FAST CARS AND FIREARMS

Men in this town seem to be passionate about two things (and with apologies to the town’s women, you are not one of them). This fact dawned on me gradually, beginning with the discovery that the male neighbors living closest to me in Traveler’s Joy* possessed dogs named Ruger and Daytona, respectively.

One important rite of passage for sons south of the Mason-Dixon line, occurring when a boy is around seven, is receiving your first firearm. (On that score, however, I have witnessed at least one man-child who didn’t look old enough to be out of training pants twirling a pellet rifle in his matchstick-sized arms.)  The second, equally important milestone, is obtaining your first car. 

This second rite is not restricted to sons.  Men and women in this town have told me hair-raising, coming-of-age tales of reckless races, dramatic wrecks and near-misses experienced in their first high-horse-powered rides.  One young man’s first date with a girl ended at the hospital for both of them as well as the two teens in the car they were racing – the teens surviving, but not the cars.  Another local boy was driving himself and his uncle in a pickup truck when a tornado lifted them and set them down elsewhere, unharmed.  And a tiny eighteen-year-old redhead told me how she routinely raced challengers on the straight, broad lanes of Highway 9,* south of town, with her seven-year old sister perched on the front seat beside her.            

The husband of a friend of ours, Charlie M., maintains that for Traveler’s Joy adolescents, outrunning the law on a country road is virtually a senior-year requirement.  Charlie graduated from a speeding teenager to a paramedic with a legitimate reason to push the engine to bolt-busting speeds whenever he and his team were called out in Tomahawk County*. 

One rainy night the ambulance was dispatched to the scene of a crash on the Thicketty* highway.  The driver of a white Cadillac had been clocked doing 85 mph when the car glanced off a bridge railing, hit a tree head-on, and landed upside down in a shallow creekbed.  When the EMTs first laid eyes on the Caddy, which looked like a refrigerator that had been fed through a trash compactor, none of them expected to find survivors.  They climbed down in the darkness to the creek, however, when they heard someone calling out.             

Charlie was the first to reach the driver, a scrawny old man who reeked of booze.  Because the man’s body was twisted at an unnatural angle, Charlie assumed he must have broken his legs, or his spine, although there was no sign of blood. 

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“I be paralyzed!” the old man shouted.

Charlie crawled into the half-submerged and flattened car, trying to feel the driver’s limbs and assess the damage.  It was hard to do, because the old man wasn't demonstrating pain and didn’t appear to be injured. 

“Does that hurt?” Charlie asked, prodding and pressing as gently as possible. 

“I be paralyzed!” was all the man could say. 

At last, Charlie discovered a length of wooden 2” x 2” wedged under the driver’s torso, and understood.  Paw-Paw wasn’t injured; he’d been paralyzed from the waist down years earlier in a rash bout of drinking and driving, as Charlie learned before the night was over.  On this rainy night he’d “borrowed” a friend’s Cadillac and gone for a joyride, using the 2” x 2” to hold the gas pedal to the floor until his hand slipped and the car became airborne.  The combination of a sky-high blood alcohol level and a profound lack of nerve endings meant that the old man had bounced harmlessly around the Caddy’s interior like a life-sized Gumby in an industrial dryer, and he would no doubt try to repeat his feat at the earliest opportunity.

“Lord, he was booking it when he hit that tree,” Charlie recalled, not without admiration.

Speeding teenagers and risk-happy septugenarians wrecking their cars on country roads explain why there are so many salvage yards in this county.  Several vast junkyards of eviscerated automotive bodies stretch out on the wastelands beside the railroad tracks west of town and the abandoned mill site to the east, eastern red cedars and trumpet vine thrusting up through sprung hoods and shattered windshields.  The thriftiness of southerners, enforced by many decades of sclerotic economic growth, is as ingrained as church-going in these parts.  Little is wasted, and that includes any part of a car that can be repaired, reused, or converted into profit, however small. 

When my husband’s compact car was rear-ended on a visit to Charlotte recently, he was given estimates from the dealer there in the thousands of dollars for repairing the body, and more than one mechanic told him to junk the car and start over.  However, starting over is what we’re doing with our lives out of necessity, meaning that we must fully adopt the southern practice of ‘making do’ or we’ll go down.  No matter how essential it may be, there is no possibility of buying anything so expensive as an entire car.

