January We Just Tried

From the front studio with the curtains open, a wind howling outside, the sweet pale blue winter skies, i'm still trying,

We didn’t know where we were going before we got here, I am not worried about where we are going after.

Seven purple and green cabbages propped up on the dryer in the laundry room, all of the plants moved inside. Doesn’t look like the beets made it, but I’ll be damned if that kale we planted last winter has survived chickens, cabbage moths, drought, and frost. If it ever goes to seed I’ll send you some.

It feels like early spring outside and the fickle Japanese magnolia has buds on it, so does the poplar tree.

The chickens have regained their courage after a brief and unintentional terror campaign by the new dog. The one chicken that she caught has even resumed laying eggs. She’s the oldest hen by far, and she is a great reminder always, never say never. Ever.

We watched snow geese blanket a field on highway 6 in the sunset, both sides honking and snow-covered in moments. We drive places and are always reminded, comforted, assured, there’s no place like home.

I saw a beaver in the bayou next to the church who’s bones are breaking, a silver v streaking north in the Sunday setting sun.

Watched a buck cross a field and only later did a boy come out to find it, long gone. Watched six ducks in the sky heading northwest, the same day the Canadian geese moved, the snow geese so loud I started walking to where I thought they landed, but they were overhead and close. It seems sometimes like all of nature moves at once, and they never send me a memo.

Mississippi extended it’s deer season through until Sunday the 2nd. Please go get your limit.

We walked out into the darkness of predawn and it was blue and black and purple but he had walked it so many times he could do it with his eyes closed, which is what it felt like.

We had stayed out late the night before, learned a new dice game in their warm dark living room at their fine dining table, drinking, jabbing. Got home and stayed up some more for feeling good. So it was a hard 3:30 am alarm to head out into the cold. Listening to heartbeats.

Up into the deer stand, it’s easier to climb a ladder in the dark. A blanket and a heater and staring out two windows in the stand, it begins raining, and we’re up in the pines and they’re black and blue, too. And I see faces and shapes in the bark and then the crows start and the squirrels start and the little birds, too. With the rain and the cold-warm I’m terrifically drowsy and still snapping awake to not nod all the way off. Shapes come up out of the woods and he said the deer will be easy to see, black with rain. The pines have this quality about them, especially in the rain, it all felt a little like a dream. Ok, breath in, pull the trigger when you breath out.

Everyone here seems so rational and even-tempered and even the guy who built the dam without asking anybody and blocked up the bayou, he was reasonable when they were on the phone, yes I’ll tear it down. I was worried about it flooding. I was going to write a story about a crazy old lady and how the farmers here are a little bit like gods. You can have a lot of opinions about everybody but they all have these helping hearts. Vonnegut wrote about everyone being this unwavering band of light.

I guess my problem is, I always expect people to fully understand how they are responding when they first react. I don’t even do that.

The hollyhocks came up after all, at the very last, it seemed in the strangest time.

It was 8:30 on Saturday morning and he came over from Rena Laura and he had all of his fingers. We were going to blow up one of the places where the beavers had engineered another bayou blockage, they have two or three more - and he pulled the explosives out of his truck and buried them deep into the mud. Two and a half minutes later, mud and frozen mud and ice hurled into the sky, ka-pow. Laughing in surprise. Show’s over. The beavers haven’t come to fix it yet because the water isn’t really moving. He prescribed a oil can with a little tiny pinprick of a hole in it, to string it over the section where the dam blew up. “They don’t like oil on their hands, I haven’t tried it but I heard it works.” The rest of the weekend we heard everyone reminiscing about how easy it used to be to get dynamite. All you had to do was go to Ruleville and they’d fill your trunk up with dynamite. Wouldn’t even ask what you were using it for.

They had gone duck hunting and he laid up under where a boar hog had just come out of. “It was warm, I had a book,”

And the guys at the deer processing place were maybe some of the best customer service people I’ve met in the Delta, and if you know about customer service here, you know.

The dogs are traveling along still at top speed, one rainy dreary day before it turned cold, I watched them dig and scuttle, and little field mice sprang from their holes. As badly as Wilbur wants to be a hunter, he’s not a very good one. And Sandii is his clumsy mentee. They’re digging holes in the mud and I see a mouse escape into the long grass on the ditch bank. They do not notice her and she is wide eyed and breathing fast. She dives into the cold rainwater in the ditch and goes under. It never occurred to me mice were any kind of swimmers and I’m watching in amazement and wondering. She appears a little further down stream and disappears back into the land. I watch this happen twice more and am relieved that even though they have to find a warm place again in this January cold, they escaped.

Hot tamales in the old barbecue place, it was just right for the weather.

Without doing very much I am rememberable, from the oil change place to the pharmacy to the mechanic to the telephone calls, the island I was talking about going to “is as big as Coahoma county, we could ride around it in a couple hours and see the whole thing,”

I forgot the power steering hose flew off and left red fluid in a sticky pile on the ground, bled all over the road in the way I reversed. “Oh, so and so will probably tow it, he knows where to drop it off. Leave the keys on the seat.” Waiting on the full moon rising in the cold bright air and the stars come on. And so and so showed up and towed it, he knew just where to go.

We went out to the trail at the lake and watched the sunset after a walk in the woods, a fallen tree looked like an Egyptian sarcophagus, all gold and painted in the falling sun. It wouldn’t surprise me anymore if it was, we went to go make sure it wasn’t, for sure.

It’s muddy out here, all over, it looks like rough hell. Been looking through photos from the summer and I forgot that I also live in an eden. I forgot it ever looked like that.

Sunflower seeds in the freezer, squash, catfish from the autumn out on the river, okra, greens, cabbage, corn, deer from the winter.

I have my health, a priceless thing. The last lines of Breakfast of Champions, make me young again make me young again, this is it, this is it. There’s a roof and we’ve been warm all winter. There are clouds and the wind howls and on the evening walk we echo out into the woods with calling and barking and chasing. Deer season is almost over, the woods become ours again, for good, until the poison ivy comes back. He says there is an empty lot over in Rosedale with catalpa trees in it. The ice melted, we dressed warmly, we made it through, up and down the road, up and back, towards home. We have everything we need, why aren’t we happy. It’ll be a year while we try to make a pasture. Rake, burn, till, plant, hope.

Just like that - the show closes February 8th! The closing reception is Saturday the 8th from 5 - 7 pm in Hunstville, Alabama. Looking forward to seeing you and being in the busy beautiful buzz of Lowe Mill on an open studio night. There will be a couple closing receptions happening across the building, plus lots of artists sharing their studio spaces!

The Little Green Store in Huntsville just got a shipment of new work as well, if you are in the area please visit this beautiful gem on the mountain.

Up next, i am excited to send work to Revelry Fine Arts in Nashville, Tennessee. They will have work available February 20th - more on that over on instagram soon. https://revelryfinearts.com/

After that, i’m pleased to have work at Paper Fool’s at Coast Episcopal. Many thanks to Ann Madden for always making the thing happen! https://coastepiscopalschool.org/mc/event/8533/

More in the next newsletter. If you don’t mind, i might send out a reminder about Revelry when it becomes more in - stone, y’know?

this is one of my favorite versions of one of my favorite blues songs,