MARIANNA, FLORIDA

On a return trip from central Florida to New Iberia, Louisiana, we stopped at Marianna, Florida, the halfway mark of a 15-hour journey. We had always stopped short of this town, as it seemed like just another county seat that didn't offer much in the way of "immersion." However, even the Floridian with whom I was traveling was surprised at the attractiveness of the town, a place associated with Spanish Colonial history and settled by Spanish missionaries and soldiers. The missionaries had traveled west to create missions among the Chacato Indians living along the Chipola River.

Marianna sits on a ridge above spring-fed Chipola River and offers attractions like several Colonial Plantation homes; e.g., Great Oaks and Erwin House, as well as Queen Anne Victorian houses. As I'm an Episcopal deacon, I was especially interested in the history of St. Luke's Episcopal Church that was burned by the Feds during the Battle of Marianna in 1864. A Bible survived the conflagration and is on display at St. Luke's, a reproach to the soldiers who tried to destroy the church... and the town. The Battle of Marianna has been described as the "deepest penetration of Confederate Florida by Federal soldiers," according to a historian who lives in the town and does extensive Civil War research.

Waterways near Marianna include the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee, and Chipola Rivers, Compass and Seminole Lakes. Birders love the area near Lake Seminole where King rails, purple gallinule and yellow-throated vireo abound. Along the Chipola River, wood warblers thrive, and one bird watcher reported 150 species in a single year. Birders come in herds to see the horned lark, which frequents open cotton fields near the Chattahoochee River. The ubiquitous blackbird was sighted during our overnight stay, and grackles (my favorite) paraded in the motel parking lot.

Because we couldn't find the bookstore at nearby Chipola College, I resorted to reading the telephone directory and a visitor's guide published by the Jackson County Tourist Development Council. I was amazed to read that an olive grove flourishes at nearby Alford. It was planted by Don Mueller who retired to Florida after spending many years vacationing in Italy. He established Green Gate Olive Grove (a U-Pick farm) because he discerned that the climate in Jackson County, Florida was similar to the Mediterranean area he visited in Italy. "U-Pickers" clean Mueller's grove out in three weeks during August-mid September. He's the first big producer of olives and olive oil in Florida and has been in the business for six years. Next trip, we plan to visit during U-Picking time. We're told that a variety of Kalamata-style olives are being developed.

We missed the Bellamy Bridge, which is reputed to be haunted by the ghost of Elizabeth Bellamy. Elizabeth's bridal gown caught fire on her wedding night, and she was burned to death. I didn't discover why she haunts the bridge, but I surmise that she still searches for water to douse the blaze that set her afire. The bridge is now open to the public under an agreement with Northwest Florida Water Management District, but we didn't stick around to catch a glimpse of Elizabeth's ghost.

As I've said before, travelers never know where they'll find serendipity, and the GPS has never alerted us to "places of immersion," but we find them anyway!

THE VIRGINIA HIGHLANDS

Heartwood, SW Virginia's Artisan Gateway
Abingdon, Virginia

Tennessee is a long, narrow state that is bordered by eight states with interesting sites that can be reached within a four or five hour drive from Sewanee, Tennessee where we reside half the year.  The bordering states that we don't frequent because they entail longer drives are Arkansas and Missouri, but during the past six years we've covered the art scenes in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Virginia. 

We've just returned from Abingdon, Virginia where the Virginia Highlands Festival went on for sixteen days.  The Festival, dubbed "The Jewel of the Blue Ridge," showcased Appalachian arts and crafts – juried arts shows, antiques markets, Celtic and Blue Grass music, tours of the famous William King Museum, quilting exhibits, and, of course, the famous Barter Theatre.

The Barter Theatre is eight decades old and is touted as the most famous stage in Virginia, as well as winner of the Tony Award for Regional Theatre.  During the Highlands Festival, the Barter featured a full venue of plays, and we enjoyed The Blonde, The Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead, a one-woman performance in which Tricia Matthews played the parts of a wife, a husband, a lover, a child, a neighbor, and a shop girl in two acts.  We've seen a lot of Little Theatre plays, but this was a stunning professional performance by a versatile female actress who is the resident acting coach at the Barter Theatre when she isn't performing.   Her acting performances are diverse, ranging from Amanda in The Glass Menagerie to Miss Hanningan in Annie.

Although "The Heartland" featured the biggest array of crafts in Abingdon, we spent more time sampling the farm-grown food and playing the CD's of blue grass music – we had missed the usual Thursday night performance by famous and soon-to-be famous blue grass musicians. Docents encouraged us to follow "The Crooked Road," Virginia's Heritage Music Trail, 333 miles through the mountains of southwest Virginia where there are miles of music venues and wayside exhibits, but we didn't venture that far afield.

I was attracted to the exhibit of the Virginia dulcimer in the William King Museum and stood before a video of blue grass music that featured dulcimers, creating my own lyrics while the musicians did their bowing, strumming, and picking.  "You should write lyrics for country music," my friend Victoria told me as I improvised lyrics.  "Yes, Nashville is full of wannabes like me who think their spontaneous song making will catapult them to Grand Ole Opry fame," I said wryly, but went on singing improvisations in a high, lonesome-sounding voice reminiscent of blue grass performers.  I'm sure the docent who had greeted us when we entered the museum caught my act on her desk monitor!

The dulcimer, a teardrop-shaped instrument, arrived in Virginia via immigrants from Germany, Scotland, and England, and since my Scots ancestors settled near Fredericksburg, Virginia, I suppose I could claim some inheritance of appreciation for the dulcimer.  One dulcimer in the exhibit was reserved for strummers, so I picked a tune with it and wished that I had been able to attend an earlier lecture about this fascinating musical instrument.

Wm. King Museum graffiti on
storage building

Another intriguing exhibit at the William King Museum, entitled "UNshelved," featured artists who're interested in textbook images – seeing books as art objects and working on paper in alternative ways.  They're billed as collectors of images, publications, stories that inform their artistic work.  One artist, Nick DeFord, collects maps and books, mixes art supplies with office supplies, references art history, popular culture, and places where mysterious events take place in his exhibit.  Travis Head of Blacksburg, Virginia, uses his sketchbooks for exhibits, documenting events from his life through notes and meticulous drawings that reminded me of Da Vinci's notebooks.  As we left the museum, a docent told us to notice the arresting graffiti mural on a storage building that an artist had done, using spray paint in cans.