 

FK visited several of the salvage yards in the area, narrowing the search for a replacement hatchback door for his uncommon model. Ultimately, he located the door at one yard and the expertise at another, less than a mile from our home, where three generations of the Tessick* family preside over a salvage, auto body and mechanical repair dynasty.  After about a week with the car in the shop, FK going in several times for companionable consultations and time spent discussing automotive parts and engines, Bobby, head mechanic and second-generation Tessick,* left word that the door was installed and the car ready. An exceptionally reasonable amount of money changed hands and then my husband drove his car home, as good as new.  The only difference in the car’s appearance, and it is a distinguishing one, is that the formerly all-silver compact now features a shiny purple door.  We feel that the car finally ‘fits’ its surroundings in Traveler’s Joy, displaying a sort of battle-tested survivability; a proud homeliness.

The car of choice among youngsters in this town tends to be long, low and American – a Plymouth Barracuda with a V-8 engine, or a Camaro jacked-up on tractor tires.  The boy next door owns one of these vehicles, and for a time while he was holding down a regular job the sound of that engine starting up outside our bedroom window shortly before 6:00 a.m. every morning reminded me of Alabama-born writer Rick Bragg’s descriptive memoir, “100 Miles per Hour, Upside-Down and Sideways.”  In that essay Bragg writes about the 1969 GM muscle car he bought and owned exactly two weeks before smashing it in a ditch, describing how “when you started her up, she sounded like Judgment Day” (Bragg 13).

J.J., the boy next door, is a lot more responsible than Bragg apparently was at that age, but there are plenty just like the writer who treat Limestone* Street more like a runway than a road.  I try to keep off the streets of Traveler’s Joy on weekdays at 3:30 p.m., when the high school lets out.  Pets and pedestrians alike are in danger when our town’s testosterone-pumped adolescents get behind the wheel for the first time in six hours, and I’ve seen too many spring kittens end up as autumn road-kill on the thoroughfares leading to and from the Home of the Wildcats.

I sometimes think that this predilection for vehicles as well as for firearms is simply a case of adaptation, writ large.  When the Civil War broke out and the two sides sized up their opponents in order to plan strategy, there was no doubt of the North’s superior strength in numbers: more men, more munitions, more manufacturing, more mules, more money.  On the other hand, the south held the tactical advantage of possessing more battle-ready soldiers, considering that southern men mostly hailed from farms and rural communities where they learned to ride and shoot while still in the cradle.  Given the average Palmetto-state dweller’s dim view of government today, a hold-over from the days of occupation and moonshine-running, it occurs to me that the habit of riding and shooting continues just in case it’s needed when the developed world collapses.

Many people hunt in this part of the world, but hunting is only part of the picture.  The first barbecue my husband and I were invited to in Traveler’s Joy occurred at the same time a dangerous criminal was on the loose in the upstate, a man who had already murdered four people in cold blood and continued to evade police in two states.  Sitting around the picnic table eating burgers and slaw, the conversation among our hosts and the other guests quietly revealed that virtually every man at the cookout – excepting my husband – was at that moment ‘packing heat.’  It shocked me at the time, but I’ve come to understand that guns serve a kind of compensatory purpose for people who are gripped by, as Faulkner put it, “the old, fierce pull of blood.”  In trying to explain the southern psyche he once told an interviewer “we have to be clannish just like the people in the Scottish highlands, each springing to defend his own blood whether it be right or wrong… only a comparatively short time ago we were invaded by our own people, speaking in our own language, which is always a pretty savage sort of warfare” (Hiles 516)  Southern men have gotten into the habit of expecting disenfranchisement, and are constantly readying their response for what will likely never come.

One can’t speak openly against gun ownership here, not that I would want to.  I was taught to shoot by my high school librarian, a transplanted Alabamian who drew a coterie around her like a rock star and who, during Sunday gatherings at her property high in a distant mountain range, drank mightily, spun elaborate stories, and fired her antique Colt Revolver into the trees cloaking the canyon until dogs began to bark a mile away.  I sometimes think Mary Jane P. is the reason I ended up in Dixie (certainly the reason I read Faulkner), and I’m indebted to her for teaching me about books and life and how to shoot the s_ t out of a Jeffrey pine. So I understand the appeal of guns, which is really an appreciation of the power guns possess.  But I don’t understand why logic and rational thinking can’t also be part of the approach to dealing with gun violence in the U.S. 

