I am working on a reflection I call “first things” that I may eventually share. In it I claim that, even at 78, there are first things.

I’m here to tell you about a first thing that really is, in this case, just the next thing in the series, but also new.

The series is the hardware I’ve held in my hands, gathering images-memory-history since the day of the flash bulb. In 2002 I bought my first digital camera—a Nikon Coolpix swivel-body shirt-pocket 2MB camera. I was in love.

And now I’m getting that camera that I did not know even as to which brand in a recent confession of the temptation to upgrade that I made here last week. And know I know in full.

And it will be delivered today.

A FINALITY TO FRUGALITY

I am preparing the nursery now for a week in anticipation of the, er, delivery.

I tried to love the one I was with (Panasonic Lumix FZ200), but always left our dates disappointed. She surely had more to offer than I was able to coax out of her. But it’s over.

And perhaps best of all, I come back into photography with a modern camera that is, like my first Coolpix, a Nikon--my final Nikon and the first of my current-technology ventures into photography-as-memory.

The role of photography for me is wide and deep, and for much more than collecting pixels. How did I phrase this? Something like “Each press of the shutter embeds the fullness of the moment in the permanent emulsion of memory.”

SHOTS FROM TODAY

And as a fond-ish if frustrated farewell to my circa 2016 issue Panasonic, I will post a few images from the morning walk. I drove five minutes and had miles of trails to myself. I carried the Lumix and failed on the two shots I attempted after much fidgeting to get a shot. I took a few with my iPhone. And have pulled in another I’ve recently revisited.

You will certainly be the recipients of the vision gained through the new lenses. And as I suggested, more often that not, an image is also a story.

I see the spending for the camera with the following logical cascade:

The expense of the purchase will be motivation get my money’s worth and make good use of it at least weekly.

This will encourage me to make the effort to learn about and visit more places like Eagle Bluffs with my camera.

If I do this, I will have visuals to write about and thus to sustain my writing momentum (when I regain that rhythm and discipline).

It’s amazing how the mind so often works to tell us what we want to hear.

Getting this camera checks a lot of boxes. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

AND FINALLY

Yes, this final image is “enhanced” because I was so disappointed that my favorite massive TreeBeard Sycamore on an oft-visited trail views so poorly to the eye of the camera versus the eye of the photographer.

The elder Entling exudes defiance, vitality and wisdom of place. And something more like the rendering below is the way I see it from my roots.

And as a sign of authentic amateurism, the photog’s finger enters the frame, stage south. (Tree diameter base height maybe 36 inches.)

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It rained on my parade, but I can get there next time without confusion (Apple maps sent me to a maintenance shed the first pass) and I will stay all day and explore.

The area consists of more than 4400 acres of intentional flooded and sustained wetlands--after nearly 90% of the states historical wetlands have been lost to agricultural and river use “management” practices.

Here is an informative excerpt from the Conservation Department website:

The wetland management infrastructure includes 30 miles of levees, 61 water control structures, river water supply pumps, a water supply junction box, pump-out facilities, and a pipeline linking the area to the City of Columbia’s wastewater treatment wetlands.

The City of Columbia and the Department of Conservation entered into a cooperative agreement that allows the Department to use treated wastewater from the city as a primary water source for the wetlands. The city’s recycled wastewater provides a near constant source of water, but river pumps can supplement the water supply when the area’s needs exceed the flow from the city.

The area’s 17 wetland pools allow the flooding of 1,100 acres of moist soil marshes, emergent marshes, and crop fields. These marshes provide year-round habitat for migrating and wintering birds and permanent wildlife and excellent wildlife viewing and hunting opportunities.

You can probably imagine my delight, creeping round the bend at 10 mph and seeing this ankle-deep pond at feeding time. In this view, find 8 Great Blue Herons and 8 Common Egrets feeding casually, undisturbed by my presence. I eased the window down and got the shot as the rain decided it was with me for the day.

But no surprise reading the clouds moving over me—-the asperitas type— where “chaotic atmospheric gravity waves and wind shear pass through a layer of unstable air, usually associated with convective thunderstorm activity.” It was headed my way. I didn’t have much time.

But I much preferred overcast and drizzle to full June sunshine. The wet air belongs here brooding above the saturated native skin of this lush extravagance of reeds and rushes, algae and life in a submerged and reliably water-soaked soil.