This account only highlights a few of the attractions at The Virginia Highlands Festival in Abingdon, Virginia, but it was refreshing to visit a hotbed of Appalachian culture and a community of vibrant artists, even though we developed a case of "visual overwhelm."  Festival administrators attributed the success of the 65^th Anniversary Celebration to the all-volunteer committee members who helped visitors explore "The Jewel of the Blue Ridge." 

VISTAS…

From steps of St. Mary's Convent,
Sewanee TN

Every morning when I wake, I open the French doors in the living room and look out at the woods bordering our front yard to get my shot of a vista for the day. Although I’m not a hiker or camper, my parents were inured to both activities, and I was taught to appreciate the outdoors. A copse of trees, as well as a great stretch of desert, are sacred sights to me. One vista often reminds me of another; e.g., the road leading to the valley in Cowan, Tennessee reminds me of the curvy Highway 1 leading to Big Sur, California, sans Pacific Ocean on one side of the road.

I’m always inviting people to view different vistas, and today my thoughts turn to Ben Blanchard, who will be married in Austin, Texas this afternoon. Ben once accompanied his mother, Janet, one of my best friends, on a trip we made to California. Ben was ten and a reluctant traveler, and he balked at every curve when we traveled the road to Big Sur and Point Lobos, often dozing or sulking in the back seat of the car as we passed through magnificent scenery – rugged cliffs, canyons, long meadows, and redwoods, stopping to explore narrow inlets where we could get a better view of the greenish blue waters of the Pacific. I’m not sure it was an entirely miserable experience for him because a few weeks ago, word came that he wanted to take his bride on a honeymoon to California – and guess where he wanted to go? Of course, he wanted to retrace his steps up Highway l to Big Sur!

You never know when you have effected a “travel take” with offspring, but if they’re exposed to vistas at an early age, they’re likely to develop wanderlust and appreciate the outdoors. I never fully appreciated the trip to Diddy Wah Diddy (California) that my father initiated back in the 40’s and earned the title of “luxury-loving girl” because I wasn’t too keen on the idea of campouts along the way. However, by the time I reached my twenties, I had a full-blown case of wanderlust. And, in my thirties when I went to Iran and lived there two years, people thought I had lost my mind because I enjoyed my sojourn in the southern desert of Khuzestan – so much so that I’ve written four books about the experience. In my forties, I began traveling to California every year and became enraptured with the deserts of southern California and Nevada.

A few months ago, Pinyon Review published one of my poems that revealed my intense feelings about the desert entitled:

Carson City, Nevada:”

I could live here

under the rock outcroppings

away from the hot summer wind;

the sun would make me a cover

and I would become dry and brief;

my words sharp as the sage

skirting the Sierra foothills;

I could live like a mountain lizard,

scuttle with the ground squirrels

at the sound of footfalls,

suffering no invasion on the desert’s face;

I could live here

where my heart could dry out

from a lifetime of mistrust;

I would believe the night stars,

sleep in a grove of cottonwoods

rustling dryly,

feeling only kinship.

Landscapes affect me deeply, as they do most poets. When Robinson Jefferson moved to Big Sur, he became spellbound with the rugged coast near Carmel, writing that “the coast had displayed all its winter magic for us: drifts of silver rain through great gorges, clouds dragging on the summits, storm on the rock shore, sacred calm under the redwoods…” I was just as enchanted with my first glimpses of that rocky California coast, and the wild beauty of it had a lasting effect on me. Actually, if I had my druthers, I’d live in Carmel, California, but my senior’s purse won’t allow that luxury.

I’m happy that Ben will get to see all the natural beauty of the central coast of California when he makes a return trip to the scene that he scorned as a young child – this time with fresh eyes, and I expect the experience will be overwhelming for him and for his bride. Meanwhile, I will think about his trip vicariously and continue to record the beauty of the landscape here on the Cumberland Plateau, including a photograph of the Cumberland Valley as seen from the backyard of St. Mary’s Convent accompanying this blog. 

HEAVY RAINS BRING MEMORIES OF HUNTING PLANTS…

The plant hunter on an early expedition.

This week’s “monsoon” that flooded city streets throughout Acadiana reminded me of Hurricane Elena and an article I wrote back in 1988 about a plant collecting trip in which I accompanied my friend Dr. Sullivan and a Japanese botanist, Dr. Yahara, to St. Augustine, Florida. On that memorable trip, Hurricane Elena followed us 700 miles to Florida, then turned and followed us all the way back to the Gulf Coast after we had collected the plants. We were searching for Eupatorium, weeds with dirty white flowers that most people would scarcely glance at a first time, much less a second time, identifiable in ditches, pastures, and at forest edges by the botanists from a van speeding 65 mph along interstate highways. The botanists were collecting samples of these plants to analyze the isozymes and chromosome karyotypes for comparison of species with those in East Asia. So much for scientific explanations.

The memorable part of the trip was the behavior of these botanists. During the three-day trip, rain fell in buckets, as the hurricane began to shadow us. To ward off the rain, Dr. Yahara tied a light chartreuse towel around his shaggy, home-barbered style hair, but Dr. Sullivan ran bareheaded through the drops, and I foolishly followed them on this plant hunt. We waded through palmetto, swamp magnolia, large colonies of mosquitoes breeding in the hardwood forests, and stretches of posted property (I’ve never hunted plants with a botanist on anything but posted land – botanists are drawn to growth on illegal property as irresistibly as insects to pitcher plants).

Somewhere along the way, Dr. Sullivan allowed Dr. Yahara to drive because he wanted to practice his driving, he said. Now, in Japan, drivers motor along, British style, on the left-hand side of the road, and the steering wheel is located on the right-hand side of the vehicles. Add to this disadvantage of everything being backward Dr. Yahara’s unfamiliarity with power steering and brakes and you get the picture – that of a gleaming white van moving in fits and starts in the fast lane of a major U.S. artery. The sudden bucking halts caused a stream of piggybacking vehicles behind us, and curses were hurled at our pilot in a maelstrom of ethnic prejudice.

