Drawings and Text

In 1991 I had a show at Artswatch Galery in Louisville, KY entitled “Fragments: Drawings & Text.” I wrote short '“prose poems” or statements to accompany each of the drawings to flesh out the narrative content. These drawings fuse memories of my life growing up on a farm in NC with the people, places and events of my life adult life in rural KYIn light of recent events in the US, I feel these writings are prophetic.

Faults and Gaps 1986

            I live in far western Kentucky on the New Madrid fault zone. Though little has been heard, or felt, from this fault in almost one hundred and eighty years, the earthquakes of 1811-1812 from this area rang church bells in Boston, knocked people down in Nashville, and temporarily reversed the flow of the Mississippi river.

            Recently, just before the Equinox, people got worried because of a prediction of a mighty quake by a man who believes in the power of the moon upon the earth. Ancient superstitions prevailed, but the hysteria receded when the heavenly alignment came and went without incident. The TV crews left and the bottled water was put t better use. .

            Once again, the relative tranquility of life on the surface here belies the powerful struggle taking place underground. Still, there is a sense, more in the landscape than the people, of waiting for something monumental to happen.

WINTER FLOOD I   1988

            People here are drawn to the river. Cars park in the middle of the bridge, doors open, oblivious to other traffic. People stand on the bridge and shoot anything that moves. “They’re just ignorant!” says a woman who crosses the bridge twice as she walks several miles a day, smoking cigarettes – she’s collecting unemployment, recovering from a stroke. 

         During the first big flood after the drought ended, people at the store said that “some of the boys in town” got in their johnboats and shot snakes whose hibernation had come to an abrupt and confusing end. It was a balmy winter night – the moon was full.

         There is a stand of trees at the end of our road on Temple Hill, high above the flood plain. Before they “busted up,” the couple who lived in the unfinished house there methodically pruned the trees and filled soil around them, either knowing - or not knowing - that doing this would kill them. Maybe it was a sacrifice.

A WOMB OF ONE’S OWN    1989

         When my daughter reads she often substitutes “she” for “he.” Or if, in a story, a character’s sex is undetermined, she presumes it is a girl, while I often presume it is a boy. I never realized before how biased my language is toward the masculine. 

            It is woman’s history to take one step forward and two steps back; in the Church, at Work, at Home, and in the Law. I hope that when my daughter is my age we will not be one step behind where we are now.  

EDUCATION IS KNOWING WHO TO BELIEVE AND WHO NOT TO BELIEVE 1989

             As far as I know, after he left the mountains to go to college, he never set foot in a church again. Still he never lost that uncluttered Baptist purity of line and space. The barns were always spotless and orderly, and his fences were flawlessly constructed to keep out the chaos of the rest of the world that terrified him.  He also kept that sense of superiority that often clouds the vision of the isolated Protestant – that sense that anyone who looks or thinks differently is not to be trusted. 

   Though he assured me I would never make it through college, he also wisely preached that ‘education is knowing who to believe and who not to believe,’ however, he did not believe that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, saying NASA staged the whole thing. He watched his beloved college basketball with disdain, remembering the game-fixing scandal that plagued his alma-mater. His suspicion grew until he could barely tolerate other people.

The ideals and dreams of his youth must have been more urgent than those of most, for when he realized he could trust neither God, Country, or Family, he was no longer able to live in this world.

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HOW ARE WE THE SAME?    1989

            The meeting was scheduled for the county courthouse, but such a crowd showed up that it had to be moved, at the last minute, to the middle school gymnasium. There were two camps – one large and one small. Both camps believed they were fighting for their future and their way of life.

            I found myself checking for exits. My camp was the small one.

            When I left I walked by people in the parking lot who were on the other side. Away from the microphones and the tension  of the recent confrontation, we now had to go home and fix supper for our kids, or mow the yard. We could hardly bear to look at each other – we were too much the same for so much difference.

PRISONER   1989

           There is a mountain on the Continental Divide in the northwestern North Carolina mountains - a state park – wooded on one side but with a sheer drop of immense, barren granite on the other. From an overlook on the Blue ridge Parkway miles away that barren face is clearly the shape of a dove.  If you walk down the face, the horizon line is tilted and disconcerting. What few battered trees that do grow there cling to life tenaciously in a hostile environment. Not so many miles away, on another much higher peak, once healthy trees also cling to life, victims of the acid rains that blow in from the west.

RESURRECTION    1989

            It seemed like that house burned for days as more and more of her affects were piled on – limbs from her trees, the door from her shed, chairs. Years of collecting went in to the fire, years of seeing possibilities in objects that were of no use to people without her vision, or without her memory of a time when even ordinary things were hard to come by.

            I never talked to her – our eyes never met. She was too absorbed in her work to look up every time a car stopped beside her house at the rural intersection. She mowed her yard, chopped her wood, and burnt leaves in her ditches.

            In my memory of her, I see her rising out of the smoking ditch, looming close to my windshield, tall and thin, her white hair dyed red, her cotton dress wrapped around her in folds.  She rises like the Resurrection Lily from its brown and withered foliage.

SHORT SUMMER  1990

            It is crucial that we remember for them.

They were hard years, those few years durirg the Depresssion when they lived in California. All the young men in the family had gone there to deliver mail. Then she moved out with the kids. She cooked for everyone - her family and the boarders who stayed with them. But it was warm there, there were sidewalks and trees so different from the ones in the moutains.

            She was never one to embroider speech, so her spoken reccollections of living there were not so different from her memories of having rheumatic fever, or of teaching for that year before she got married, or of going to boarding school - but it must have been like paradise for her. Her kids were little, her husband was alive, everyone was young and healthy, and the world was still full of promise. What remains is a family snapsot, beautifully composed and focused, with a delicate, elaborate border that whispers of finery and magic.

            Years later, long after he died, when the kids had gone off the begin their own summers, she built a patio with wrought iron railings beside the huge mimosa tree in her yard. It soared above the busy two lane street and the ancient mountains. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren were warned never to play on the delicate monument that grew more and more fragile with the years. It was her one extravagance, that patio, and it was her monument to the brief summer of her life.

I FEEL THE EARTH  1991

            They say the ground will move, buildings will sway, and bridges may collapse as the earth shifts and releases pressure. Hide under a table or a doorway, we are told, so we will scurry like ants to save ourselves. We will bury canned food and bottled water. It will be over so quickly that we won’t have time to sprinkle sawdust on the rolling floor, beat or drums and dance.

It’s October and the sumac is on fire. Orion returns like Elvis in the east – part of eternity. 

WINTER FLOOD III     1991

         Since the drought ended the river floods every few months and we have to take the high road to town. Last fall spiders spun temporary housing on tall grasses at the edge of the floodwaters- overnight refugees who would be carried away the next morning by calmer receding waters. There are plans, of course, to dredge the river, to control it and make it predictable, to keep it out of the tobacco growing in the fertile bottomlands.

         My father used to pray his unbelieving prayer for rain when no rain would come, so I understand the desire to control and contain, so little in life is certain. Like a hawk, I see our river from the air - it meanders, unaware of our plans and our waste. We are but a brief, terrifying interlude.

WINTER FLOOD II     1991

         This winter the river flooded, iced over, snow fell, then receded leaving the ice suspended in broken fragments. Once again we marvel at the simple miracles that occur around us.

Civil War 1992 30x90”

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