From the wide view of the crowded pond up top I was able to extract a composition of two egrets. You can see the spatter of raindrops on the surface of the pond. I was at least at that point able to roll down the window and awkwardly compose the shot.

But soon after the “group shot” the rains came in earnest and I took a few disappointing frames through the rain-spattered glass. I did, however, come away with an image I could modify artificially to provide a subject suitable perhaps for my first watercolor.

The shot is mine, but the image clarity through the wet windshield was disappointing. But my AI genie took the blur and offered me a pastel rendering I envisioned that picks up the dreamy quality of the reflections of the standing and flying herons.

DO I ALREADY OWN MY LAST CAMERA?

The Panasonic Lumix FZ200, vintage 2012, might be as far as I go. It often disappoints me. I have not yet determined how much of that is user failure, but the results typically leave me not 100% satisfied.

Does a 78 year old duffer need an expensive camera for the few times he’ll have subjects worthy of the hardware? The jury is out.

After deciding positively NO to this question last week and spending hours studying up again on the FZ200, I keep coming back to the Nikon Z50 II Mirrorless Camera with 16-50mm and 50-250mm Lenses.

But in the end, after I enjoy the camera package for an indeterminate number of months or years, wouldn’t it be a nice thing to leave for my heirs—which is the same rationalization I used when upgrading the Subaru in October? Win-win. Right?

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He fished the eddies in the current where aquatic insects and small fish would find refuge from the turbulence, and he would find lunch.

I spent more time than I’d intended searching the expansive gravel bar for collectible “rocks” to take home. I had neglected to bring a bag to put them in so just stuffed the one below in my shirt pocket.

Last fall I helped an artist friend collect many dozen of the 4-pointed star shapes from the tops of fallen over-ripe persimmons. She will use them in one of her “constructions” that “paints” with three-dimensional objects from nature.

The “star” is a calyx—a whirl of sepals that subtends the superior fruit, and in the center, also the short-lived maroon petals. I have discovered a persimmon tree here that is 14 inches at the base. Might be a country record?

Not by a long shot, turns out. I had no idea they grew so large!

The Missouri state champion persimmon has been measured at 122 feet tall with a 97-inch trunk circumference and a 38-foot crown spread — and a more recent geocaching source puts it at 93 inches in circumference, 124 feet high, and 40 feet of spread, totaling 227 points on the champion scoring index. That's a DBH of roughly 29–31 inches (circumference ÷ π). This persimmon also qualifies as a national champion.

The beautiful wildflower below is Foxglove Beardtongue, Penstemon digitalis, growing in perfusion along the stream banks. It is a mid-western prairie species I had seen before—in Floyd, where our adjoining neighbors have naturalized (rather than pasture-ized) their acreage in native grasses and prairie species.

I consider such known creatures to be friends and it delights me to discover them anew every year, even in Missouri meadows.

And lastly, from the recent travels back to Virginia—the final stay on the return trip was in Paducah KY. I learned that the town was devastated by a massive record-setting flood in 1937, when the town received 18 inches of rain in 16 days.

To prevent this from happening again, a 12 mile floodwall was constructed, 3 feet higher than needed to turn back a 1937 repeat. You can see it just below our 4th floor balcony at the Holiday Inn Waterfront. The Ohio river is still a working river, including commercial fisheries for catfish.

Meanwhile, I am writing lately with a bit of new energy and enthusiasm. But the topics are not sufficiently crafted in my mind or polished in my vocabulary to share. And much of it, only for my own edification and rumination: how do I know what I think until I see what I say. Right?

I hope to do a better job of sharing what’s going on in the life and times of a transplanted biology watcher, still thankful for his mobility and his senses, and in love with the planet, its creatures great and small, and some of its perplexing humans.

I regret being so distant of late, but I have just been distracted and quiet, and not down for the count!

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I can hardly pretend that I am not amazed to have just completed an 1800 mile round trip with no report of disaster, failure or disappointment.

Not since leaving Virginia for Missouri in late August 2024 have I driven halfway across the country, much less that distance and back again, this time leaving and coming back “home” to Columbia MO.

SIDE NOTE: It was the most comfortable drive of my life, thanks to the 2021 Subaru’s easily adjustable driver’s seat and the driving features lacking in the 2009 Forester I traded in for $1000 in October.

With the purchase of this “new” car with automatic transmission, I will never shift gears again for the first time since 1963. My wife (since the VW in 1970) would not drive anything but a stick shift (yep, go figure) so my right shifting arm and left clutch foot were constantly at the ready.

