MORE SERENDIPITY

Luzette Kincaid Musen and 

daughter Megan

Most of the time, serendipity comes to us when we veer off course and explore unfamiliar territory. While driving to central Florida recently, we left I-75 and followed US 27 to High Springs, Florida, a town of approximately 5500 people that is a destination for nature enthusiasts, which proved to be the site of serendipity. Once an important railroad center, the town now attracts sports people who enjoy fishing, scuba diving, swimming, canoeing, and tubing. Ichetucknee Springs State Park, fifteen miles north of High Springs, is a site of natural wilderness along the spring-fed Ichetucknee River; Blue Springs runs into the Santa Fe River; Ginnie Springs includes nine springs; Poe Springs Park, located five miles west of High Springs, is also on the Santa Fe River. Six miles north of High Springs, one of Florida's first state parks, O'Leno State Park, still maintains the old buildings and a suspension bridge the CCC built over the Santa Fe River back in the 1930's.

We had been to the town several times for lunch at the Great Outdoors Restaurant, but on this jaunt, we decided to walk the main streets of High Springs to shop for a gift. We wandered into a place called "Buffalo Girl Soaps" that offered all natural bath and body products, aromatherapy, and organic skin care and knew immediately that we had found more serendipity. Megan, the young woman who welcomed us, is the daughter of shop owner, Luzette Kincaid Musen, who had been in business seventeen years. Her products include handmade batches of soap of 100 percent goat's milk and quality essential oils, natural clays, minerals, and wildcrafted herbs. The scent in this small shop tucked away in High Springs conjured up visions of relaxing in warm waters scented with lavender, rose geranium, and "mint tingle" soaps.

Interior of Buffalo Girl Soaps

Luzette Musen writes a blog and in it, she mentions that she maintains the products in her shop because she likes "the smells from growing up in the South...mossy green of the creek; warm dirt in a fresh-tilled garden, the heavy sweetness of vanilla in her grandmother's custard pie... These smells are wild, sometimes untamed, and on the adventurous side," she says. Her leitmotif is: "Start with natural ingredients. Be wild, untamed, and always stay adventurous."

While we chatted with Megan, Luzette arrived. As she is a former biology teacher, she and my companion Vickie Sullivan, who is a botanist, began a discussion about plant biology and discovered similar interests in the use of natural products for general health care. Minutes passed, and our arrival time in central Florida stretched further away. When we discovered that Luzette and her daughter had just returned from Washington, D.C. and had participated in the Women's March, moments became almost an hour before we left the shop. We learned that most participants in this event had chartered buses and the march was, as expected of women, beautifully organized.

Although we didn't visit the historic Priest Theatre on First Street, built in 1910, we discovered that it had once been a place where vaudeville and traveling acts were performed. The theater had featured performers Smiley Burnett, who worked with Gene Autry; Roy Rogers and his horse Trigger; and Lash La Rue, a television star who performed with his whip. Today, the theater features three shows weekly. Performances are held on a raised stage with an arched opening and two columns on both sides and stairs on opposite sides of the stage that lead to the actors' dressing rooms. It will accommodate several hundred theatre-goers.

Although High Springs offered more vistas to explore, we were two hours behind schedule and scurried away carrying the scent of serendipity with us and vowing to return to this small paradise off the beaten trail of the busy interstate.

 

AFTER THE INVOCATION

I love the title of Pinyon Publishing's newest book of poetry, After the Invocation, the word "invocation" summoning immediate interest in a collection covering locations of author John Miller's life: Hawai'i, central Ohio, and a retirement community in Virginia. Although the imminent poet, Dabney Stuart, masterfully reviewed Miller's poetry on the back cover of this new volume, and his review covers the range of Miller's voice, I feel compelled to add a few notes about those poems that invoked a response and invited me to read further.

Among the more nostalgic pieces, I was drawn to "High School Graduation Photos," a wry poem about the posturing of teenagers when it's time to take what we once called "the school picture." Today, of course, teenagers use a more sophisticated camera embedded in their ubiquitous cell phones for "selfies" and aren't as attentive to the staged school photographs, but I can readily relate to Miller's description of that occasion when "white bloused, coated, tied,/dressed for our proofs to choose among, we chose,/not knowing if such preference would last,/what black and white shades best implied/our selfhood, or what features froze us/into our high school pasts." And most of us who have entered old age shudder to think of being frozen into that adolescent stage of our lives with all its angst, self-consciousness and pre-occupation... and, I might add, lack of wisdom.

As a former fishing enthusiast, I appreciated "Elegy For An Ebbing Upland Stream," the active language in this one engendering old memories of "floating the river," fly fishing with my former husband. This poem rivals any writing I've read about fishing, including the meditative pieces in Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton "...A ganglion of branches, with dead grass/dead gray-brown on it, stirs above the last/few inches of that pool, no more a test/of angling in the wilderness...my long baton-switch whipped a lure on course/to land beyond the logjam, where a trout/might slash the surface faster than a thought..." As fishermen say about a fish with sufficient flesh, this poem is "a keeper."