For instance, if, as many vocal supporters of gun rights attest, we are safest in this society when everyone is armed, and that our possession of handguns and semi-automatic assault weapons serves as an equalizer against ‘the bad guys,’ why isn’t that borne out by statistics?  South Carolina has high stats for gun ownership, but gun deaths are also high.  Interestingly enough, our state ranks 18^th in the nation for the number of residents owning guns, at 42.3% of the population, but we are also 18^th in gun deaths, earning us a place on the list of the twenty deadliest states in the union.  There are 13.4 gun deaths per 100,000 people, annually.  All those armed men at the barbecue did not necessarily make us safer.      

It makes me think of a homicide that occurred a few blocks east of our house two years ago, a tragedy Faulkner could have scripted.  A man was shot and killed by his brother-in-law as he was in the process of beating his wife, the killer’s sister.  By all accounts, the murdered man was a scoundrel: imagine Abner Snopes addicted to drugs and alcohol.  He had terrorized his family for years and abused his wife habitually, so he wasn’t widely mourned. The shooter was an ex-con who had very recently moved in with his sister and her family when he had nowhere else to go.  The police asked him what he was doing with a gun when he must have known, as a felon, that it was illegal for him to possess one.  He replied, without a trace of irony, that he’d obtained the gun because someone told him he was moving into a very bad neighborhood.

#####

Work Cited

Bragg, Rick. “100 Miles per Hour, Upside Down and Sideways.” The Reader.  Ed. Judy Sieg 3^rd ed. New York: Pearson, 2010. 13. Print 

Faulkner, William.  “Barn Burning.” The Bedford Introduction to Literature.  Ed. Michael Meyer, 9^th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 503. Print. 

Hiles, Jane.  “Blood Ties in Barn Burning.” The Bedford Introduction to Literature.  Ed. Michael Meyer,, 9^th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. 516-517. Print.

THE BEST GARDENER IN TRAVELER'S JOY

I have written here that our town of Traveler’s Joy* is too prosaic to be quaint, too down-at-heel to be appealing.  I should have noted the exceptions to that rule, the most impressive one being the homestead of my close neighbor, Mr. S, which has been tended thoughtfully and meticulously for over forty years.

Steve S. on the porch of his house in Traveler's Joy.*  Blue porch ceilings are a Charleston tradition -- they're believed to keep insects and "haints" (ghosts) at bay.

 Steve S. belongs to the second category of residents in this Piedmont village: he married someone who was born here.  Unlike some ‘newcomers,’ however, Steve’s upstate roots run as deep as his late wife M.’s, and he can claim a mill-town lineage as humble and hardworking as the best of them.

I admired Steve’s garden for some time before I came to know and admire the man who created it.  Brick pillars clothed in creeping fig flank the path leading to his front door, and giant crepe myrtles shade his drive.  In spring, white ‘Ice Follies’ narcissus bloom in the ivy skirting a trio of river birches, while in winter, the birds seek refuge in a billowy windbreak of mature boxwoods on the western edge of his yard and in a hedge of Camellia japonica bordering a small lawn on the eastern side.  I love camellias, but have had bad luck with japonicas, which have often succumbed to phytophthora at my hands, or perversely fling their buds to the ground, unopened.  The autumn-blooming C. sasanquas are easier to grow, being better suited to heat and clay soil and resistant to root-rot.  In addition, they bloom in a more reliably temperate season, when their smaller flowers are less vulnerable to the frosts that can turn a gloriously turned-out japonica to a big shrub dripping with mush, overnight. 

Steve with a mature pink  C Japonica

Since it is human nature to covet what we cannot have, however, I covet my neighbor’s sumptuous collection of C. japonicas when they bloom in mid-winter, blanketed with red, white and cotton-candy colored flowers atop glossy shrubs the size of haystacks.

Steve traces his appreciation for camellias to the first trip made to Charleston on his honeymoon with Mrs. S., forty-five years ago.  They visited country estates and walled gardens in town, marveling at the camellias blooming there.  “Back then camellias were not widely grown in the upstate part of South Carolina,” Steve points out. In fact, camellias were introduced to America from Asia by way of Andre Michaux, the intrepid French explorer and botanist who established a nursery in Charleston in 1786.  (Southern gardeners are also indebted to Michaux for giving us crepe myrtles and the fragrant tea olive.)  It’s believed that Michaux presented camellia plants to plantation owner Henry Middleton around this time, according to southern garden historian James R. Cothran, who writes in Gardens and Historic Plants of the Antebellum South that “one of the original camellias that Michaux is purported to have given to Henry Middleton, Reine des Fleurs, still grows on the grounds” (Cothran 166).

