November Knowing, Glowing

hello for the record i wrote this on Saturday November 30th, but could not bear to send it out on a Saturday, a day not the same for reading like a Sunday morning is.

The truth is i thought i was going to get to write two newsletters for you this month, but mercury in retrograde rolled in and my computer’s been waiting on a new battery for a week. I haven’t even heard from her today to see if it might be fixed already; i handed off everything to a stranger in a red nissan in the bank parking lot. C’est la vie here in the country. It isn’t her fault the battery didn’t come in. Drove half an hour to fix something in my account at the bank and they’re understaffed, would it be ok to come back monday? Of course. This reads like a complaint but it isn’t meant to be, every month i am determined i have been tamed and healed and fixed because of the chance to live here, that my patience has been rewarded, and i am always at peace. This isn’t truly the case, it finds new ways to test me, but i keep determining, hoping. McCullers writes, “That’s how ugly and hardboiled i used to be and still am sometimes.” 

That being said, let me try to conjure back the month because what i wrote to you so far is no longer in my possession, 

Walking out to his new studio before the rain, if you were paying attention, little toads were popping up in all of the cracks in the earth, their little heads darting back as i approached, laughing. He was out there one day in the late summer laughing about yes the guys used to drop wrenches into the cracks, and i’d say, that’s ok, the earth is so fertile they’ll pop up as little wrenches in a few months. 

We were driving to Memphis and all of a sudden the birds were migrating, it was a sunday morning walking out into the brisk and you could hear them way up in the air, migrating, and then it’s every morning in the deep distant blue, i asked, is it easier to fly the further up you go? He answered, based on my experience, i do not know. One morning coming back down the road in the quiet of the bright blue afternoon, strange shapes in the close sky, unflapping, discovered - white pelicans just gliding quietly in the air, wherever the current took them, they swirled, a tide of them sweeping and then suddenly absolutely gone. Soundlessly to the coast. 

This new dog showed up at the crossroads, while he was sitting on the porch, and so he called to her. She came along and now me and the two dogs go walking twice a day to try to keep her being good, the same way i go out into the world and keep learning humility, patience, listening, attention, even though it’s hard to keep bearing myself/baring myself. She runs like a loping horse, and Wilbur leads the way, 

We are often so lucky, when the day is all ours, sunrise to sunset, then out into the stars, and they shine bright - i said i am just waiting for a right turn and then i’ll come home, the first ended in a gate, the second in a dead end, the third in high water, 

We go out riding sometimes just to look at the land and sometimes just to go to the store, and he said every day has felt like sunday since you got here, 

Riding home from picking green tomatoes out in roundaway, i guess we had our first and second frost but i never really saw evidence of it until today, tomatoes and sweet potato plants brown and turning over in defeat, anyhow - riding home from roundaway after i helped pick green tomatoes and her jalapeno peppers that have the taste but not the heat, she said come back and pick pecans any time, and again i feel so rich; what a blessing; riding home and there was a hawk on the ground but as i drove by it turned it’s head to look at me there next to the road, appearing small and more like a cat. I turned around in the middle of the road, hoping i could get the shot - no - not quite - but as i turned around again i saw this strange jungling creature hulking and trotting down a turnrow towards the eagle’s nest, another blip barely seen, like the frogs, only to discover (a blessed road, too, you can sometimes stop in the middle and just stare at things) a wild hog, blackcoarse and thick, too, just like a brick wall. 

Riding out into the stars, the aphids or something ate up all of my Georgia Collard Greens, the ones that i love the best, even though when they’re cooked down i can’t really tell a difference. Bobo - Sherard road, to the bridge and there in the headlights a single celebration of collards there in the dirt, he got out like he sometimes does, and picked them all. 

Thinking, dreaming, of Ocean Springs, when everything meant everything. Before the pandemic, where i was seeing everything and counting my fortune - pennies, lucky numbers, turtles, boars, stars. (Something like anomalous collard greens, where no one grows them for miles and behold.) There in my truck with my dog beneath the Twelve Oaks, counting that kind of fortune. McCullers wrote “for the child knows two layers of reality - that of the world, which is accepted like an immense collusion of all adults - and the unacknowledged, hidden secret, the profound.” It has been so difficult, once i began colluding again, to un-collude, to re-remember, what if everything means something? Count the ants, count the stars, you wouldn’t even need to play the lottery, consult the dream book.

