Category: Almanac 2018

Sewed rye under the power lines and down the ridge past the dogwoods. Had sewn rye in late October to keep our dirt. A stand took but is having to work through the new leaf cover, so I’m spreading a second round. * I’ve been selecting for cedars when thinning. Cedars last forever from what I can tell. They keep our home hidden from the road, and after a rain, walking through cedars will lift you earth to branch. * Because sometimes the seasons dictate what you do, and the need to stay warm, which means cutting firewood has overtaken every chore, except on this day, we’ve opened the windows for the wind … Continue ReadingTwelve—Rye

Didn’t cure enough wood from last winter, so I cut trees for January, February, March. Already we’re breathing fires into vestal each morning over ash and coals. Between two dogwood stands out west, a V for sighting Cherty Ridge. This year in that V, a scuppernong vine. I’ll pull it from the branches when the rains stop. But it is something, that tendril reaching out, twining where there had been gravity and air.

I tell you, sometimes it feels as if I’ve waited this life for summer to end. And then in the cool I’d forgotten, an ease to living.

And it broke after the hurricane hit south, hit people I knew. In the vacuum, cold, cold air sweeping away the hot summer that at times we thought would not end, the heat in the earth and the sun was just too much. Then the aftermath. I drove to South Georgia to cut up trees that had been upturned and twisted at the rot. One tree knifed a branch through the roof of my father’s house. Other branches fell their way on top of his pottery studio. So many branches—those on the fence line, those in the drive, everything covered in a quiet layer of needle and leaf, everything smelling of pine. Now, … Continue ReadingTen—Aftermath

All month the clouds stacked high as soon as the sun set behind Cherty, and the purple, orange, pink—a hue turned down here, brightened there—changed minutes, but the clouds were ships sitting in the afternoon like people have said, they didn’t move. By morning, we had a creek of mist above Foot Creek diffuse up the ridge to our home. Couldn’t see until the fog settled back and held together into creek again. Diffused creek, this was our breath until the sun got high enough to dissipate our breathing. Then the clouds rolled over the skylight fast. There were the two afternoons at Cliff Tops, us sitting in the rocks, the sun’s low … Continue ReadingNine—Alchemy

With the deck done, August days are spent outside behind the close trees, west where the sun can only get through branch by branch, leaf by leaf just a little. Cherty Ridge has turned dusky in the sun’s shadow, the sun reaching over it, not casting upon it. The sun will set behind it soon. Between the oak, the one with the scarred hull where I cut a low, large branch years ago, the oak has wept dead wood all summer, the collar on the branch stub closing in on the black center where worms have taken root in the weeping. Between the scarred oak and the maple that has finally grown bigger … Continue ReadingEight—Light

Sometimes it’s the rain that puts the work here to a halt. Here in the heat of it, in the humidity and storms, I know the truth—summer is almost gone. And this summer the storms have been plenty, no drought in sight. In turn the air has thickened and the days I finish working on the cabin’s deck, my clothes are soaked. I have to lay them out on the plywood floor to dry. The same as when I worked my brother’s watermelon fields as a teenager. Once you do something like that, spend days cutting melons and lifting them from the sand, handing them off down a row of workers the same … Continue ReadingEight—Work

The wind come up and the thunder with it, a storm just below us on Pine Mountain shoaling clouds into the heat and the blue here. I have not heard the leaves stirred like this in sometime. That was back in March. So I put up all the saws, the boards, the tools, vowing one day I’d have a place for them and wouldn’t have to put them under cover when the threat of rain was close. But it won’t come here, I think, the storm won’t make it. We’ll get the cool wind from Pine Mountain, we’ll get the clouds shoaling, the ones empty of water now, and the leaves acting so … Continue ReadingSeven—Storm

The sun is too much. I go to work. I sweat it out. But I can’t keep down in the heat, and the water breaks don’t lift the dizziness from me. Even this wind that’s come up to cool dies out, and the sun comes on stronger.

We hiked Braziel Trail into the Sipsey and stopped where gravity took the creek through the air. That falling went through me to the pool of boulders in the canyon like it went through the moss bank dripping water to the bedrock. At the edge one tree gripped the rushing and leaned out. In the Smokies two weeks later on the trail to Andrews Bald, we saw a root in a rock flow. And next morning at the Townsend Y, we sat beside the bend in Little River, finning our feet under the slick rocks, our ankles getting cold, pulled and turned. Back home the storms have come after two weeks of dry. … Continue ReadingFive—Water

Found what I believe is a promethea silkmoth on one of the west windows camouflaged by the wood frame. It didn’t go, not even when the wind caused the wing’s blue eyespot to twitch, until night.

At not quite the center is a tulipwood, too thin to survive for long. Many of them died a year ago in the drought—they’re on the land, dead standing—but this one reaches into a large pine’s branches with new leaves. Yesterday I took firewood from the bed of the truck and set stick atop stick against two sides of the tulipwood’s trunk to make a stack as tall as me. The pieces fell, and afterward I saw my body in front tripping before the falling wood until covered. A phantom ache like the one I’ve had since last spring when I set a wood plate full of sunflower heads, cut from the stalk … Continue ReadingFour—Stack

Cut from a red oak on my neighbor’s land, these rounds have been split and stacked to dry for next winter.

Slowly through the switches we left the dead. Broom sedge and branch wood, shedding skin to bone. One of them rain-sun, more cloud than anything else hours. The minute the light made it, green petals became white, our bones mist. The woods will be dogwood white soon. Low trees, they hide halfway up the oaks all year. Yesterday the turn we took from Oneonta unhitched tree from hill. Another month of leafing and rivering and our cabin will be hidden as if it never existed. The hawk, the one that cries out on the northwest border moved in closer. Wonder when he quits circling to take up at the far oak again. That … Continue ReadingThree—Bloom

There is a flow to the house, the way the wood runs. I always see it as river for everything was shaped by water, Tina says. To be in the cabin is to be in the water of pine and cedar light makes into breath.

Where the rain stopped, a river of smoke like you said, bending to the valley. It is late afternoon. The sky’s clouds are steel, the maple closest to our cabin, branch red, the plum green, white. Further out is the smoke where the hawks made turns all week. I looked and looked for them, could only hear their calling for, one hawk trying to catch the other. Now, the bats. They like to swing round the red oak at dark, flip their wings closer until they recognize the echo of my face. They dive and circle like that buzzard I saw over my father’s field just above the bitterweed, their shadows making lines … Continue ReadingTwo—Air

We left the Ouachita Range for our Red and Sand. In between, the Delta’s black dirt and squeezebox silos and flat horizon towns refusing to rise once we reached them. We crossed the steel bridges that stitch the Mississipp bank to bank, and we breathed in all this river town dirt slowly, hoping to keep it with us long after we dipped down to Orleans before coming home. Above us now are the clouds Tina calls slate—long gray-white and unfurling with edges blue and pink. The color comes from the light blue sky we get when our winters turn cold. Our winter garden is gone except the rosemary, sage, and parsley. The house … Continue ReadingOne—Thaw