Flower of C. j. 'Empress'

Mr. and Mrs. S. toured the grounds of Middleton Plantation beside the Ashley River, with its famous Butterfly Lakes and centuries-old camellias, on that first visit to Charleston.

As newlyweds, they planned to build a house in the country, although Steve had reservations about the idea.  “I didn’t want all those varmints.”  After renting in Traveler’s Joy for five or six years, during which time their daughter G. was born, they decided to buy the house they’d been living in, smack in the middle of town.  “What appealed to us were the big trees on this place – white and red oaks,” Steve remembers.  Some of the oaks were eventually damaged by storms and had to be removed, and as Steve’s thumb grew greener, he longed for open space in which to plant.  After forty years spent developing a garden that charms with signature Southern plants and understated grace, its tall trees and hedges embracing a swimming pool, an arbor-shaded terrace and a Charleston-style, brick-walled parterre whose pergola is smothered in blush-toned ‘New Dawn’ roses come May, this man is remarkably modest about his labors, saying only “When I started, I was just trying to fill up space.”

The dark, glossy leaves of 'Empress'

The camellia hedge evolved slowly, with the first plant arriving shortly after the house was purchased and others coming along as seedlings from the existing trees, as gifts from family and friends, or as finds in backyard nurseries around Tomahawk* County. 

It amazes me that so many mature camellias thrive in full sun in Steve’s yard (the tallest are over fifteen feet tall and wide, and over twenty-five years old), but I have learned that this gardener flouts horticulture’s rigid rules with few ill effects, feeling no need to coddle plants that are lucky enough to get the sun, rain and soil that God sends them.  The only things growing in Steve’s garden that receive special treatment are two exquisite specimens of Felinus domesticus: ‘Molly’ and ‘Dolly,’ reed-slim sister-cats of unknown origin. 

(Allow me this digression: throughout the history of this neighborhood there has been a preponderance of spinster sister-pairs.  Two sisters owned the corner-house next door to Steve and M. for many years; these ladies planted the sinuous privet hedge that was torn out by later tenants. The Thomas* sisters, who owned our house at one time and about whom I wrote in a previous post, were considered to be dedicated gardeners as well.  More than one neighbor has told me that our property, which used to include the vast, pecan-shaded meadow behind our house that slopes down to Limestone* Street, was entirely cultivated at one time.  As I have pieced together fragments of stories about the Thomases, however, it appears that one sister was more genuinely dedicated to flora than the other. 

I learned this after Steve’s daughter, G., called her father one spring day, instructing him to tell me that some white daffodils were blooming on the banks of the storm-water ditch beside our yard.  I went down to inspect, and was astonished to see several sturdy clumps of an heirloom species of small-cupped narcissi in full flower, clinging to the steep bank.  Upon closer inspection, I also recognized some patches of muscari dotting the verge below the sidewalk, and dug these up along with the narcissus, carrying them to safer and more level ground on the newly terraced beds in our backyard.  

N. x medioluteus ('Twin Sisters')

Some weeks later, W. G., a neighbor who helps his son with his mowing business, came over on a sunny morning to cut our turf.  W. G. remarked that on the spot where I’d asked the men to dig a hole large enough for a new crabapple tree, the Misses Thomas had grown a pair of matched camellias.  Looking out over my bare landscape, with the blank new retaining wall and empty beds waiting for dryer weather, he informed me that the Thomases had tended richly diverse plantings, with all manner of roses, perennials and shrubs flowering where we stood. 

What happened to it all, I marveled, not truly believing such a landscape had ever existed. 

W. G. explained that when one of the ladies died, it turned out her sister was not as keen on plants as everyone supposed.  The surviving Miss Thomas hired a man with a front-loader to come scrape the whole damn garden off the property, pushing it to the high crust of land that rises above Limestone Street where he pitched it all into the ditch.  Here it must have washed away and become someone else’s problem.  (And the topsoil, someone’s boon, downstream).  The only remnants of the landscape that survived, not surprisingly, were the bulbs, some of which clung to protruding roots in the ditchbank and dug in. 