We have entered sleeping snake season,

It rained, it rained hard, right after the toads started poking their heads out of the dry earth, heading to town in the strange gloaming of a stormcast sky, puddle-wonderful, puddle-dangerous, and again a strange blur in the left of my vision, a moving thing - hard to see past the wiperdrawn windowshield, slowly; four does leaping running seriously, followed by two bucks, from the hunting land to our peaceful woods, watching the whole procession shocking, laughing, windows rolled down even against the rain. One buck plunges loudly and clumsily into the ditch, splashing coming up and out into the black woods. 

It rained hard and Wilbur chased a fat raccoon twice his size from the raccoon's hole out into the bayou, and they were there in the fallen trees and Wilbur was barking and yelping and the fat raccoon was hissing and i was there shocked and knee

deep hollering, still thankful atleast all of the cottonmouths have gone to sleep,

The coats have come out, rediscovering the jacket Douglas Baulos made me earlier this year - i didn’t even notice all of the beautiful things they sewed onto it until today; wearing it like the other jacket i have of his - some kind of safety, steady, protection - some kind of reminder the natural world abounds with wonder, you can illustrate it, sew it, dye it, wear it - but best of all is to just notice it. Standing there about to go out i pulled a spider web-nest from his collar, hollering and jumping when a spider came out of it, too. 

the thing about where i live, he wears everything out. This jacket started that way - worn from blue to nearly white. He wore holes into the elbows of his cashmere sweater, jeans not even frayed but the color has gone, shirts where holes slowly have borne, a black shirt washed steadily pinkpurple, he keeps things and they come around in their usefulness, always a lesson - with all of the moving i have done in my life i love to throw everything away. Try wearing something all the way out sometime. Here they keep things that last, everyone has their own stockpile if they’re fortunate enough - cypress, tin. Some buildings stripped and left because all they revealed was pine, my god. The woods littered with rusted tin, mattress springs, car frames, glass bottles - we used to make things that lasted, arrowheads, one day i know i will find a tintype in the ruins out in the distant woods but for now polaroids carry. The giant jars behind her worn out fall down house call Catch Light! from the sunset. 

Walking out from the woods where the beavers have made their paradise, we began to hunt the homesite evident in bricks and broken glass in the field. Marbles, horseshoes, a delicately carved piece of a gun, i said marbles are made miraculously, they never break in the tumult and the turn over of tilling. They come away often unblemished whatsoever. He says it like Mowgan David Wine and we carried that bottle around too. He leans down and i exclaim wow! He laughs, i’m so glad you are so easily entertained. Rusted nails, white and blue and brown bottles, 

We saw a lot of great music, it seems like the memorials and in rememberances parties bring the finest musicians out. The next day, Day of the Dead, Jimbo Mathus leads us along with his band into a celebration and a remembrance and i can’t believe she is really singing like that out here in the open and for free - where are we? He drove all of us home in his big truck through the a lonesome Shelby down past the commissary, where is your house? Where is it? You’re an outstanding member of the community you ought to have streetlights. Well i’d be glad if they’d just paint stripes on the road. 