While the botanists ran through the rain, much of the time I stayed in the backseat of the van where I sat, recording the botanist’s antics and where space requirements had been violated by large white plastic bags of specimens. The van also developed an odor, an odor which grew stronger by the moment – the botanists had packed the sulphurous smell of a nearby paper mill within the bags! Flies had also found a landing strip in the back of the van where I had been placed in this inferior unscientific position.

Rain fell in heavy gray sheets while we stopped and started, the scientists experiencing botanical seizures when they came upon such places as an airstrip surrounded by a high wire fence with a sharp pointed strand of barbed wire along the top. Eupatorium recurvans species lay just beyond, beckoning the duet. Dr. Sullivan halted the van, and the couple got out to stand before the fence, peering at the species longingly before deciding not to muster the climb. They seemed very compatible, standing there in the rain, wistfully contemplating a population of weeds in a field inaccessible to poor botanists. Dr. Yahara would have scaled the barrier if Dr. Sullivan hadn’t restrained him because of possible plane landings, she said, which, of course wasn't a rational explanation in the face of Elena’s threat and no planes landing.

Meanwhile, the leading edge of Hurricane Elena had swamped coastal areas with high tides, thunderous surf, and torrential rain. The storm, its winds roaring at 100 miles per hour, veered toward northeast Florida where we were headed. Rain had fallen so heavily in Apalachicola at midday that visibility had been only 20 feet, but we traveled on. I was beginning to have problems breathing in the space trespassed by all the severed plants in the bags. At dusk, the botanists decided to stop at a motel in St. Augustine to wash the root stocks so that Dr. Yahara could send them back to Japan. They discovered a garden hose lying outside the motel office door, quickly filching it and attaching it to a spigot outside the motel room before they began their Saturday night washing. By midnight, the pair had laundered one fourth of their harvest … and Elena had stalled in the Gulf of Mexico somewhere west of Cedar Key.

We tried to outrun the hurricane on the 14-hour trip home and got off route, moving toward Ocala on a direct southwesterly line to Cedar Key. I hissed at the botanists that we were heading into the path of Elena and a swarm of tornadoes. Trees bowed and curtsied to us in the gusts that had begun to rock the van. Rain slashed heavily against the windshield, chasing us back on route. A wind shear stalled the hurricane’s strengthening, and we crossed over to Highway 441, passing within five miles of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' home where The Yearling had been written.

“Let’s stop here. We’re already off-course,” I said tentatively, hoping they would understand that book writing was as serious a matter to me as Eupatorium was to them. Silence. “It would only take fifteen minutes.” Silence. Science vs the Arts, the classic struggle, occurred in a van moving through a hurricane. Part of the evidence which the trip had yielded was that there was a distinction between artists/writers and scientists. While artists/writers at least sense the presence of other humans, make observations about their behavior, and raise their observations to an art, botanists are oblivious to anything breathing beside them; they’re so intent on the blade or twig, flower or pollinator under scrutiny. We did not stop for Marjorie K. Rawlings. But I had enough information to support the thesis that botanists are maniacs. I became anxious to type up a study I'd entitle “On Plant Ardor.”

Fortunately, Elena grew tired of following us and slammed into port at Gulfport, Mississippi the morning after our return home, having trailed us through Florida and all the way back to the Gulf coast. The sun shone on the end of our botanical expedition and when the van stopped, I jumped down, saying: “To quote the saying my houseboy Jabar taught me when I lived in Iran before the deposing of the Shah, ‘Is Finish.’”

Such are the memories inspired by two days of forced isolation during a heavy rainstorm in south Louisiana! I hasten to add that this past year Dr. Sullivan was honored for her work with Eupatorium by having Eupatorium sullivaniae named for her.

LEAVING OUR FAMILY AT ST. MARY’S

One of the major experiences I’ll miss when I return to Louisiana for the winter is my life as an Associate with the Anglican Sisters of St. Mary’s Convent, Sewanee, Tennessee. Yesterday, Victoria Sullivan and I celebrated an anniversary of four years as Associates with the Sisters. We received a lovely bouquet of dahlias grown in the Convent’s garden and two cards with handwritten sentiments recognizing our service with the Community. Sister Miriam had also gotten up at 2 a.m. to bake apple raisin bread for the occasion, a bread that she jokingly referred to as "extremely pregnant" because it had risen to a mid-section height unparalleled in her baking career. Lots of unpublishable remarks followed this reference, and the anniversary was one of those light and laughter celebrations characteristic of the Sisters’ “family events.”

During the 80’s when I attended self-improvement seminars about how to live and work as a contributing person in society, participants were told that there are three things people need to do in their daily lives -- invite others to join them in contributing to community life, make promises to the community, and acknowledge people’s efforts when they've made contributions. The Sisters of St. Mary do those three things. They invite people to become Associates and work with them, requiring each person who joins with them in worship and service to promise to live by a daily Rule. And they support and acknowledge the Associates for their work.

The Big Plus for Associates is that they join an authentic family –a family that remembers birthdays, anniversaries, the names of the Associates’ offspring and grand offspring and one that offers open discussion of problems and ongoing spiritual direction. The family of Sisters listens well, rather than pronouncing personal judgments and criticism; and they provide prayerful, unconditional love. It’s an honor for Associates to be able to worship and pray at four services every day of the week in this small gray stone chapel perched on a bluff of the Cumberland Plateau.

We share the Eucharist and breakfasts on Tuesday and Sunday mornings every week and are sometimes invited, as we have been this week, to share Sunday lunch with the Sisters in a refectory overlooking the Cumberland Valley. The Sisters love to laugh and often praise Victoria for her special ability to tell stories or make wry remarks that incite laughter. In her anniversary card, Vickie received special acknowledgement for her gift of laughter, for her wisdom, and for the time she gives to Convent projects;e.g., the Board of Directors of the Convent.

I often serve at St.Mary’s altar and preach at least once a month while we’re sojourning on The Mountain and feel at home serving as a retired deacon from another Episcopal Diocese on this small, modest altar and sharing the Gospel with a congregation of 30-40 active members.  I've also been involved in fundraising efforts on behalf of the Convent's work and for maintenance of their mother house and received acknowledgement of those efforts.