To my mind this story speaks to the stalwart nature of bulbs, and even more directly to the invidious nature of sisterhood...)

Steve insists he does not give his camellias any special food and does not amend the soil.  Years of falling oak leaves may have enriched it adequately, even to the point of providing that degree of acidity that camellias prefer.  He does struggle with sooty mold in damp years, but the proximity of the hedge to the house next door, which limits air circulation, also protects the trees from morning sun in winter, which can be lethal to plant tissue that has frozen during the night. The only extra care he takes with his camellias is to fortify the branches against ice storms, wiring them to the trunks with eye-bolt screws and coated wire.  Nearly all the large, mature plants have suffered damage from ice in previous winters, and Steve maintains that wiring them in this way is the least invasive method, warning that “Cutting off branches after they’ve broken makes it easier for the tree to contract a fungus or disease.”

Steve's protective wiring in place

His favorite camellia is the house-sized ‘Empress,’ with hibiscus-like flowers in a shade of red I have heard referred to as ‘blood-of-China.’  The glossy foliage of this plant grows very thickly, with leaves of such a dark-green color they are almost black.  In this way the flowers are set off against the foliage as if floating on a midnight sky.  Steve claims he would have this camellia even if it never bloomed, just for the sake of its beautiful leaves.

Almost as large (and as old) is a tree bearing pale pink flowers.  Its name has been lost, but it has spawned several seedlings.  Steve has dug them up and re-sited them to expand the wall of winter-flowering interest.  A tree bearing blossoms of pure white at the hedge’s center is also the cold-weather favorite of over-wintering birds, evidenced by the nests tucked into the branch crotches.

The Charleston-style parterre garden

Steve has indulged his love of camellias throughout the garden, with a peppermint-striped beauty sheltered beneath hardwoods at the back fence-line, a vertical white bloomer on the west wall of the house, and ten newly planted C. sasanqua ‘Frank Parsons’s forming a screen in his enclosed parterre garden.  Talking to me, he takes a moment to sit in this private garden ‘room’ crafted of brick and boxwoods and carefully chosen shade-lovers, a living homage to the elegant Southern city he and his wife loved so well that they were planning one last trip before she passed away in 2011.  Molly rubs his leg, looking for affection.

“Plants are like little children,” Steve observes, scooping the small cat into his arms.  “You want them to grow up and do their best.”

Everything in his garden appears to be living up to those fond wishes.

Steve S. and Miss Molly

Work Cited:

Cothran, James R.  Gardens and Historic Plants of the Antebellum South.  Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.  Print.

THE WINTER GARDEN (LISTENING IN THE SNOW)

I may not have "a mind of winter,” like the snow man in Wallace Stevens' poem of the same name, but it does occur to me that winter is a season of the spirit at least as much as it is a season in the landscape.  Traveler’s Joy,* S.C., has never been gripped by the kind of extreme winter weather that visits northern parts of the country, or not for long at any rate.  However, the inland parts of the upper south are certainly familiar with freezing cold, ice, snow, and the gradual stripping-away of color and density in the environment that accompanies shortened days and weakened light.  I have come to welcome this process as a necessary respite for the heart, the mind, and the senses.  It is an opportunity to disengage from the subjective world and try to be “the listener, who listens in the snow/And, nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”


Traveler's Joy* in winter



Snowmen aren’t the only ones privileged to experience this paradoxical reality; gardeners know that the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” describes our mid-winter gardens, where the ground that looks colorless and bare to the uninitiated is, to us, rich with the promise of the tender leaves, fragrant flowers and ripening fruit that will emerge from the earth as the calendar inches forward.  Once we can be free of the festive confinement imposed by Christmas traditions and have packed the last glittering ornament off to the attic, you will find us wandering among our bleak, frost-blasted beds and borders with the preoccupied air of mystics.  We are dreaming, planning, thinking, hoping.  We are waiting, with a patience born of familiarity with the natural world.  We don’t dare to predict, but we have definitely learned to trust.