Later the chorus out in Memphis at Al Green’s church rises like a wave to the very top of the ceiling, and one of the men singing led the bible study and wanted us to know we were already born with  a purpose. He already knew what we would do when he put us here. Later the neighbor came over to get a dog house for his new dog that barks every time we go by, and it’s the setting sun behind the ash tree and everything lined with gold. And it used to be that the neighbor wouldn’t really look at me or speak to me, and we all three helped get the dog house into the bed of his truck in that golden light. And he had an outfit on that wasn’t dissimilar from ours, Sunday-after-church soft clothes, worn but made for working and still working. He preaches at the church up the road where they have a falling down outhouse and some of the headstones in the woods that are hard to see, sometimes we talk about going to sit outside and listen to the sermon but we don’t want to cause folks to become nervous. Anyhow he begins preaching very similarly to the bible study, God made Adam and he made Eve, he makes people that just belong together, and that’s a good thing. I could have worried about what he meant, but all it really sounded like was acceptance. Maybe he wanted to always tell me that, or maybe the spirit just came upon him. But i said all of that to say, i wish you could’ve seen us there against the cane and the ash tree, where the laundry water runs and where that dog house has been sitting unused for a decade, but we were all gilded and everyone was speaking beautifully, and being out there bearing myself and baring myself, we were all neighbors and he rode his truck out of the yard back into the road, shored up the dog house, and the dog that was born with the purpose of barking, still barks. 

Lastly from the conjuring, my oldest hen from Louisiana, i believe her brain must be a little bigger than all of the other chickens, she disappeared completely for two days, no explosion of feathers, no guilty dogs, no mournful splattering pile on the road. Then she returned, unable to say what happened, when, or how. Now the rooster has disappeared - the hens anxious to leave the coop in the morning when before they’d pace and peck to be let out. 

Well, the final mowing happened in September, i guess, maybe October. The neighbor is out there mowing today. Meanwhile, grateful for the glittering of frost already mirroring the stars last night, silver, soft. This morning it was blue and the thing about the new dog is, the shadows are blue and beautiful on her, but she’s too fast and clumsy to photograph it yet. Still i can go barefoot and feel the slick wild onions. We got enough greens, we had enough okra, we done pretty good, i guess. 

What other miraculous vision? 

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Big love & brayerfully, 

Merrily, merrily,

x

The new show opened on Wednesday the 27th at Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment in Huntsville, Alabama. The closing reception will be Saturday, February 8th, from 5 - 7 pm. It brought me truly childlike joy to make so much of this work - if you are in the area, I hope you have the time to check it out, along with the 150+ artist studios and three floors of art shows. Huntsville has been so wonderful to me - in ways I haven’t sat down and thanked anyone for like I should’ve. Thank you. I’ve shown there three times now at Lowe, and once on the mountain at The Little Green Store, and it’s all been so full of love that is beyond what I have earned. Thank you. More information about the show at Lowe Mill

I’ll next be at Sumac Cottage on SUNDAY December 8th 11 - 4 pm. That’s in Greensboro, Hale County, Alabama. If you’re like me and love William Christenberry, but never took a drive out to Hale County before, now might be a reasonable enough reason. Sumac Cottage Info

Prints are available here. The way prints work in the future will change drastically (only available for a week at a time) and all of the work posted will be unavailable once we reach 2025.

So i have two music selections for you this month. Every time i hear this song it sounds different, and also it’s catchy. Like bad. I had met Obed at Kroger’s many times, he used to be a stockboy, now he works at checkout, and he also does wonderful drawings - the thing about out here that i always think i have learned, but haven’t really - everyone has something surprising to offer - a skill, a song, a story. I mean, i guess that’s everywhere. It is. But people don’t seem as prone to tell you about it anywhere else. And so the same goes for Obed (Obie) - he’s written forty songs for his wife and his secret is that he wrote and performed this song there in Merigold with all of the other legendary bright brief spirits that went on to live muddy hard beautiful lives. It’s not a clap machine, it’s not a computer, there are folks in there clapping on time. And you can hear backup vocals singing like a butterfly itself, thin, fragile, breathtaking. That’s him singing and on the harmonica, you can have a hope for a bright tomorrow.

Well, i was listening to Brother Theotis Taylor sing about Thank you for the sunshine, and this feller came up on the playlist, and all i could do was smile. you know his music already, he sang That’s How Strong My Love Is that Otis Redding covered, and like everything else The Rolling Stones ripped off. He’s Shelby County, Tennessee, born - and was just inducted to the Blues Hall of Fame this year, although he passed in 1980.

with love, deep affection, terrific gratitude, here at the computer and it’s the Memphis news in the other room, and the way the words melt out of their mouths, our world is still beautiful and very real,