TRAVELING SOUTH AGAIN

A journey through south/middle Georgia and northeast/central Florida proved to be a relaxing and, at the same time, a not-so-relaxing break from a writing routine this past week. Our destination was Frostproof, Florida, orange grove territory. The highlight of the trip through middle Georgia was an agricultural experience with a stop just off I-75 to visit Lane Southern Orchards, a farm that includes 3,000 acres of peach orchards, 3,000 acres of pecan orchards, and a 6-acre patch of strawberries. The roadside market offered peaches and pecans ‘a plenty, and we bought both in a huge marketplace that has been open since 1908.

The pecan trees in Georgia can live up to 200 years, but they only produce every other year. Even so, the State remains the largest producer of pecans in the United States, and Albany, Georgia has the distinction of being the pecan capital of the U.S. Lane Orchard’s brochure touted that pecans are heart-healthy and contain antioxidants, including 19 vitamins and minerals, healthy fat and fiber. And for trivial pursuers, the Lane merchants told us that there’re 78 pecans in a pecan pie (one of their specialties). Driving through the farm heartland, we thought about the old question Cajuns ask when they encounter a stranger: “Who’s your mama? And can you make a roux?” except that the question in south/middle Georgia is: “Who’s your farmer? And can you make a cobbler (blackberry, blueberry, strawberry, and the premier one, peach cobbler)?”

The day after our farm tour, we veered off course to coastal Florida and came to an abrupt stop at Amelia Island, not far from Jacksonville. The Island is a barrier island in northern Florida -- a place touting itself as the “southernmost jewel in the Sea Island chain.” Amelia Island has 13 miles of pristine Atlantic Ocean beaches and is the size and shape of Manhattan. Eight different flags have flown over it, and it’s home to Civil War Era Fort Clinch and American Beach, which was a refuge for those who sought freedom from segregation. We had planned to stay at an inn on this island, but when we entered the lobby, we found cats and dogs occupying choice places on the sofas. As I’m allergic to animal dander, we cancelled the room and went on to Fernandina Beach, the northern part of Amelia Island that is referred to as “tropical Mayberry.” 

Two docents in an art gallery of the 50-block Historic District in Fernandina Beach gave us a rundown on the artsy life of the town where culture is alive and doing well, including poetry readings and an event that particularly interested me, the Amelia Island Book Festival, which is 15 years old and offers a free Reader’s Festival. The famed John Grisham has a home in the area and visits often, and international crowds are drawn to theatre, dance, and open air art walks. We experienced a strong pull to stay awhile, particularly when we dined under the canopy of giant oaks trailing Spanish moss that reminded us of our home in south Louisiana.

But we meandered on to lake country Florida near Lake Wales to visit with my friend Vickie’s relatives and spent four days on Silver Lake, watching the bird life and sunsets that outclass any in locales to which I’ve traveled, beginning with the memories of our family trip West to “Diddy Wah Diddy” (California) back in the 40’s.

We’d been so taken with Fernandina Beach that we scheduled a stop there on our return trip to Sewanee, Tennessee and were disappointed to read reports of rainy weather at Amelia Island and Fernandina Beach. Rain began to fall after we ate dinner in the historic district of Fernandina Beach, and by the time we returned to the motel, the wind had begun to pick up. A few hours later, we heard gusts roaring outside as rain pelted against the windows. I didn’t watch the weather report until the following morning and was glad I had avoided the news when I learned that we had been in a tropical storm and a hurricane watch during the night! We had driven into the heart of a dangerous storm and slept through the worst of it. I can remember surviving Hurricane Andrew in the same manner when it hovered over south Louisiana.

However, by 8:30 a.m., we were traveling the highway inland toward Tifton, Georgia and didn’t abandon the road until 4 p.m. when we reached The Mountain and familiar territory sans stormy weather.

                                                                                                           

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan

“THE LOSS OF THE JOY OF COOKING”

The above is the title of a wonderful poem in the latest book of poetry, A Late Spring and After by Robert Shaw, published by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado. As I’ve lived in Cajun Louisiana for fifty years, I’m naturally drawn to recipes, stories, articles, and, yes, poems about cooking and food. Mention a pot of gumbo, a slice of pecan pie, or a bowl of bread pudding, and I’m not only sure of my sense of place, I search for an open kitchen and know that good food therein is going to make me happier and more at peace with the human condition. So, a poignant poem about Shaw losing one of America’s finest cookbooks following the death of his wife, with whom he had happily worked in the kitchen, incited my interest.

In every line of this sensual poem about food, we encounter the poet’s longing for his deceased beloved: “We used to work/together at it, each on a different side;/the stirring, measuring, tasting, I/chopping, dicing, mincing as required. /Rocking the blade the way she showed me to, /I freed from each raw thing a smell we liked:/ the garlic’s earthy reek, the ginger’s sting, /the anise, wisping up from celery leaves…” and his ultimate loss of appetite: “the book is missing. Even if it’s found/ and followed to the letter, there will still/be loss, the unlisted ingredient, /throwing the best efforts out of balance. /It bakes itself into what’s left of life. /The cold plate waits. Nothing now tastes the same.” This is a fiercely-controlled poem, and it balances the poet’s pain with sensual detail in a memory that reflects the best of a couple’s life together.