Wintersweet

Knowing that waiting can be hard, I have learned to invest my landscape with plants that pay rich dividends, blooming in December, January and February when little else is stirring.  The best of these are fragrant bloomers, like the wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox ‘Concolor’).  This shrub is profoundly innocuous, even at its peak during the growing season, when it looks like a weedy ligustrum sown by a bird.  On that basis I have more than once gone to hoik it out and have caught myself in time.  I finally labeled it and placed it behind showier hydrangeas and a giant Fatsia japonica -- another winter-blooming beauty – which shields ‘Concolor’ from overzealous weed-busters like me.  In that spot it has thrived, as it needs the bit of shelter provided by the fence that backs the border.  (As does the fatsia.)  The wintersweet’s homeliness is forgotten when its stubby, yellow bells scent the frozen garden with the smell of warm honey.

Edgeworthia

The daphne (Daphne odora) is another fragrant winter-blooming favorite, and there is nothing homely about its glossy foliage or pleasing habit.  Over the years, however, I have steeled myself against becoming too attached to this shrub, as it has earned the reputation (like certain finicky gardenias and rhodendrons) of being suicidal.  The slightest prick, injury or insult may result in sudden death, as I was reminded this past autumn when a beautiful D. odora ‘Variegata’ that flowered happily for many seasons turned brown overnight and expired within days.  To my growing dismay, a strapping Edgeworthia papyrifera that had formed dozens of button-shaped buds by Halloween also gave up the ghost at about the same time.  This edgeworthia was the pride of my garden and had top billing in my winter-blooming pageant; in February its pendant buds opened into tiny star-shaped flowers that released clouds of perfume.  My gardening neighbor, Steve S., suggests that it received too much western sun this summer, and once I’d dug up the shriveled tree and inspected the roots for rot or nematodes (there were none) I was inclined to agree.  Edgeworthias like it on the cool side.  They also abhor damp soil.  When it wasn’t murderously hot this summer, it was raining, and the clay never seemed to dry out.

Thank goodness for the hellebores (Lenten roses) which are tough as nails and bloom as soon as December, in some years.  I sprinkle a bit of granular organic food on them at Thanksgiving if I remember, and when there’s time I try to snip off the spent leaf stalks, but the porcelain cups of white, rose and purple bloom robustly in spite of neglect.  Because the plants are low to the ground and the blossoms dangle, it’s difficult to see and appreciate the beautiful interior traceries of the sepals and the nectaries that resemble tiny chandeliers.  For this reason I made sure to transplant several types to the bed atop our new retaining wall, the area shaded by the giant pecan.  In this way I can appreciate the flowers whenever I’m in the lower garden. 

Hellebore

 

I sited one of my favorite cultivars in this shady bed, a hybrid called ‘Ivory Prince.’  These were hard to find when they first came out in the trade a few years ago, and I paid what I considered at the time to be an unhealthy sum for a one-gallon plant: $24.  If I’d only been able to delay gratification, I could have waited a couple of seasons and then picked up a ‘prince’ at the big box store for half the price. 

A healthy specimen of Helleborus ‘Ivory Prince’ is a beautiful sight, and it should be, considering how many crosses were required to produce it in that specialized (and passionate) world of hellebore enthusiasts.  A British grower named David Tristram crossed a seedling of the spectacular Christmas rose cultivar, Helleborus niger ‘Potter’s Wheel,’ with another grower’s hybrid, H. x ericsmithii (you can guess the name of that hybridizer), which was a cross of H. sternii and H. niger.  ‘Potter’s Wheel’ contributed its large, cream-white flowers and sturdy stems to the resulting plant, which also featured H. x ericsmithii’s captivating blue foliage.  I once tried to grow a H. x sternii cultivar named ‘Boughton Beauty’ (which also cost too much).  Its notched silver-blue foliage was irresistible, but that and the shimmering chocolate-y tone of the outer sepals should have tipped me off  that this 'beauty' was too rare for the real world.  I planted it, blinked, and it was gone.  Not just dead, but gone – the dessicated remnants of its unearthly flowers and foliage littering the ground where the spirit had departed for more ethereal climes.   

H. ‘Ivory Prince’ is much better equipped for reality, so long as it’s sited in well-drained, humus-rich soil, and has a good deal of light shade.  It may not be a prima donna, but it still manages to be a stunner, with notched, teal-blue leaves revealing creamy flower-bells set on sturdy, chocolate-colored stems.  The buds are dark mauve, and are held very close to the crowns.

