West Virginia

I had the opportunity to spend the night in Charleston, WV this last Friday. I was signing copies of my book at Taylor Books - a really wonderful shop. Anyhow, I was really struck by this capital city that is fighting to reinvent itself, since coal is not what it once was. I am familiar with this kind of work being that my hometown is doing the same; it was built on tobacco (RJR), Banking (Wachovia) and textiles (Hanes). Anyway, I took time on Saturday morning to drive highway 60 out of town to Fayetteville, WV to the New River Gorge. What an amazingly beautiful drive, although depressing at points seeing what has become of the small towns along the river. I did not photograph the rows of trailer homes or closed businesses - it didn't feel right. What has happened there and what has happened here are yet more reminders that nothing is forever. To quote Amos Lee "Time, it swallows everything, from the mighty to the meager things..."

Where the mountain river flows
And the rhododendron grows
Is the land of all the lands
That I touch with tender hands;

Loved and treasured, earth and star,
By my father's father far--
Deep-earth, black-earth, of-the-lime
From the ancient oceans' time.

Plow-land, fern-land, woodland shade,
Grave-land where my kin are laid,
West Virginia's hills to bless--
Leafy songs of wilderness;

Dear land, near land, here at home--
Where the rocks are honeycomb,
And the rhododendrons . . .
Where the mountain river runs.

Louise McNeill

Diving with Whale Sharks

I wish I could post the video. It was an amazing experience and very well worth the trip to Atlanta. The Georgia Aquarium is not only beautiful and certainly entertaining, but one of the best educational resources we have in this country to talk about ocean health and how it impacts all of us. Call, order tickets and go. If you are a certified diver, get in the water with the whale sharks - you will be amazed. 


Link to the Georgia Aquarium.

Botany Bay Plantation, SC

There are no words to adequately describe this place. I will simply say - get thee down to Edisto Island, SC (just south of Charleston) and plan on spending a long and amazing day if not two - on foot.


The 4,687 acre Botany Bay Plantation Wildlife Management Area (WMA) is located adjacent to the waters of the Atlantic Ocean in the northeast corner of Edisto Island in lower Charleston County, South Carolina. The area lies near the North Edisto River just south of the intensely developed resort islands of Kiawah and Seabrook and just north of the rapidly developing Edisto Beach area. The SC Department of Natural Resources acquired this property and opened it to the public in 2008.

The area's location near the North Edisto River places it within the boundary of the ACE Basin Focus Area, one of the largest remaining relatively undeveloped wetland ecosystems along the Atlantic Coast. Botany Bay Plantation WMA with Botany Bay Island (under conservation easement with The Nature Conservancy) and Deveaux Bank form a core area of protected habitat in the eastern corner of the Focus Area.

The biological features of Botany Bay Plantation WMA are characteristic of Sea Islands along the lower Southeast coast. The undeveloped coastal habitats of the management area are important to numerous wildlife species. The beach is utilized for nesting by the federally-threatenedloggerhead sea turtle and the state-threatened least tern. The maritime forest and coastal scrub/shrub areas provide nesting and foraging habitat for neotropical songbirds including painted buntings and summer tanagers. The uplands support a wide diversity of wildlife. The tidal marshes and managed wetlands contain a variety of fish and shellfish resources and provide foraging habitat for numerous wildlife species.

The cultural resources on Botany Bay Plantation WMA are extremely significant. Cultural resource sites dating from as early as the Late Archaic Period through the 19th century are present. Several sites including the Fig Island Shell Rings, outbuildings from Bleak Hall Plantation and elements of the Alexander Bache U.S. Coast Survey Line are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Charleston, SC Book Signing at Blue Bicycle Books, 420 King Street

Please join me at Blue Bicycle Books on January 15th from 1-4 pm!

Blue Bicycle Books Charleston's only independent book seller!

Or, if you cannot make it, it's on Amazon.

