they usually do. However, if they don’t show up soon, I’m going into the leaseholder’s office and threaten to bring over one of the irascible emus I often see in a yard in the Cowan valley and loose it from captivity. Talk about a commotion, as we Cajuns say!!

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan

INUNDATIONS AND SUNLIGHT

Spring Annunciation, glasswork by Karen Bourque

During the recent disaster of the Storm Barry that inundated parts of Iberia Parish and brought wind and water to Louisiana, my home in New Iberia was spared significant damage. While the storm raged, friends sent messages that I was lucky to be living on The Mountain at Sewanee, TN instead of the storm-ravaged parts of my native state. Many of my friends thought that at 2000 feet, Sewanee was safe from floods that could have inundated my residence at a 25- foot elevation in New Iberia. 

However, if I had been living on The Mountain in February of this year, I’d have put on high boots because southeast Tennessee received 12 inches of rain. Although flooding occurred on the Cumberland Plateau and drained off The Mountain into area coves and communities surrounding Sewanee, no damage to my home here occurred. When we arrived in March, we were appalled at the sight of a flooded corn field near Cowan, TN where we had bought and enjoyed the #1 sweetest corn grown anywhere in the U.S. That flooded area finally dried last month, but only through evaporation and the grace of God because there were no coves or rivers into which it could have drained. Fortunately, the Amish farmer had planted a crop in another spot on higher ground, and we’re now enjoying fresh, sweet corn daily.

Lapp's flooded corn field, Cowan, TN

The year 2018 was the wettest year on record at Sewanee, according to a report in The Sewanee Purple, the student newspaper at the University of the South. Despite naysayers about “climate change,” flooding has become a widespread problem in the United States, and friends in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, say “another 1927 flood may become a reality.” They refer to the wall of water that reached the Bayou Teche from Port Barre to Arnaudville and crossed the ridges of the Bayou Teche, smashing a protection levee in St. Martinville and rushing into Spanish Lake while the bayou filled with water from the east side. Over 4,000 people in Iberia Parish became refugees in camps on a ridge overlooking Spanish Lake. These camps were set up in May 1927 and did not close until July 1927.

Amid gray days of recent heavy rain on The Mountain and news of the inundations in New Iberia, I received a package containing The Consolation of Gardens, my newest book of poetry, and a ray of sunlight arrived at our home here. The cover of this book features a photograph of a beautiful glass piece rendered by Karen Bourque, glass artist from Church Point, Louisiana (shown at the top of this blog). Gold and yellow hues brought immediate sunlight into the house, and a dragonfly in the center of the glass piece affirms the joy viewers will feel when they look at the photograph on the cover. It’s a vibrant glass piece that radiates positive signals, a sacred work that captured the essence of the poetry in which I attempted to connect with nature’s contemplative and nurturing presence. Karen entitled the piece “Spring Annunciation,” and she could have subtitled it “Hope,” as it is a piece of healing art.

Beneath the Surface, glasswork by Karen Bourque

In A Slow Moving Stream, a book of poetry that I read at the Louisiana Book Festival a few years ago, I wrote of floods in Louisiana and the tenacity of the Acadians when water becomes a spring ritual. As I read one of the poems now, I’m reminded of how enduring my Cajun friends are:

Although the water behaved

as if nothing would ever hold it back

and they did not know

how much terror they could withstand,

they would not turn away.

This land of palmetto, cattail,

willows and elderberry;

swamp and wetland wilderness,

was the abundance of a higher realm

constantly lit they had discovered

where bayou and river conjoined,

a place where the deceitful water

had tried to take them away

but everything had been revealed to them

in the catastrophes of their belonging.

Another photograph of one of Karen’s glass pieces, "Beneath the Surface," appears on the cover of this book, one in which a field of yellow ranunculus is featured — again, a beautiful piece of healing art.

THE CONSOLATION OF GARDENS

Border Press announces the July publication of The Consolation of Gardens by Diane Marquart Moore, a poet living in New Iberia, Louisiana and Sewanee, Tennessee, with photography by Dr. Victoria Sullivan. The duet of poet and plant photographer, Moore and Sullivan, has produced another book featuring their pursuits of plant life scattered throughout the southeastern United States and as far afield as the Mideast.

Poet Diane Marquart Moore observes humanistic elements in the diversity of plant forms, from mayapples to the everlasting rose; and Sullivan’s trained eye records the color and structure of typical and atypical forms of leaf and flower.

A special page in Consolation of Gardens, derived from drawings delineated by the poet’s mother, Dorothy Greenlaw Marquart, in 1926, lends interest to this volume.

Poems about those living forms that provide beauty as the principal adornments in garden and field provide botanical bounty for plant collectors, explorers, and lovers of gardens.

The cover of this volume is a photograph of a beautiful glass piece, Spring Annunciation, rendered by Karen Bourque, glass artist in Church Point, Louisiana and designed by Martin Romero, Vice-President of Landscape Design for Mullin Landscape Associates, St. Rose, Louisiana.