For serious hellebore-lovers, the best book I know of is Hellebores; a Comprehensive Guide, by the Virginia-based garden writer C. Colston Burrell and hellebore grower Judith Knott Tyler, of Pine Knot Farms in VA.  My husband FK was kind enough to put this definitive tome under the Christmas tree for me a couple of years ago, and I am still working my way through it, with great pleasure.

Hellebores.  Daphne.  Wintersweet.  Fatsia.  The names of these winter headliners roll off the tongue like poetry.  They are enough to satisfy me until the bulbs push their noses above ground, with some, like the early narcissus N. ‘February Gold’ and the turquoise leaves of the lady tulips already emerging, despite nighttime temps in the twenties.  As soon as I’m able to look out my window in the morning and see the candy-striped buds of Tulipa clusiana ‘Lady Jane’ nodding in the frosty light, I will know that spring is finally here.  And the snowman has melted. 



Lady Jane tulip

 

***

Here is Wallace Stevens’ poem in its entirety:

 THE SNOW MAN

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Work Cited:

Burrell, C. Colston & Tyler, Judith Knott.  Hellebores; a Comprehensive Guide.  Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2006.  Print.

Stevens, Wallace.  “The Snow Man.” Twentieth-Century American Poetry.  Ed. Dana Gioia, David Mason, Meg Schoerke. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004. 121-22.  Print.

TRAVELER'S JOY: WHERE THE CATBIRD SINGS

There is nothing remarkable about the town where I live, and I am beginning to understand that this may be what makes it so entirely livable. 

 

Traveler's joy: the old-fashioned name for Clematis virginiana

This town of less than 2,000 people which I’ll call Traveler’s Joy* (after the naturalized virgin’s bower that blooms in late summer in the roadside ditches) is situated in a not-very-prosperous county in South Carolina which I’ll call Tomahawk County.*  We are too far from the large Carolina cities like Charlotte, Spartanburg and Columbia to be anyone’s bedroom community, and there are no historic landmarks or modern attractions to draw tourists, unless you count the delectable fried chicken at Brannan’s Fish Camp* or the giant water-tower shaped and painted like a peach which amazes drivers passing it at high speed on the interstate. 

Businesses have retreated one by one from our downtown over the years, with the latest and arguably the most-lamented casualty being the town newspaper, which closed its doors last month.  New industries are not lured here; the Town Council is cool to change of any kind, and is almost as averse to risk.  And because Traveler’s Joy does not capitalize on its past glory, the few historic structures left from the days when the community supported a mine, several mills and a resort nestled against the south flank of Mt. Whitman,* where affluent Yankees disembarking at the depot would be whisked by carriage to the palatial hotel, are in too much disrepair to lend the town an air of old-world charm.  Quaint it ain’t.

In general, people live here for one of three reasons: they were born here to people who were born here; they married someone who was born here; or they ended up here as the inevitable result of a series of ever-diminishing choices.

My husband FK and I probably qualify for the last category, since neither one of us was born here.  And yet we have striven mightily to make a lasting home in Traveler’s Joy, despite our dubious circumstances.  We have come to understand this about ourselves: that a certain amount of adversity is galvanizing.  Thus galvanized, we have centered our lives on work, writing, study, community, and – at semester breaks or whenever we can steal a few moments to be outdoors – establishing a fruitful and wildlife-rich garden on the property.

Several years have passed since we fled the southern metropolis where we lived for fifteen years and took possession of our one-hundred-year old cottage in Traveler’s Joy, close by the Norfolk-Southern railroad tracks.  The house proved to be surprisingly sound, with 12’ high ceilings and heart-pine floors worn as smooth as glass.  Aside from new plumbing and some electrical work, it needed only interior painting and a kitchen renovation that replaced the bottle-green linoleum while preserving the tall cupboards that look like they were crafted in a high school shop class.  The quirky character of the cupboards, like many features of this home, speak to the good intentions of past generations.

Our town lies in the heart of the Piedmont textile mill belt. Only a handful of mills still operate in this region that stretches diagonally from Virginia in the north to Alabama in the south.  Abundant free-flowing rivers spilling down to the plains from the Appalachians provided those men of capital who built their mills here with reliable profits after the depredations of the Civil War.  An even more profitable and essential resource for the mills was the near-endless supply of inexpensive labor in the form of poor southerners, who fled their hardscrabble farms by the tens of thousands for the mixed blessings of mill wages and milltown life.  According to Like a Family, the Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, our county boasted over 200,000 operative spindles in 1929, with the booming areas of Gastonia, Spartanburg and Greenville having over half a million (Hall, Map1). 