Better Homes & Gardens selects Karen Gray Design for 2011 Quilt Sampler

********CLICK HERE TO PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY AND KIT**********

All of you are aware of how wonderful and talented my wife is. Anyway, it seems that the people at Better Homes and Gardens also think so!

FOR RELEASE AFTER JANUARY 1, 2011

Local Quilt Shop Featured in
Better Homes and Gardens® Quilt Sampler® Magazine

DES MOINES, IA – Karen Gray Design, a quilt shop in Winston-Salem, NC, has been chosen as one of the 11 featured shops across the United States for the Spring 2011 issue of Quilt Sampler® magazine, published by Better Homes and Gardens.

Quilt Sampler, published twice a year, has been profiling North America’s top quilt shops for the past 14 years. Quilt shops submit a detailed application on their history, business promotions, charitable work, teaching schedules and design philosophies. A panel of quilt experts led by Jennifer Keltner, group editor of American Patchwork & Quilting® magazine, narrows down the applications to 10 featured shops for each issue. The team also selects an "encore" shop that was featured in a past issue to revisit. The names of the selected shops are kept secret and unveiled at either the spring or fall International Quilt Market.

Competition to be included in Quilt Sampler is keen. Nearly 3,000 quilt shops are
eligible to apply for this year’s honor. Karen Gray Design and the other 10 shops chosen were photographed and interviewed by a team from Quilt Sampler, and a multi-page profile of the shop will appear in the issue, which will be available on newsstands on May 10, 2011. Employees of each quilt shop also design an original quilt for the magazine, and the full-sized pattern for the quilt appears in the issue of Quilt Sampler.

Quilt Sampler has proven to be a huge success, and early, out-of-print issues are collector’s items. Chosen shops are inundated with visitors and requests for the shop’s quilt patterns and fabrics. Quilters are known to try and visit all the shops in each issue, getting the signature of each shop owner in their copy of the issue.

Karen's website

Karen's blog

She's Home. 1972 BMW 3.0 CS

Remember my post from December 2008? Well, she is finally done. And yes, I am so shallow that an old car makes me happy.

 

Welcome home Gertie

Birds & Trees

So, while I was down in Hobe Sound, FL, I had the good fortune of finding a favorite perch used by several birds. Here are a few samples of what a few of these characters were up to possibly not being aware that they were being watched. Once again, the pelican, is the most fun and I think the most expressive bird alive. Now, what this pelican was trying to say is left to interpretation. As for the trees, I love the stretch of road that leads to and from the island covered in Banyan Trees. It makes for a suitable point of demarcation from reality and the other a fine place to sit and watch the sun set. As with other locations I post here frequently, this is yet another that has a deep family connection that goes back three generations and is the keeper of childhood memories.

November

Was 65 and perfect here in NC today. Caused me to get out and roam to see what November had to offer. I found myself around the Deep Creek Dam and ultimately on a perch looking north to the foothills from Dennyville (I know all of you know exactly where that is - I'll let you google it)

My November Guest

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,

Thinks these dark days of autumn rain

Are beautiful as days can be;

She loves the bare, the withered tree;

She walked the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.

She talks and I am fain to list:

She's glad the birds are gone away,

She's glad her simple worsted gray

Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,

The faded earth, the heavy sky,

The beauties she so truly sees,

She thinks I have no eye for these,

And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know

The love of bare November days

Before the coming of the snow,

But it were vain to tell her so,

And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost

What makes a teacher?