Available by July 15, 2019 from amazon.com or order from Border Press Books, P. O. Box 3124, Sewanee, TN 37375

BETWEEN THE ROCKS

Savage Falls Trail by Andy Gay

Andy Gay of Cowan, Tennessee wears a lot of hats — musician, minister, photographer, writer, painter… I was introduced to him at St. Mary’s Convent, Sewanee, Tennessee when he and his wife Mary Ann began attending services in the chapel there. A former Presbyterian minister, Andy began playing his guitar in the Convent’s special programs about environmental issues, and he’s been a guest preacher at several St. Mary Sunday services. At breakfast in the refectory, we often talk with him about Ghost Ranch, New Mexico where he and Mary Ann have been vacationing for over thirty years. We only recently discovered that he has been creating paintings of Orphan Mesa, Canyon de Chelly and other sites near Ghost Ranch, which is, of course, the territory of the famed artist, Georgia O’Keefe. 

Andy’s passion for painting the natural landscapes of southern middle Tennessee; Alaska; the Isle of Skye, Scotland; Ghost Ranch, and other areas, worldwide, has resulted in a fascinating exhibit at the Artisan Depot Gallery in Cowan, Tennessee. There, we learned that he has also exhibited his art in the Tennessee All State Exhibit at the Parthenon Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee. As a retired minister, he claims time to paint, pursuing work in transparent watercolors after exploring the art of acrylic and pastel chalk painting. 

Andy’s exhibit at Artisan Depot Gallery was inspired by places he’d often visited or lived and dates back to the 1990’s; however, his venue at the Gallery is a “first.” Viewers learn that whatever the setting, Andy says he looks Between the Rocks (the title of his exhibit) where “the great and tiny, the hard and the delicate, the momentary and ancient, co-exist in beauty and are illumined by the multifarious moments of changing light and texture…”

Readers can see that the commentary accompanying paintings in this exhibit is as poetic as Andy’s paintings and reveals Andy’s writing talents; e.g., a description of “Into the Light” on the Savage Falls Trail in the Savage Gulf Natural Area, Tennessee : “On this trail to the falls one passes through masses of light filtered through rhododendron, and laurel stands bracketed by shaded passages. This bridge carries us from one issue of light into another. Every bend harbors some kind of mystery, no matter how many times you have been there…” The eloquent text reminds me of John Muir’s Wilderness Essays and, like Muir, it reflects the writer’s passion for places of endless variety that inspire wonder — natural formations, weather changes, light shows…

Andy’s description of the painting, “Sundance:” expresses his fascination with scenes of his New Mexico visits: “During the monsoon season, when clouds tower and sift the sky over Chimney Rock, light dances. Celestial celebrations go into the night in the forked lightnings over Pedernal, and to the east, the Milky Way unfolds itself, spilling stars now and again into our world…”

Andy reports that he has probably been inspired to paint more Shake Rag Hollow scenes in Sewanee, Tennessee through the years than any other region he’s visited. He writes that “the sun, in the last hour of the day, finds a path, here and there, to penetrate to the forest floor, spilling out in pools of light in the darkening wood. At the last, especially in September and October, the light becomes golden. You may step into these little pools of gold and bathe in them…”

Between the Rocks is a show that lovers of outstanding landscape art will appreciate. Whether Andy is writing songs and playing them, indulging his passion for watercolor painting, nature writing, or preaching an eloquent sermon, in my lexicon he’s a Renaissance man whose art shows “beauty in all its forms, both novel and familiar.”* 

*From Wilderness Essays by John Muir

See the Artisan Depot Gallery website for hours, exhibit announcements, and events scheduled.

REMEMBERING ANNE BOYKIN

April blossoms of Wild Azalea at Convent of St. Mary

Yesterday I received word that Anne Boykin, wife of a former Episcopal minister who once served in New Iberia, Louisiana had died. In 2009, shortly after we moved to The Mountain here at Sewanee, Tennessee, I wrote a blog about Anne, and the message is one of fond remembrance that needs repeating because it speaks of a better time in Anne’s life. The message is also repeated for her many friends in New Iberia, Louisiana. “Give rest, O Christ, to your servant Anne with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting” (From The Book of Common Prayer).

Posting from 2009:
Yesterday, temps on The Mountain hovered near 40 degrees, and a fine mist and rain fell most of the day. It could have been a gloomy time, but our long-time friend, Anne Boykin, invited us to have lunch with her in Tracy City to brighten the day. Tracy City is a small town at the end of a road that winds through the hills northeast of Sewanee and has lately become noted for its restaurant, “Tea On the Mountain.” The building that houses this eating place is a nondescript, white-plastered building with scant windows, and when we drove up and looked at the bland exterior, I thought “uh-oh.” However, we opened the door and stepped into a fine dining facility — white linen table cloths, fine china and silver atop antique tables scattered throughout several rooms, the walls lined with regional art and sets of fine china displayed on tables in every room — some sets for sale, some on exhibit only.