Our cottage closely matches the mill-house design widely circulated in the Carolinas by Charlotte mill owner D. A. Tompkins around the turn-of-the-century.  The Tompkins mill-house was intended to retain workers who were accustomed to rural life, so the four rooms of this “hall-and-parlor style” house are generously proportioned by modern standards.  Two chimneys were designed to rise above the roof peak, providing coal fires in each room, with a porch fronting the home and a ‘shed room’ and covered porch on the back serving as a place for doing laundry or cleaning and skinning animals.  In time, the back porch was enclosed to become part of the house and indoor plumbing would have been installed.

Also in Like a Family… the excellent book on southern textile mill communities by Jacquelyn Hall, James LeLoudis and others, the authors point out that in the early 1900s, the four-room mill-house was meant to accommodate a family of at least seven people, with all rooms but the kitchen given over to sleeping. Bessie Buchanan, who recalls growing up as one of nine children in a mill family, is quoted as saying, “The boys slept in one room, and the girls slept in another.  And Mother and Daddy had a room.  And the kitchen.  We never knew what it was to have a dining room.  We didn’t have a living room or a den or nothing like that; we wasn’t used to it” (Hall 127).

Luckily, we don’t sleep eleven (and with one tiny bathroom the size of an airplane commode, that would be difficult).  However, our neighbor Margaret T. remembers that when she was nine or ten, the spinster sisters who lived in our house at the time would sometimes pay her a quarter to come down the hill and sleep in their second parlor at the front (the room we currently use as a dining room/workroom/guest room) while they slept together in the back.  What Margaret was protecting them from by sleeping so close to the front door, she was never sure, but since her mother encouraged the arrangement, she has always assumed that the threat of an invading axe murderer existed only in the Thomas* sisters’ minds.

Another former owner remembered by the neighbors is Junior Swift*, who lopped off the two chimneys when he grew tired of maintaining them.  He patched the holes in the roof but left the bricks piled on the attic floor.  Even if we could afford to restore the chimneys, the fire boxes aren’t deep enough to burn wood safely, in any case.  So, we content ourselves with the decorative value of the graceful Edwardian mantels in the main parlor and bedroom, as well as the vintage ceramic insert and brass fire-guard in the dining room that is a good conversation-starter.  (Junior is the one who might have left a small guitar for us to discover, nestled between the studs in the attic wall.  We’ll never know.)
 

This is where we live.  We have grown accustomed to the train whistle blasting through our dreams at 2 a.m., as we have to the clattery hum of the compressor working late into the night at the small car-upholstery mill on the hill above us.  We have taken in a one-eyed kitten named Miss Billie who dragged herself up Limestone Street* from a less-respectable part of town three years ago (unwanted cats are the only commodity produced regularly in great quantity in Traveler’s Joy) and, as of Christmas 2012, a puppy abandoned outside the First Baptist Church which we have named Alice.  Alice has a hound’s soft ears and soulful eyes, and a beagle’s piercing vocalizations.  For some reason, strays show up at our house during rainstorms.  No doubt there will be more.

We are delighted by the riot of birdsong that surrounds our house on certain mornings (a visiting friend from New Mexico pointed out how extraordinary and uplifting this chorus is in the south, reminding us gently not to take it for granted).  It’s fortunate that Miss Billie’s eyesight is inadequate for catching those bluebirds who perch on our vegetable-plot arbors in pairs, or the slim gray catbirds who bring their fledglings into our shrub borders on warm spring days and hector them to forage and to fly, and whose feline yowls always trick me into thinking that my cat has been trapped in a tree. 

We are grateful for the huge pecans and one ancient water oak that shelter the house and beckon the birds, and are especially thankful for the kind neighbors who tolerate our customs and questions and who share cuttings of Confederate roses and bring us bulbs from their family homesteads.  Some swapping takes place, but we are always the clear beneficiaries in this exchange, because along with the narcissus and peanut butter fudge we are gifted with many remarkable stories.  It is an embarrassment of riches.

(*name changed to preserve the privacy of friends, family and neighbors)

Work Cited

Hall, J.D.; LeLoudis, James; Korstad, Robt.; Murphy, Mary; Jones, L. A.; Daly, C.B.  Like a Family; the Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Print.