Those of you who know me know that I was never much of an academic. For most of my time in the hallowed halls I viewed my work as something to be endured and pushed through in order to keep one or more people in my life off my back. Most of my teachers and ultimately professors simply had me regurgitate information and those that asked for original thought really only wanted to see if I had discovered what they wanted me to see, not what I actually thought or found. This all changed one fall at the University of St. Thomas when my roommate charged through the door and exclaimed - "you have to to take Graham Thatcher's class, you'll love him." This turned out to be an understatement. The rhetoric class was already full, or at least theoretically it was with 30 people or so. Graham ultimately let about 50 of us in. He asked us to stand on the shoulders of all the great philosophers and orators that had come before and handed us a copy of William Safire's "Lend Me Your Ears".  He then proceeded to set our minds on fire with all the possibilities that came with powerful persuasiveness. Looking back, the experience could have been a classroom scene from "The Dead Poets' Society" with one or more students Yawping from a desktop; throwing conventional approaches to classical teaching theories on speech and rhetoric out the window of a speeding bus. I was never better as a student. My work was mine for the first time. Unfortunately, like Robin Williams' character in Dead Poets' Society, Graham faced the ugly side of academia and had to resign as head of the Communications department. I resigned shortly after. Graham has since gone on to build a successful business portraying everyone from Clarence Darrow to Justice William O. Douglas in a series of one-man two-act plays recounting these great legal minds and their amazing use of rhetoric to help shape our nation and it's laws. He is so good at his portrayals, that his audiences are usually comprised of mostly lawyers who get CLE credit for attending!

I had the privilege of attending his first performance at St. Thomas, reenacting the "Monkey Scopes Trial" as Clarence Darrow in 1993. I mention this because just last night I got to see him again in Charlotte, NC performing "The Impeachment of Justice Douglas". Over 17 years had passed since I had seen my old professor, but sitting in that front row last night, I was once again a student, only this time the homework, not assigned by him, was to go and find my speech.

Thanks for being a real teacher Dr. Thatcher - God knows there aren't enough of you.

October?

 

It has hardly felt like October lately, but I did catch a good whiff of it this last Sunday out at the farm. I suspect that this weekend will have some time dedicated to preparing for Halloween and some final yard work. Trying to choose between loving the fall over the spring here in NC is like trying to decide between the mountains and the beach or coming to a final decision on the finest sunset I have ever seen. It can't been done, at least not conclusively. I can say this much; that being outdoors some place like the farm, or up in the mountains or the outer banks during a change of season is a humbling and beautiful thing. Its good to be in awe of the seasons, it reminds us of how small we really are and that for all the power, intelligence, creativity we may posses, we cannot recreate these changes at will. Its good for us to be reminded of who is really in charge. Click here for more October photographs - Music by U2.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Robert Frost
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold,
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
 

The Buzzard

This rather graceful menace was circling above me yesterday as I roamed the farm. There were two actually. I was walking, I wonder if to them I looked as if I was about to drop dead in my tracks and they would have an answer to the question of dinner. Nonetheless, watching them glide and arch was something.

(Can't find any poetry about a buzzard, so this will have to do...)

Vulture by Robinson Jeffers

I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling
high up in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit
narrowing,
I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-
feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.
I could see the naked red head between the great wings
Bear downward staring. I said, "My dear bird, we are wasting time
here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you." But how
beautiful
he looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the
sea-light
over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak
and
become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes--
What a sublime end of one's body, what and enskyment; what a life
after death.

The sea answers all questions......

      The sound of the sea is the most time-effacing sound there is. The centuries reroll in a cloud and the earth becomes young again when you listen, with eyes shut, to the sea - a young green time when the water and the land were just getting acquainted and had known each other for few billion years and the mollusks were just beginning to dip and creep in the shallows; and now man the invertebrate, under his ribbed umbrella, anoints himself with oil and pulls on his Polaroid glasses to stop the glare and stretches out his long brown body at ease upon a towel on the warm sand and listens.

    The sea answers all questions, and always in the same way; for when you read in the papers the interminable discussions and the bickering and the prognostications and the turmoil, the disagreements and the fateful decisions and agreements and plans and the programs and the threats and counter threats, and then you close your eyes and the sea dispatches one more big roller in the unbroken line since the beginning of the world and it combs and breaks and returns foaming and saying "So soon?"

E.B. White, February 1941

Under The Harvest Moon

Most of you know that I love Carl Sandburg, summer, Brookberry Farm and my time behind the lens. So when we had our first Harvest Moon since 1993, I ran out to the farm and parked myself out on top of a hill and waited - and I was not let down.


UNDER the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.
     Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

Carl Sandburg