Now, with cruise control and modern driving features I was released from the frozen postures of fixed appendages never at ease for hundreds of miles. It was a joy!

NOT BOWLING ALONE

And yes, you might have guessed it: I went back to Virginia. Three days getting there, four days being there, and three days back.

As regular readers know, a year ago mid-May wife Ann entered Memory Care, a five minute walk from what had been our apartment, now mine alone. On this date last year, I was bewildered in the days-old freedom to begin life apart.

And now a year later, she has lost so much of herself so that she knows that she knows me but asks if I’m her father. And lately she has started falling. I can’t say what is coming next, only that it will not ever get better for her as the dementia takes more of what was once Ann.

Meanwhile, my health continues to be excellent for a 78 year old, and I have intentions and hopes. And I am not alone. I have a companion just down the hall, and we made this trip together. She’d heard me speak so often of my little village of unique folks in the Blue Ridge that she wanted to see for herself.

It was not a sure thing until it was. So many things can happen at this age (she is four years older than me) when things fall apart one joint or giblet at a time out of nowhere. I was prepared the entire month before to cancel room reservations in five different motels when the plan fell through.

But Saturday May 9 at 8:00 we set out to get beyond Saint Louis in the first leg of a seven hour first-night destination east of Nashville. It was happening after all!

MOVING ALONG GETTING ALONG

My son warned me that “in that many days and miles together there will be at least two times when you will hate each other.” I fully expected that would be true. It never happened.

There were disappointments and surprises that rocked the boat, but we stayed afloat and let the current carry us as it would.

On the trip east, notable was the stay at the Martha Washington Inn in Abingdon, Virginia. This was lodging luxury I’ve only known a time or two over the decades. It was worth it, but likely Frugal Fred will not be indulging in such a way ever again.

Most of our lodging days were at Hotel Floyd, and every lunch and supper for four days was with different friends—with several dozen at a pot luck on Wednesday.

The hardest part was watching the clock for the next planned event and saying goodbye far too soon—especially knowing I might never see these dear age-peers again.

SO WHAT’S THE SO WHAT?

Was the trip worth the effort and expense? What purpose did it serve?

It helped me to both embrace and to let go of my history of place—to hold close and to loosen my grip on the landscapes where I lived my best years; to accept that life there goes on without me. This is both reassuring and sobering.

I made ripples on that pond but came back this trip briefly on the outside looking in and leaving no trace. And that had to be okay. I came. I stayed. I left. I will likely never go back.

But at least now I have one other soul here who will remember; another who has shared those people and places with me. She can appreciate my joy in retelling tales—as I often do—of belonging there so completely and for almost 30 years.

I just felt like I had to post this as a benchmark late in life—an accounting of a significant and enjoyable adventure that, one year ago today in my uncertain solitude, I could not have possibly imagined.

Life is still full of surprises. Cheers!

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I grew up in a Birmingham southside suburb but our next door neighbor had chickens. My only memory of them when I was five was watching one run around the house next door without its head. That experience had something to do with the fact that I never wanted any with heads until Y2K triggered the urge to be more self-sufficient.

I confess I thought of chickens as nothing more than small-brained egg machines that we would tolerate through their ovulary lifetimes and then crock pot.

I tolerated the first batch which was soon ravaged by a distant neighbor’s dogs. It took a while to want more—the ones pictured above. They had names. They knew me. I bonded with a chicken—especially Dionne in the front there.

Our dogs, too, got to know our birds—the biggy-sized one pictured here, by far the largest of them all. Yellow lab Tsuga thought of our birds as other dogs, but was disappointed they were not much fun at fetching or romping in the creeks.

Gandy, the Rhodesian Ridgeback-German Shepherd mix was especially close to the girls and very protective of them, fending off snakes and chasing off other dogs that occasionally wandered lost down our road.

We might have carried our bonding a bit far, when the Egg-layers Association threatened to cut us off if they were not allowed to follow the dog inside. We worked it out, creating this perch on top of the generator where they could at least see what was going on inside.

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The last batch we got as younger birds, and I visited them several times a day, sitting for stretches of time on a plastic crate as they milled around inside their pen. First one then another would come over and peck at my shoes; then eventually, hop briefly onto a knee.