In short, we’re included and respected as members of an organization that is a well-functioning servant leader organization, one that doesn't just pay lip service to so-called “religious” ideals but provides Associates a family that is honest with, and upholds, all of its members, unlike many of the dysfunctional families in American society that tout togetherness but practice phony baloney, acts of sniping and unkindness to members of the family into which they're born.   

The idea of developing an Associates order can probably be attributed to a Sister of an early St. Mary's order named Mother Mary Maude who, in 1934, wrote the prophetic words quoted in Ten Decades of Praise by Sister Mary Hilary:

“It has been said that this age is ripe for a new manifestation in the monastic tradition…One wonders in what way it will come. Perhaps in lay organizations, pledged to the ascetic ideal, yet living and mingling in the world. If ever the world needed the salt of distinctively Christian lives it needs it now. Such lives must be based on theological virtues, built up on the moral virtues, pledged to simple and frugal living, detached from worldly standards, fired with a passion for social justice, and sustained by a dynamic energy drawn from sacramental grace and nourished by a systematic prayer life…”

The Sisters of St. Mary in the southern province are the “inheritors” of an order established 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. The Sewanee order also established an order of St. Mary in the Philippines, and a tiny Sister named Mary Zita was called to the convent at Sewanee after the Sisters made a mission to Sagada.

We’re fortunate to have found this authentic family in one of the world’s “thin places,” a community dedicated to "providing the salt of distinctively Christian lives,” devoted to holy work and to caring for people who may not have experienced unconditional love and acceptance by their birth families. I might mention that members of the Sisters’ family include three cats and three dogs who scurry through the halls and sometimes join us at the Eucharist.

We'll miss our wonderful Convent family, but their e-mails, letters, phone calls, and prayers always follow us to Cajun country. It's exhilarating to enjoy a relationship with the Sisters that St. Paul described in I Corinthians 13, verses 1-13.  I invite you to re-read it.

MOONEY’S

Mooney's Market & Emporium

For five years, I passed a dingy stucco building on the highway between Monteagle and Sewanee, Tennessee and remarked how forlorn the building looked. It appeared to have housed an enterprise of some kind or a small family. “I wish someone would buy that place and renovate or restore it,” I’d say when we passed, but, then, I dislike abandoned buildings of any kind – home, business, motel, schoolhouse – and I suspected that the little structure would be torn down in a few years.

This year, when I returned from Louisiana where we winter and neared Sewanee feeling my usual reluctance to change homes for the season, I smiled widely when I saw that the little stucco building had been restored and bore the name “Mooney’s Market and Emporium” on its freshly-painted exterior. Since that time I’ve frequented the place weekly and enjoy talking with Joan Thomas, the proprietor. Joan, a witty woman with long blonde hair, has the kind of hospitable manner that makes a specialty grocery successful, and she also has a background in bookkeeping that keeps the store operating in the black.

Mooney’s occupies a building that was once a grocery called “Sanders,” owned by a family named Sanders who sold groceries in the big front room on one side of the structure and used the rest of the house as living quarters for the family. The road in front of the grocery was called Dixie Highway and was a graded and graveled road until it became Hwy. 41A.

“My husband and I bought the property to save what we considered to be an authentic landmark,” Joan said. “It took us a year to get clear title, and by the time we did get it, we were a telephone call away from having it demolished – the roof leaked, and the building appeared to be on the point of collapsing. However, I became sick and spent four days in bed, and while abed I had an epiphany. The epiphany was that we should save the building. We looked at the property again, and all the while, people in the Sewanee area were saying that the building wasn’t so bad. Then, my husband looked at it again and said, ‘it’s not so bad.’ Paul Cahoon, a friend who thinks outside the box, looked at the place, and after examining the structure, he said, ‘it’s not so bad.’ So we began restoration on the strength of everyone thinking that the building wasn’t in such bad shape.”

“While I was in bed those four days, I envisioned what we would do with the building after it was restored. I asked myself, ‘What is the work you have always wanted to do?’ and the answer was to have a yarn shop as I’m a weaver. In my vision, I made the front room on one side a weaving place that would hold my loom because the light in that room was perfect for a loom. Then, since I had always been in charge of a food coop – even ran one at St. Andrews Episcopal School before it burned down – I felt the need to create something like a food coop. That’s how the grocery was born.”

Joan Thomas

Joan recently added to the three acres that Mooney’s occupies by purchasing 1/3 acre that is the old railroad bed for trains which crossed within a few feet of the front corner of the house. “The train stopped running in the 60’s,” Joan said, “and in the 80’s the tracks were removed. The old railroad bed will become part of a Tennessee nature trail called the Mountain Goat Trail.”

Mooney’s inventory includes 90% natural foods, “and some gourmet fluff,” Joan says. A vegan since she was 15, she says she really learned about the value of food when she quit eating meat. A garden in the rear of the grocery attests to her interest in vegetables. In the small space, she grows tomatoes, kale, okra, herbs, and other vegetables according to season, a bounty that she sells along with foods from the Sewanee area, including local cheeses.

The store also houses a weaving/spinning room where Joan weaves and Claire Cage spins. The back rooms contain antiques on consignment from Anne Sherrill, a dorm matron for dormitories on the campus of the University of the South, and assorted furniture and books from others.

When I interviewed Joan, we sat at an old ice cream parlor table on the back porch and chatted about her background, which is as interesting as Mooney’s. A native of Cleveland, Tennessee, Joan has lived mostly in Tennessee, with a hiatus in Seattle, Washington where she tried her wings as a bookkeeper for television and the theatre and did food styling for commercials. “I also did some cooking for a cooking show – you know, dump and pour,” she said, laughing.

Joan moved to Sewanee in 1985 to house sit “Brinkwood” on the Natural Bridge Road near Sewanee, a home that was in the family of the famed author Walker Percy and which she house sat for seven years. She married her first husband, and when Brinkwood was sold, she helped establish Link Farm on 1,200 acres in the Jump Off Community Land Trust near Sewanee. There, she and her husband initiated a gardeners’ market, a food coop, and began making a community like one that they envisioned a “community should be.” Joan related that for awhile, she lived in a teepee, then “built a home and divorced, in that order.” We agreed that couples who build a home together from foundation upward often divorce during the planning and building process.