As far as my reading goes, “The Loss of the Joy of Cooking” is by far the most moving poem in the book, but in “Craquelure,” Shaw relates an impression of century-and-a-half portraits of ancestors wearing their Sunday best that also resonated with me. I once published a poem about my great-grandfather’s portrait that hangs in my living room in Louisiana, a similarly “cracked” picture that is aptly described in Shaw’s poem as “radiating fissures forming nets/of lines as delicate as hairs that once/ were snugged together on the artist’s brush-tip…an aging in the surface of the paint/or in the once-protective coat of varnish/belies their images’ arrested aging…” Lines like these evoke ideas that perhaps ancestral voices in a portrait can speak through portraiture, or call forth ekphrastic poetry… another time in history awakening in “filaments as fine as those,/spreading a weft, on each a weightless veil…in either likeness anchored to its canvas.”

An interesting addition to A Late Spring and After is a series of three riddles as translated from The Exeter Book, a collection of Old English Literature and the poet’s suggested answers, which he regards as “renderings influenced by the original verse forms, but allow themselves numerous liberties.” The most decipherable one is entitled “Riddle 70, lines 5-6”: “High on this headland day and night I stand/and show a blushing cheek, but feel no shame. /Men out cruising ogle me, weigh my worth. /Hear my solicitation: what’s my name?” The answer: a lighthouse.

Loss and grief form the central theme of A Late Spring, and Shaw transmits his deepest feelings in a brief, fervent elegy entitled “A Late Spring”: “Those few flowers on her tray, /buds lagging on each tree. /What more is there to say/now when the warming clay/seems pleased to let life be?/She died on Mother’s Day./What more is there to say?” An empty bed beside the poet, cold cereal for breakfast – the emblems of grief face Shaw at every turn, but he transcends his perturbation and ameliorates his pain with remembered happier hours of “unfenced green fields to wander through…”

This is a book of wide-ranging poetry moving between past and present, life and death, to arrive at four cogent lines from “Winter Sunset”: “I’d say this landscape frames/hints of how best to go. /Others may crash in flames. /My goal is afterglow.” With unwavering honesty and passion, Shaw deals with his losses, accomplishing a sometimes sardonic tone, but always revealing his appreciation for “time’s best gifts and heedless of any moment beyond the one we were in.”

Another distinctive volume from Gary Entsminger’s small press, Pinyon Publishing.

Robert Shaw has received the Robert Fitzgerald Award and is a co-winner of The Poet’s Prize. He recently retired from Mount Holyoke College where he was the Emily Dickinson Professor of English. Copies of A Late Spring, and After can be ordered from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403. 

CLOSE TO THE LAND

In my last blog, I wrote about the valley near Cowan and Winchester and mentioned stopping at a place called Lapp’s Greenhouse and Produce Center to buy fresh corn and tomatoes. Yesterday, we made a return trip for more corn as it is a product that lived up to its advertising as “the sweetest corn you’ll ever taste.” The co-manager of the produce center and her husband, who moved down to Tennessee from Pennsylvania, bought a large farm between Cowan and Winchester and brought with them invaluable farming knowledge, as they’d lived close to the land in an Amish community not far from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

The corn patches further up and down the road between Cowan and Winchester are parched from the drought, but the owners of the nursery/produce center produced a banner crop of corn as they watered their fields daily. I know because I was nosy enough to ask the co-manager wherein lay the difference between the parched fields and their green patches.

The visit to Lapp’s reminded me of a visit to Lawrence County, Tennessee I made a few years ago when I sampled the Ethridge Amish Community’s corn, apple jelly, and homemade soap. The Amish in this area belong to the Swartzentruber sect, a very conservative branch of the Amish religion. They migrated to Ethridge from Lumberton, Mississippi during the 1940’s, and the population has burgeoned to 1500 people. The first families arrived in a railroad car filled with farm machinery, horses, and their worldly belongings. They weren’t too impressed with the farmland at that time, but they began farming corn, pepper, hay, oats, peanuts, and other fresh vegetables, and, of course, their crops flourished. Today, they also market molasses, baskets, quilts, rugs, cane chairs, slaughter hogs and cows, and produce dairy products. Families in the community own sawmills and still make buggy and wagons to use within the county.

I remember traveling in the countryside near Ethridge and buying the aforementioned jelly and soap from a barefooted young man who had erected a stand in front of a large farmhouse. The house had no running water or electricity, and I wondered where the young man attended school. Later, I read that five Amish schools flourished in this district, and children were schooled until the 8^th grade or until they reached 14 years of age, whichever came first. Interestingly, most Amish children in Lawrence County speak English, Pennsylvania Dutch, and some German. The Ethridge Community is one of the oldest and largest settlements in Tennessee.

I also learned that Amish families renounce worldliness: education, office holding and the pursuit of honors of any kind. The farmers believe that it’s important to provide sustenance for their families, but luxuries and sinful appetites are harmful to the spirit. Their values: devout religion, love of the land, and close-knit family and community. And, most impressively, they follow Christ’s imperative to be peaceful in all situations. One hundred Amish families live in Lawrence County, and they prefer the company of those who follow their own religion so that they can live out their values among fellow believers. Twenty-one hundred believers in four communities comprise the total Amish population in Tennessee, not counting one in Dickson County that became extinct during the Panic of 1893.

I suppose that my interest in sweet corn is a meagre reason to become interested in Amish beliefs, but a bit of research seemed be the outcome of my visit to the Lapp Produce Market in the Valley last week; it also inspired a sermon on humility I preached at St. Mary’s Convent and Grace Fellowship this past Sunday.

Photograph by Victoria Sullivan