As I recently completed a collection of poetry entitled Sifting Red Dirt that focuses on family portraits and events, including one about my Greenlaw forebears, "Genealogy" especially interested me. Miller's droll voice appears again as he examines the "paper trail to the ancestors/we think we deserve?..." (in my poem about tracing ancestry, I refer to that attitude of deserving as "remember you're a...") Miller concludes this poem that is infused with the "time-honored means of social climbing" with the caveat: "Why try to cultivate a family tree/when we're like Whitman's leaves of grass?" As the reader can discern, Miller's voice borders on acrimonious, but he explains the complexities of life in ironic verse forms that adjure the reader's amusement.

Another poem featuring Mormon visitors who often visited Miller's family,"... [asking] for a few minutes of our time,/that they might save us/for eternity..." again showcases Miller's sense of irony and his skilled use of it in portraying a young boy's exposure to the elders' conversation about sin and punishment, "...those self-chosen Saints, their low voices/trailing off into the darkness/along with my unease/and stolen innocence."

Classical myths, important characters in American history, childhood experiences, and the homeless in our country's cities — Miller offers us a panoply of poetic experiences in a seasoned voice that reflects delightful wit and empathetic nuances of the inner life — humor and elegance are gently entwined.

John Miller grew up in Hawai'i, received graduate degrees at Stanford, and taught at Denison University. His work has appeared in numerous poetry journals and in three books of poetry, In Passing, Second War in Hawai'i, and In and Out of Their Elements, as well as two chapbooks.

WHERE BAYOUS FUSELIER AND TECHE MEET

This week, a writer friend from Florida arrived after delivering boxes containing journals covering her lifetime to the archives of Sophie Newcomb in New Orleans, Louisiana and wanted to revisit a few sights in Teche country she'd missed after she left here eighteen years ago. We took her to one of our favorite places for lunch at the Little Big Cup and to NuNu Art & Culture Collective in Arnaudville, Louisiana. The latter center was conceived by native-born George Marks, an artist and sculptor, who returned to his roots in this small Cajun community twelve years ago. Marks, who helped revive a dying community and who has made a home for displaced artists after Hurricane Katrina, recently received the Jillian Johnson Award for Entrepreneurship in the Creative Economy and is credited with spearheading a cultural and economic rebirth in Arnaudville. He was recently highlighted in an article by Walter Pierce in ABiz, an alternative newspaper featuring news and analysis on commerce in South Louisiana.

When we arrived at NuNu's, we were greeted by a member of the quilting circle working in one of the rooms of the Art and Culture Collective, and she postponed returning to her sewing until she had pointed out a few of the artists' creations — paintings, jewelry, wood carvings, soaps, textiles, books
by Louisiana writers and other pieces of artistic work. My writer friend, Jo Ann Lordahl, was attracted to a huge painting by Marks, and we had our picture taken beside his work shown in this blog.

We spent an hour in the Collective, and I enjoyed talking with Debbie Richard, a retired speech teacher who hangs out in NuNu's and is a "closet writer." I'd seen a sign that read Prairie des Femmes, or Prairie of the Women, as I entered the art center and was intrigued by Debbie's description of a triangular prairie between Bayou Fuselier and the headwaters of Bayou Vermilion. She said that it was a place to which women had fled from storms, hurricanes, war, and other disasters and that there were stories about this unincorporated community with which she wasn't familiar.

When I returned home, I did a bit of research and found that a woman named Ashlee Michot lives near Prairie des Femmes and has written two books about the area, Journals and Portraits of A Place. She has also published several books about Louisiana yard shrines and Marian grottos. Many days she spends time in the countryside around Point Blue where she says she first heard French spoken. A retired school teacher, she photographs rural scenes, writes music, works with medicinal herbs and does amateur archaeology in fields around her home. I was told that my friend, the poet Darrell Bourque, knows Ashlee, and I intend to learn more about her and any stories she has heard about Prairie des Femmes when we meet with the Bourques in February.

As usual, I enjoyed touring a South Louisiana habitat as much as the tourist, and after eating some Cajun fare on the deck of The Little Big Cup, we walked through Tom's Fiddle & Bow Shop where owner Tom Pierce often has bluegrass jam sessions. We denied having any musical ability, although I have a yen to learn how to play the banjo, and we escaped before Pierce could sign us up for fiddle lessons.

A growing number of Cajun and Creole artists, poets, musicians, and chefs have set up shop in Arnaudville, some of whom have built homes in this haven that almost died out in the 1980's, but which is now recognized by Gaye Hamilton, manager of Louisiana Cultural Districts of the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, as a town where "placemaking has been done right."