When Joan moved to "The Farm" in Summertown, 120 miles west of Sewanee, she joined an intentional community that had formerly been a famous commune where each member of the community signed a vow of poverty and pooled whatever possessions he or she had. In this community Joan met her second husband, Michael Lee. The Farm is now privatized, but it remains an intentional, gated community.

Joan and her husband later established a contracting business in the area. “Then I broke my leg,” she said, “which must have been a way to get out of the business because I foolishly climbed up on a 20 ft. ladder and fell off.” Her contracting background proved valuable when she and her husband restored Mooney’s. They maintained the authenticity of the old structure, repairing rotten boards, reframing and refinishing floors in other rooms, reusing all the old materials to restore the home. Joan took on the job of painting, applying three or four coats to the exterior and interior of Mooney’s. However, she had learned her lesson regarding ladders and didn’t volunteer to paint the ceilings. The outcome of the appraisals “it’s not so bad” is a structure that would qualify for a National Historic property, a neat small-town marketplace boasting a colorful awning and sign with a smiling moon that attracts customers from mid-Tennessee and from throughout the U.S. and other countries.

Joan plans to expand Mooney’s to include a restaurant, a travel trailer in the side yard that will be used as a kitchen to prepare wraps and sandwiches for patrons who can pick up lunch from a window ledge on one side of the trailer. She employs one assistant, Rebecca Newton, who works part time at Mooney’s and never seems to be done with packing grains and loading shelves. Rebecca shares Joan’s love of the market/emporium but has a second job as an editor.

Inside Mooney's

“We’re constantly busy, and I don’t have time to spare,” Joan says. “The grocery takes up my whole life. I do meditate every day for thirty minutes, using my own mantra. My spiritual life can be summed up in one sentence: I believe that we are all One – everything that is, is God, and we are part of it.”

MAKING THE LOOP TO LEIPER’S FORK

Joe Natural's for lunch at Leiper's Fork

Last week, a friend in Louisiana wrote to me about a small town near Franklin, Tennessee called Leiper’s Fork, knowing well that this information would incite my peripatetic senses. It seems the town was showcased in a recent article that appeared in Country Living magazine and is one of those quaint back roads villages that has been rejuvenated and caters to Franklin and Nashville citizens who look for a place to spend a week-end in the country. I let the message from my friend sit on my desk for two full days before setting out to see why Leiper’s Fork had filled several pages of Country Living.

Like Bellbuckle, another small town in Tennessee that I often visit, Leiper’s Fork is one long main street lined with galleries, gift shops, and wonderful restaurants. We stopped at Joe Natural’s for lunch because the restaurant advertised fresh, natural ingredients and organic, homemade cuisine. Some of the fare included gluten-free breads and cookies and grass-fed burgers, but I opted for a cold soup containing pureed avocado, celery, and tomato, seasoned with homegrown herbs. The piece de resistance was a home-baked cookie made of beets and chocolate. I know the ingredients sound not-so-palatable, but it was one of those “give me more” occasions!

My book addiction led me farther down the street to Yeoman’s In the Fork, a rare book and document gallery inside an old mansion with the traditional four white columns on the porch. I was surprised to discover a gallery with over 50,000 rare books, documents, and maps. The bookstore features rare antiquarian books from many historical periods, with a special focus on Colonial America, including historical documents hand signed by some of America’s founding fathers.

Randal Bedwell explaining bookbinding at
Yeoman's in the Fork

I wandered toward the back of the gallery and discovered a man sitting at a desk engaged in bookbinding who offered to help me if I needed information about the gallery. Instead, I struck up a conversation about his bookbinding work, and he showed me a large book with leather binding that he had just finished cleaning and mending – it was a copy of the works of Euripedes, a Greek tragedian living in the 5^th century B.C. The volume was published in 1694, and the print was as clear as the day it was published on fine, unblemished paper resembling parchment!

Bedwell established a Guild Bookbindery in 1987 in the basement of his parents’ home in Paris, Tennessee and reports that he began his business repairing and rebinding old Bibles, as well as Civil War volumes. We found that we had a mutual acquaintance in Oxford, Mississippi --Richard Howorth, owner of the famous Square Books bookstore in Oxford. Bedwell pursued his Masters in History at Ole Miss and later started a publishing house called the Guild Bindery Press and a literary magazine, Southern Reader. He published his own books through the press, authoring many books on southern history and culture and later sold his May I Quote You, General? Civil War Biography Series to Cumberland House Publishing and three other titles to Random House in New York City.

Bedwell showed me a copy of General Lee and Santa Claus: An Adaptation, a children’s book that he authored with Louise Clack about the unlikely pairing of General Robert E. Lee and Santa Claus, which he plans to reprint this year. However, his real passion is bookbinding, and he’s searching for more bookbinding equipment as this service will soon be expanded at its present location so that the work of conserving, preserving, and bookbinding rare books continues at Yeoman’s.

Bedwell also teaches History at Nashville State Community College and is working on his doctorate at Trevecca Nazarene University, but his dissertation isn’t concerned with bookbinding – it’s about online learning. He authors a blog, one of which tells the story of the loss of the famed jeweled book, The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam when the Titanic went down a hundred years ago. This book, with more than 1500 gems in its cover and worth $45,000, was recovered and then lost again. But I won’t retell the story because interested readers can read the complete story on Bedwell’s blog Sinking of Titanic Spawns Bookbinding Legend -- The Great Omar.

As I’ve said before, no telling who or what will turn up when you take a trip through the hills of Tennessee, and Yeoman’s in the Fork is one of those rare places where you’ll find serendipity.

POSTCARDS FROM DIDDY WAH DIDDY: my latest book

It’s Spring at Sewanee, a felicitous time to publish another book of poetry, and I’m right on schedule with it because I anticipated bringing one into the world in May, my birthday month. A good friend plans to review Postcards From Diddy Wah Diddy, but I usually mention my latest book for A Words Worth readers. I won’t review my own book – just wanted to give a thumbnail sketch of it a la blog.

