out of a front

Mmm, been thinking of clouds lately. Yesterday, we zipped home from Cumberland Island in a Cessna 206 and flew out of a front. When we looked back behind us, a sheet of white cloud on an otherwise gray day was floating along behind us. Someone said "A Morning Glory!" and for a moment I was back in Burketown in that blue and white Grob. But this one had no lift. We were jostled and jerked, "like we were in a bottle that was being shaken up" I described to someone.

Now, home. It's home to the rain, the leaky roof, the busy present-preparing workshop in my square yellow room, on my square yellow table. And lots of friends to make me merry and celebrate this wonderful time of year.


p.s. - This photo was originally posted here, from a walk in Lost Cove.  No connection, just a pretty thought.

Mumsy's swamp

Mumsy wears white every day. Her lips are the same shade of pink as they were forty-five years ago. Once, they discontinued her lipstick color and her grand-daughter made her a new tube by melting down the stubs of her old lipsticks in the microwave and pouring them into a new lipstick mold. She eventually found another color that was similar.

Mumsy has lived by the swamp for about thirty-five years. When one of her sons was in high school he built an 800-foot boardwalk that leads straight into it and almost to the other side. It took him four years.  Her husband drew with colorful pastels. He built her house. His name was Neil Nehrbass. Hers is Janet. Everybody calls her Mumsy.

where clouds begin

To get there, we had to paddle through a cloud. When we reached the far side, the cloud had moved on.

Williams Island Farm is located dead smack in the center of the Tennessee River just after it swerves around Moccasin Bend. The River begins near Knoxville where the Holston meets the French Broad (hidy, Suttree would say), and ends on the Kentucky line where it is swallowed by the Ohio.  A couple miles from my house, she shears downtown Chattanooga in two. 

Chattanooga itself is a city of conjunctions - three mountains, three valleys, a snaky gorge, a river cutting through the center, and railroad tracks and interstates playing tic tac toe all over it.  So what do its residents do? They build bridges over the river. They cut railroads into the mountains. They hanglide out over the valleys.  And the oldest practice: they farm the island in the middle of the Tennessee River. 

A thousand years ago, people did the same thing.  And they've been doing it on and off ever since.  Today, it's cultivated by my brother and a couple other farmhands who grow vegetables there. Beets, turnips, radishes, eggplant, chard, kale, collards, peppers, squash, carrots, okra, arugula, herbs, shiitakes, sweet potatoes, parsnips, cabbage to name a few. I go there every other week to hoe my fair share, but really it's the island feeling that I savor. Paddling across the river. Gazing south to Lookout and north into the Gorge. The clouds never lie the same way twice.

Off, and back on again

 For a while, it seemed too big.

There was too much.
Too much to sift through.
Too much to think about.

It was a denial - was it a denial? Whether my return from the Watson year was an eager casting off of the title "foreigner" or a wholehearted embrace of familiar language, culture, and community, I'm not sure.


 Please don't misinterpret that. I believe with my whole soul in the value of seeing and experiencing and learning from other cultures. I don't for a millisecond write off the year's experience as anything but the transformative and mind-blowing year that it was. 

 Yet life-changing is not easy. Life-changing means subjecting yourself to experience. It means putting yourself out there. It means not being invisible. It means...difficulties. Joys, hard work, laughter, failure, success, rejection, confusion (lots of confusion), frustration...is there any way to describe a year of traveling alone?  I don't think it can be rattled off in a list.

After that year - 365 days of constant exploration and discovery, of entirely new places and faces, languages and music, clouds and landscapes - I was worn out. I was craving a familiar face, a familiar place, the everyday intimacies that we take for granted: the chipped red paint on the front door, the smile of a neighbor, the familiar pothole on the road (I'm imagining that scene from the film "It's a Wonderful Life" where George Bailey, upon returning from the haunting dream world to his real life again, desperately searches for a scrap of familiarity and, finding his daughter's flower petals in his pocket shouts "Zuzu's petals...Zuzu...THERE THEY ARE!")  Okay, it wasn't that dramatic. But wow, it felt good to be home!

The return was fantastic.  Overwhelming. Stupefying. I have so much stuff. Clothes. Books. Possessions. For one year, I had a backpack. The next day I had a room full of things in a house on some land.  But the biggest shock was family. Friends. They were all there. Doing their thing, being their wonderful selves. And I was a part of it.

(That's probably the most meaningful gift anyone could ask for. I felt so grateful. I still do. I swore not to take that for granted anymore, not to take any detail for granted. I was a part of a community of people who appreciated me and loved me and occasionaly let me know it, although most of the time it was through subtle signs like saying "good morning" or asking me if I would please cut the grass or sharing a meal. )

So why all this writing? Why now?

This blog is a story. It began as my cloud story. It began before I received the Watson Fellowship, when I was formulating ideas about how I see the world, wanting a place to express those ideas and wondering if there would be an audience interested in listening. This blog is that vessel. That medium. The ideas continue, but for a while I had to not think about it. I felt pressure. I had returned with a load of wonderful experiences, experiences that still come out in stories here and there and that I often surprise myself with by remembering. I have over a dozen journals from that year and thousands and thousands of images.

They are valuable. There is a lot to be learned from them, a lot to be shared, but it must be done thoughtfully and relevantly. I want these ideas to live, and I want to continue to share my thoughts on the clouds, to move forward with a grateful nod to the past and a passionate eye for the capacity to change the way we think in the future. This is a place that lives. Thanks for listening.  The clouds today are beautiful.