I didn’t miss a day those first couple of months. And at one point, I was festooned with fowl on my knee, shoulder and head (thankfully I was wearing a cap because…) I always hoped nobody would drive by just then, and they never did. My secret was safe. Now I’ve revealed all. Be kind.

What’s it like to be a chicken?

They have their own intelligence, curiosity, memory, and will to live. They are amazing feeding machines, given an overturned board where every pillbug will disappear into a beak in a split second with machine gun accuracy. They would follow me in a little clot, moving from rock to board to log, quivering with expectation, waiting to strike.

Maybe the take-away is that I can never see pictures of industrial poultry concentration camps without suffering the pain of knowing each of those identical birds has its own feather-wrapped sense of being a chicken, without being able to be a chicken.

Alas, their ability to supply omlettes and drumsticks was their undoing.

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It felt less like steering my own ship than being moved by winds from a source I could not name towards a destination I would only know when at last it appeared from beyond the curve of the distant horizon.

In the spring of 2002, I baled out of a job doomed to take me down with it. I quit being a physical therapist managing a clinic and became a sole survivor adrift, alone most hours of most days, on an island of forested slopes I only knew by sight. I wanted to understand what I later called my “personal ecology”.

To know that place intimately, as if my life depended on it, I began to write. At 54, I travelled hopefully and because I must. The spirit moves in mysterious ways.

After a shaky start in early 2002, Fragments from Floyd (the weblog that merely survives for archival purposes) got its sea legs by June of that year and I knew--lead less by reason than my gut--that writing would guide me.

Every day was a new exploration of the ordinary just outside my door. I made the choice to open myself--the details of my personal who and where--to readers who might see my signals and find my outpost. That was risky. The gamble of vulnerablilty has enriched my life immeasurably.

Strangers would come to discover--with me--what life was like in the hinterlands of the Blue Ridge mountains of Floyd County, Virginia.

Less than four years later--on the 20th of April, 2006, a block of 1000 books was deposited on a pallet in our driveway. Slow Road Home was born into my life and over the next ten years, it would open doors of expression, relationship and opportunity that I have only recently described to myself as “the beginning of my life” as my own person, not as a partner or parent or professional.

I turned 78 two weeks ago. Life goes on, but the stories worth telling have been harder to come by. My malnourished muse was enfeebled--but not extinguished--by the mental-emotional refocusing required in the past few years.

Some of you reading this post to Substack today have come with me through those trials and struggles. You were there from the beginning and might have even been one of the first recipients of books from that first huge book-drop in April 2006.

I remember. Thanks for your companionship. I don’t think I’m quite done learning and sharing. It helps to know I don’t travel alone.

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Slow Road Home: A Year Old Today

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But I am still vertical with a pulse and a camera in my pocket. So at least I can validate my ongoing existence by posting a few photos and maybe at some point in the future, I will be capable of entire paragraphs from my current state of being and mind. Until then…

We do have BIG SKY here, not obscured by those comforting Blue Ridges that once obscured a bit of horizon while sheltering the observer reassuringly in the fold of ridge and valley. Here, the mammatus clouds are streaming in the direction of an approaching cold front pushing down on Columbia from the northwest

I don’t get out much but I get out some. Here, at the Blue Note in downtown CoMo, the Wellermen offered a night of sea shanties that I still find myself humming now that I have these musicians saved on Spotify. Has anybody heard them perform? The bass singer is especially noteworthy. And I thought I was a bass.

This is perhaps the largest snapping turtle I’ve ever seen, other than from the Tennessee River the summer in college when I worked on a drilling barge. I’m guessing this one (in a two foot deep local creek) probably weighs 30 pounds or more.

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Outside our apartment doors are two small shelves on which residents can place adornments and receive local mail. I have an assortment of collected rocks and fossils on one of mine. One day last week, a tiny new mascot appeared. I feel much safer with this mysterious new guardian at my door. And I have suspicions as to how he got there. With thanks…

I need to get back to the pastels. This is the only one I have attempted that is NOT from my own photographs. This one helps me remember the Milky Way as I saw it in September from Ghost Ranch, NM. It is disappointing to not get pastels to deep-space black. Next time I might use a soft charcoal?

Almost but not quite done: The light at Bethel Lake, Columbia Missouri. I’m thinking about adding a single egret in flight, left-center at mid-distance. But it could end up looking like a flying penguin, given my drawing skills. That could be interesting.