About the cover: I have my mother’s collection of postcards from our family trip to California, during the late 40’s and planned to use one of them for the cover before I discovered that the one I wanted to use is a famous painting by a well-known, deceased western artist who lived in New Mexico, and the card was copyrighted after the 1921 cut-off date for expiration of copyrights – a copyright for ninety years! I did unearth a few of mother’s collection that had no copyrights printed on the cards and used one of these sepia-colored cards on the back cover of Postcards, but the front cover is a snapshot of my mother, my older brother Paul, and me – three of the principals traveling in the blue Ford coupe to Diddy Wah Diddy, my father’s name for California in 1946. California was Mecca, in his opinion, but when he uprooted his four children to make this odyssey, we weren’t too sure we wanted to live as gypsies traveling toward his envisioned paradise. The first few poems in Postcards From Diddy Wah Diddy express the feelings of the entire family concerning this memorable trip, excepting my father.

Many of the poems in this volume are nostalgic; others speak of friends and ancestors, of aging, travels and nature. As lagniappe and for varied reading, I included three short stories that have been in a box for years.

My grandson Martin designed the cover of Postcards From Diddy Wah Diddy, and the book is a product of Border Press, Sewanee, Tennessee.

Click on the title, Postcards From Diddy Wah Diddy, anywhere in this post to go to a website for ordering. Write to Border Press, PO Box 3124, Sewanee, TN 37375 for mail orders, and include a check for $12 plus $5, shipping and handling.

MAKING THE MOST OF BLANK SPACES…

Many people who’re classified as “hobbyists” are authentic artists and artisans who care more about their art or craft than they do about high-powered marketing. Marilyn (“Toni”) Blackwell is one of those gifted artists. While in Florida last week, I visited with her several times and toured what she calls her “comfort zone” in Babson Park, Florida. Toni was featured on one of my blogs a few years ago, but after touring her home the other day, I decided that her skills weren’t confined to decorating the note cards, glassware, vases, candles, and terra cotta pots that I had written about -- she even has a penchant for organizing personal objects, like jewelry, clothing, and scarves, in an artistic way.

Some of the photographs here show how she uses her organizational talents to arrange closets, shelves, and racks that reflect her appreciation for beautiful objects.

Toni also uses her decorative art skills by dressing in unique clothing and wearing bright jewelry that she has inherited, collected, or designed. She creates many of her earrings and bracelets, sometimes decorating dress sandals, and wears all of them with more flair than less artistic people would exhibit.


Toni is a native “Yankee” from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and a transplanted Floridian who graduated from Webber International University in Babson Park and worked as an administrative assistant to executives at Florida Power Corporation (now Progress Energy) for thirty five years before retiring in 2002.

After taking an art course that taught her “one stroke painting,” Toni began working on terra cotta pottery; however, she now uses her technique on most any blank surfaces she finds while scouring for objects at flea markets and crafts stores – glasses, pitchers, trays...she even eyes blank walls that might be made brighter with murals and has painted several in Florida homes. Her primary subjects are flowers and plants, which she paints using acrylics, but she has become interested in a technique similar to watercolor technique that utilizes acrylics on larger canvasses than her glassware and pottery.


We enjoyed the tour that shows Toni’s decorative talents and brought home a pitcher to add to our collection of a flower pot, a breakfast tray, and a Florida palm painted on a wood surface that we have in our Sewanee home. We’ve used the breakfast tray to transfer food from the kitchen down to the dining area for several years, and the colors haven’t diminished from cleaning. The vivid red, yellow, and purple flowers are a better wake-up call than a cup of Louisiana coffee!


This blog’s photographs are included because they may be helpful as a “how-to” visual for people who have trouble making the most of space in their closets and on shelves. One of the closets occupies the space that was a former bedroom, but I didn’t photograph the closet, so readers can’t see how many changes of clothing Toni owns!


Toni attributes her love of beautiful things and her sense of color to her paternal grandmother, “Gacky” Thomas, who nurtured Toni’s (her first grandchild) interest in aesthetics, flamboyant clothing and jewelry.

CHAPTER II OF LIVING ON THE MOUNTAIN, WRITING ABOUT THE DESERT

Burnet, TX, roadside park

This is the second blog about a childhood memory of traveling to California, “to gypsy forever” in my father’s words. The first blog included pictures of postcards my mother collected on the famous odyssey West. In addition to these blogs, a short story and poems will be included in my forthcoming book, Postcards From Diddy Wah Diddy. Today, I am including two additional postcards from my mother’s collection for this blog. The Texas scenes are photographs on cards entitled “Blue Sky postcards” and show the area near Buchanan Dam where we camped out on our trip to California. Both cards feature a light blue Texas sky in the background.

A few years ago I also wrote a novel about the famous trip to Diddy Wah Diddy, one in which I was the narrator who, as an adult, leased an old blue Ford coupe and sat in my driveway in the car to evoke memories of the odyssey my family made in 1946. In this fictional account, I take the sky blue Ford on the road to Texas, attempting to find the place that my family camped out en route to California.

Here’s an excerpt from the novel that I finally decided not to publish. It begins with my drive into Texas:

“Driving had been easy; the coupe, a shiny blue top spinning through the Texas landscape, unwound toward its destination of Lake Buchanan. West of Austin, I accelerated the Ford, climbing to the Edwards Plateau, a place of rocky limestone hills covered by oak, juniper, and mesquite savannahs. My mother, Sarah Nell, had loved the homes constructed of native white rock and ‘everything spaced so far apart, while we waited for something to appear over the next hill,’ she had said. Deer crossing signs were posted everywhere, and goats, hooves poised on the trunks of mesquites, grazed on their leaflets.

“When I turned onto Highway 29 and glimpsed the green highway sign advertising Burnet, something loosened in me, and I felt Sarah Nell, Jacob, Suzanna, and Jake Jr. above me, chanting ‘Atta’ girl, come on now, you’re close, you can find it.’ I stopped to gas up several times, and the car skimmed along, drawn toward one of the most ancient geological regions in the world where outcroppings of granite guarded the secret, whatever it was, that had accelerated my family’s disintegration.

Long Horn Cavern, TX State Park, Burnet, TX

“In Burnet, I stopped at a grocery for directions to Burnet County Park, the place I tabbed as the site of the ’46 campout.

‘You want to go to Black Rock Park,’ advised an elderly woman with an overdone permanent. ‘It’s probably the oldest park and nearer to what you’re looking for. Ain’t no rock buildings like you talking about there now though,’ she added. ‘May have been at one time. How old you say you was when you come here?’