We were served hot tea as soon as we sat down and given a menu that featured a range of entrees from crab cakes to quiche, with accompanying green salad and French bread. The appetizer was an almond-stuffed date wrapped with bacon, and the piece de resistance was a tiny chess pie for dessert. The owner came to our table and told us a story about the pie’s name being derived from the wife of Andrew Jackson referring, off-handedly, to her dessert as “jes pie.” “Tea on the Mountain” was a real dining experience on a cold March day in the hills of Tennessee, and the hospitality within the square white building made me ashamed that I had misjudged the restaurant on the basis of its exterior.

Anne, who is our food guide on The Mountain, could open a restaurant at Sewanee had she an envee to do so, which she doesn’t have. She’s one of Sewanee’s finest chefs and a model of southern hospitality. I’ve put my feet under her table many times, enjoying delectable dishes prepared according to directions from neatly typed recipes passed on to Anne by her mother, who lived on a huge farm near Murfreesboro.

When Anne and Elmer (former rector of Epiphany in New Iberia) lived in New Iberia, Anne hosted weekly church luncheons and dinners in her home, even outdoor “feeds” in the rectory’s side yard, such as the one she hosted when I left New Iberia for our sojourn in Iran during the late 70’s. At 80, Anne says she has retired, but she’s noted for providing food and shelter for people who come to The Mountain for brief stays and find “no room at the Inn.” Last summer when a Vietnamese student graduated, he invited his family (who spoke no English) to the Commencement and searched vainly for rooms to accommodate them. Anne opened her home to them, and says they parleyed quite well without either speaking the other’s language. The Vietnamese family’s favorite meal while staying with Anne was breakfast, my favorite meal at her table. They were served a Tennessee farm breakfast, complete with tiny homemade biscuits, grits, sausage…the full complement of breakfast fare.

I’ve threatened to publish the small book of Anne’s recipes taken from her mother’s repertoire, but she insists she has retired and her kitchen is closed — and she doesn’t want the publicity… until someone shows up and needs food and shelter, that is. One of the reasons we retired to The Mountain is that we anticipated everyone at Sewanee being as hospitable as Anne Boykin. However, she’s still undisputed #1 gracious hostess on The Mountain — or anywhere else she has lived in the South.


Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan

PARABLES AND PIGS

Dog damage to garage

Sunday, I preached on the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and as an aftereffect of the delivery, at lunch with the Sisters of St. Mary, Sewanee, the conversation centered around the profligate son finally getting a job feeding pods to pigs. I don’t know whether the phrase “pods for pigs” was some kind of biblical alliteration created by an early translator of The Word, but the botanist in our crowd, Vickie Sullivan, and others around the table Googled and found that the pods were actually a chocolaty bean from the carob tree that pigs must have relished. 

The conversation caused me to wonder if perhaps a pig had been the culprit that damaged the siding on a corner of the garage door while we were sojourning in Louisiana. A photograph of the damage is shown above. I mean, if boa constrictors can proliferate, move around, and damage properties in Florida and nutria migrated and proliferated in Louisiana, could pigs do the same in Tennessee?! 

According to the manual, Wildflowers in the Smokies (lead author, Peter White), during the late 1940s European wild hogs escaped from a game farm in North Carolina and entered the Great Smoky Mountain Park of Tennessee and North Carolina, and attempts to remove them have failed. Now, these are no ordinary pigs; they’re large babies that root up wildflowers and create wallows in lower elevations in beech gaps, damaging trout lilies and other spring wildflowers, decimate forests by rooting for bulbs and tubers, leaving the beech gaps looking as if they’ve been plowed up. Park officials are worried about long-term effects of these hogs that they actually call wild boars. 

Since the late 1980s, large populations of the boars have been trapped or shot by park crews, but officials claim that total elimination of the hogs is almost impossible. Coyotes like to eat wild hog piglets and red wolves also like to take on full-grown boars, but I’m wondering if there are some park runaways who have managed to migrate to The Mountain here at Sewanee, and are foraging for food near residences.

A repairman who arrived to give an estimate for repairs to the damaged siding told us that there are toothmarks on the siding, and he thinks a large dog (whose owner cleaned up the siding and took it away) chased a chipmunk that crawled inside the corner siding, and tried to make a meal of the little critter. Since part of the siding had been taken away, we surmised that it was a dog whose owner decided repairs might be costly (estimate of $275), so he/she didn’t leave a note. No chipmunk skeletons or missing siding have been found in the woods either.

Unlike some cultures, I don’t have an appetite for roast dog, but I do like cochon de lait —roast pig — Cajun cooking at its best — but there are no carob pods around, and I guess we’ll have to stick to the story of disrepair by a dog who was supposed to be on a leash but got out of control when a chipmunk crossed its path. Sigh. 

We always come home to some kind of damage to the property when we leave Sewanee for the winter, and we once thought the Sewanee campus a safe place to live, but we’ve been taking a ride every day lately… looking for country acreage where we might keep a pen of pigs?…