‘Eleven – over sixty years ago.’

‘Lordee, things been changed around since then.’ She looked at my silver hair, although her weatherbeaten face out-aged mine by ten years, if a day. ‘Could be Burnit County Park, up toward the dam. You’ll just have to do some looking.’

“I drove along Highway 29, eighteen miles west of Burnet to Buchanan Dam and located Black Rock Park above a boat ramp. It was an almost-deserted park with concrete picnic tables scattered about on sloping ground dotted with small water oaks, a place that didn’t fit the expanse of campground in my memory. Elevation above Lake Buchanan seemed low. I remembered a tall bluff away from which Sarah Nell had steered Jake Jr. daily in ’46. No bluff, no rock buildings housing bathrooms and showers, no telephone that had connected Sarah to civilization and Grandfather Ellis Paul in Louisiana. To me, the park was an abysmal failure, one that looked hospitable to daytime users but provided no set-up for full-time camping. I circled the park twice, feeling deep disappointment. ‘Don’t give up,’ my dead siblings and parents chided me. ‘Try the County Park.’

“The Ford coupe showed its mettle after I turned on Farm Road 2341 and climbed the hills around the dam, soaring along at fifty miles per hour. The sight of the ubiquitous prickly pear cacti strengthened my resolve – those plants had been the bane of one year old Jake Jr.’s daily tramps. Also, the elevation felt more like the high ground on which we had pitched camp. Everywhere, walls of orange pink rock loomed, a backdrop for the post oaks and cedars I had remembered as part of the ’46 landscape.

“Crossing a stone bridge, I rounded a curve and saw a sign on the left-hand side of the highway that made my heart race: Burnet County Park. However, it was even smaller than Black Rock, a cramped park with boat launch and a few tables at the edge of the lake. Glancing at my watch, I realized it was 6 p.m., and I hadn’t eaten all day. I began to feel that I was on a hopeless chase, searching for a memory that had either moved or never been quite like I envisioned. ‘Don’t go back,’ my family remonstrated. ‘There are more parks.’ Actually, there were two more: Inks Lake and Longhorn Cavern Park. An image of a rock building on a postcard labeled ‘Longhorn Cavern State Park’ flashed in my mind. Returning to Highway 29, I turned off on Park Road 4, veering into the entrance at Inks Lake first, only to find the gates shut against drive-throughs, a warning that reminded me I needed to find lodging for the night. However, I zoomed along Park Road 4 until I reached Longhorn Caverns State Park.

“The park was set among cacti and yucca, and I glimpsed a white rock administration building exactly like the picture on the old postcard Sarah Nell had kept in the bottom of her red leather purse. As I drove around the circle, I discovered a rustic water/observation tower and braked to a full stop, realizing that I had arrived on CCC encampment ground. I sat down at a limestone picnic table in a cluster of post oaks and began to cry. The place felt overpoweringly familiar; the reasons for Jacob bringing the family there felt right – the park was perhaps something he had helped build during his life with the CCC. The old administration building resembled a Gothic fortress, surrounded by a palisade wall made of native limestone and crystal formations taken from the caverns.

“I walked around in the heavy summer heat, the air alive with whirring insects in the oak savannahs. I realized the lake was nowhere near the site when I climbed the circular steel staircase of the tower and looked out windows cut in the heavy stone and couldn’t see water. Only the dam appeared in the distance. Longhorn Cavern State Park hadn’t been the first stop of the Diddy Wah Diddy trek. But why did I feel so linked to the place? A slight movement in the clump of yucca spooked me; I felt as though I was being watched and that something sinister had occurred here, sinister enough to cause my family to flee from the area. As close and hot as the Texas summer air was, I shivered. ‘Don’t give up,’ the family choristers urged me again, but when a truck pulled into the circular drive, I got into the Ford and sped off, giving up the search…”

Needless to say, I never found the campsite, just as I never published the part memoir/part fiction novel, but lately I entertain ideas of returning one last time…

COWAN, TENNESSEE #2

After visiting the Smithsonian Exhibit, “The Way We Worked,” at Cowan, Tennessee Sunday afternoon, we walked up the main street of town, stopping often to peer in at closed shops. At the “Book Brake,” a bookstore owned by Tom McGee, two men beckoned for us to come in, and we entered the extremely long room that houses used and collectable books. Although we didn’t buy any books, we spent almost an hour talking with proprietor Tom McGee and Tom Wagner, editor of a publication “not affiliated with any group” entitled Cowan Comment. The latter is published six times a year, “one about every other month,” and provides interesting subjects to Cowan citizens and people who visit the community. Wagner’s mission is to encourage people to visit Cowan and to open businesses that will help revive life on Cumberland Street in Cowan. He asked me to contribute guest articles, so I plan to make more forays into the community to find fodder for blogs and informal essays.

McGee gave us free tickets to the Tennessee Antiquarian Book Fair which is held in the Monterrey Station in Cowan each year. Cowan claims the distinction of being the only small town in America with a national book fair. Most of the time these annual antiquarian book fairs are week-end events held in cities such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Denver, and San Francisco. Last year, over fifty booksellers from more than twelve states participated in the Antiquarian Book Fair in Cowan, and more than a thousand book collectors and readers from throughout the North American continent attended the event. Lectures included Children’s Literacy, the Civil War in Tennessee, and “Book Collecting 101.” Nicholas Basbanes related tales from his book, A Gentle Madness, which included stories about book collectors from antiquity to the 1980’s.

The Monterrey Station that houses the Book Fair was built in the 1920’s and is touted as being one of the largest indoor event complexes in southeastern Middle Tennessee. It was formerly used as a shoe factory and a yarn mill and contains 20,000 sq. ft. This year’s Fair will be held July 21 and 22, prior to the opening of the Sewanee Writer’s Conference here on the campus of the University of the South. Documents concerning the Civil War, the American Revolution, and both World Wars will be showcased, as well as many collectable and rare books, first editions of mysteries, science fiction, and literature. The event will offer a real book feast for bibliophiles! (A copy of the ticket for this event appears at the beginning of this blog.)

Cowan gained its fame as a railroad town, as mentioned in my last blog, but the first settlers were farmers in search of new land and a new life – Scots/Irish immigrants from Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina who came to the area during the 1800’s. During the early 19th century, Cowan was a stage coach stop between Chattanooga and Nashville. Farmers sent their produce to markets by road to the Elk River at Estill Springs, Tennessee where it was shipped by river to ports on the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers, notably the port at New Orleans. The town was named for Dr. J.B. Cowan, a medical officer on General Forrest’s staff during the Civil War, who is reputed to have given a large area of land to the town. Cowan became a rail center prior to the Civil War when rails were laid from Nashville through the Cumberland Tunnel two and one miles east of the town.

Cowan residents have seen various industries come and go – the Sewanee Furnace which produced 70 tons of pig iron per day at its zenith; the Davis, Hicks and Greene Timber Company that built a railroad over the mountain into Alabama and shipped logs by locomotive; a pusher terminal where special engines helped heavy freights of 125 cars and passenger trains through a tunnel in the Cumberland Mountains so that the cars could start down the opposite side; and farming operations that produced corn and cotton.

I obtained a bit of this information from an article by Dr. Andrew Rittenberry in an issue of the Franklin County Historical Review. He wrote “The City of Cowan has risen from the depths of the backwoods into a prosperous small town with industries and businesses. She possesses a great many hopes for the future: and a love and fondness of her past.” Cowan is a town whose time has come and is poised for revitalization. This Cumberland Valley town resembles many small towns in America that are gaining notice for their uniqueness and for their contributions to American culture and industry.

P.S. Thanks to my good friend and reader, Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, for yesterday’s comments regarding the first blog about Cowan: “You have such a generous, appreciative voice in your blogs and make the worlds you create so real…”

“NOTHING WILL WORK UNLESS YOU DO”...Maya Angelou

Jarod's grandmother remembers

Sunday afternoons on The Mountain here at Sewanee are desultory, particularly during the Spring break on the University of the South campus where we live in a modest cottage. The solution to ennui usually takes the form of a “field trip,” and yesterday we drove down the Mountain to the valley where the town of Cowan has been offering a unique Smithsonian exhibit entitled “The Way We Worked” at the Cowan Center for the Arts.

Cowan is a city with a population of 1737 people, and its claim to fame is as a railroad town, the site where the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway formerly employed 600 people from the area. It was the last stop before a steep uphill climb onto the Cumberland Plateau, and pusher locomotive engines were required to help the trains make the ascent, a 2228 ft. grade which had to be mounted before reaching a tunnel which ran through the Cumberland Mountains two miles from the town.

St. Mary's Station on the railway route

As a companion exhibit to the Smithsonian, the Cowan Railroad Museum offers a display showing railroad tools, methods of train travel, as well as photographs of Cowan’s largest employer between 1916 and 1928: the Davidson, Hicks, and Green Lumber Company which operated three sawmills and 25 miles of railroad. The coal and iron industries near Cowan are also featured in this exhibit.

The Smithsonian Exhibit includes kiosks with photographic essays of The Way We Worked, Where We Worked, How We Worked, Who Works, and Why We Work, including an interesting study of “Women Against the Odds,” documenting the war effort of women at work during WWII. An interesting statistic from the 20th Century: 37 percent of the workforce in 1975 involved women, and 63% were involved by the year 2000.

Jarod Pearson on board of Cowan RR Museum

One hundred eighty six photographs, with accompanying text comprise the exhibit, along with flip books, audio clips, and video screens. While we enjoyed the exhibit, we renewed our friendship with Jarod Pearson, proprietor of Sernicola’s Restaurant and the Franklin-Pearson House, a Bed and Breakfast facility. Jarod is on the Board for the Cowan Railroad Museum and told us that he helped write the proposal for the grant funding the exhibit. “We were pleasantly surprised when we received word that our proposal was the best proposal submitted,” he said. “I wrote the texts describing photographs and was told to put the stories in language that could be understood by fifth graders as school children would be primary attenders. I had to scan the photographs in high resolution for presentation, and create the stories that feature Cowan industries.”

In addition to the Smithsonian Exhibit and the Cowan Railroad Museum Companion Exhibit, an Arnold Air Force Base Display, Falls Mill Display, University of the South Display comprise exhibits in the Cowan Center for the Arts Theater. Next door in the Training Center, displays from the Crow Creek Heritage Preservation Society show how people of the Crow Creek Valley made a living as miners, railroad workers, farmers, brick makers, and as workers in the logging and tanbark industry. Photographs from The Grundy County Historical Society Heritage Center are featured, the latter showing photographs of the Swiss Colony at Gruetli, the Sam Werner Lumber Company, and a display about Dr. Lilian W. Johnson, Advocate for Agricultural Cooperatives. Franklin County Historical Society and Kokomo Grain Company also carried out the theme of how workers form the backbone of Franklin County.

I know the work ethic is strong in Franklin County as we have had carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and housekeepers working on the cottage during the past four years, and while they have been sometimes sporadic about showing up to do the work, when they appear, they crawl under the cottage, climb on the roof, remove windows for cleaning, working in teams of four or five, sometimes in blazing August temperatures that would fell a Louisianan.

I was amused last week when I bought groceries in Kroger's at Winchester, Tennessee and as I was checking out, an eighteen-year old man struck up a conversation (another facet of Tennessee workers-- garrulousness. They make you a part of their lives immediately). “How are you?” he asked. When I replied that I was doing well and how was he, he was off and running. “I’m so glad to be working,” he said. “Everyone should be glad to be working. I graduated from high school this summer and was sitting on the couch doing nothing and thought to myself, ‘Man, you are poor; what are you doing sitting on the couch?’ So I got up and came down here and got this job bagging groceries. I’m glad to have a job.”

No, I didn’t ask for the story, but such accounts are characteristic of the workers around these parts, and I applaud them for their work ethic. “The Way We Worked” display at Cowan illustrates the strength and endurance of workers in middle Tennessee who have kept our society and economy running despite downturns, politicians who make false promises, bank crashes, inflation, and wars.

“The Way We Worked” exhibit, offered in partnership with Humanities Tennessee, Museums on Main Street, the Smithsonian Institution, Cowan Railroad Museum, and State Humanities Councils nationwide, will be open until April 21. Lectures will be offered Sundays and Thursdays every week until April 19. The exhibits are free, but donations help support ongoing work of these organizations.