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April. A month of new beginnings. Finally, in April, the year truly begins. In every shade of green and gold, buds swell and spread in leaf and flower. Bees buzz, birds nest, the Earth smells sweet, of humus and pollen and pine.

April. I am born. Aldo Leopold dies. And at the first April Earth Day in 1970, my friends and I allowed ourselves to think that humanity had reached a turning point in its checkered relationship with a planet, very hospitable and livable, if we’d let it be.

The year begins for me in April, and Leopold has become part of my Aprils. I attempted to explain this odd claim to some spring-breaking Philadelphia college students last month at Apple Ridge Farm up here on the Plateau.

This current April, I turned 75. The young people in a semi-circle around me were in their early twenties. I asked them to indulge an elder, to revisit the world I lived in when I was their age. I turned 22 less than two weeks before the first Earth Day in 1970.

To explain why and how the rudder of my tiny ship of life was nudged at just that time so that I ended up just there speaking to them that night, I wanted to tell these young people about forester Aldo Leopold--an ecologist and environmentalist, before these were even well-known words. Only one student in my small audience had ever heard his name. They also did not know Wendell Berry or Bill McKibben. Meh.

Leopold died on April 21, 1948, when I was two weeks old--fighting a brush fire on a neighbor’s land. His book, Sand County Almanac, was published in 1949. He advocated for a new way to understand our relationship with Earth. I read the book in 1970. His term “land ethic” made the hair on my arms stand up. He had me for life.

Ethics has, of course, always been a standard for right behavior in our relationships with other living things--people; pets; livestock. But Leopold said we should foster this same right behavior, the same basis for right or wrong choices when considering the fate of any given piece of land and all its living community.

Very old civilizations on every continent have a long, deep and persistent land ethic. So his ethical framing of “the “land” (which extends beyond to all of nature) reached deep roots of care about the land and was an awakening for some people-old and young-- in those days.

Leopold said…

For a while in the early 70s, it seemed that the so-called first world was embracing the long-term best interests of the planet’s health: its air and water, soil and forests, and its myriad living creatures. It was time we got ourselves back to the garden. The perceived need for a renewed relationship with Nature among those we may dismiss as “flower children” and “treehuggers” was genuine. I’ve hugged a tree or two in my day.

The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and other collective decisions sought to reverse decades of ethical indifference and abuse to the landscape. Leopold was not around in the early 70s, but he would have been so pleased to see we had come to our senses that first Earth Day.

Ten years later, our good intentions fell apart again. Nothing gold can stay. We reordered priorities back towards the most efficiently-profitable use of land and the minerals, water, plant and animal life it supported. We have lived so very well having demoted land and nature to nothing but a commodity, and it seems that for many or for long, we will not be moved. Meanwhile in this relationship, the natural order is increasingly not gotten along so very well.

So fifty-three years from the first Earth Day as I speak so briefly with these young folk, I have to acknowledge my generation has failed to offer them the hopes of the Earth-aware twenty-somethings in 1970.

My generation--after a brief AHA moment of awful clarity a half century ago-- has insisted on riding to the precipice aboard an economic engine that produces profits for some and heat and disorder for many. The natural world past the edge of a scenic overlook off the Blue Ridge Parkway remains little more than the mythical Golden Egg of the modern age. And the goose is barren.

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My student listeners will turn 75, on average, in the the early 2070s. We talked about their emerging hopes and goals for the intervening years between Earth Day 2023 and their 75th.

We spoke briefly about what the world would be like then if economists and politicians and CEOs of the world persisted along the current path. But I also offered hope that their choices—their land ethic—from now until their 75th year might possibly change the world they will pass on to their children (and by that age, their grandchildren).

As emerging adults, they wonder about their futures in a wounded world full of bad advice and twisted truths. What one thing could I share with them that would offer a compass and map to safe and healthy ground by the choices they would make?

In a world so vastly complex and dysfunctional, how could they know what choices are best for the common good?

Again, my best advice on how to live out what I call their “personal ecology” comes from Aldo Leopold, who said...

Nature bats last. If those who come after choose to live on a viable and resilient planet in 2075, this land ethic of Leopold’s seems to me a pretty reliable guide post. At least that is what I have told my own children, and theirs.

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And also following, one bright star ⭐ in the dismal sky of dementia care—a simple intervention that in our case, resulted in stunningly improved state of mind for my wife, now in stage late stage 5 of the 7-stage ALZ scale.

When she and her husband moved into the facility five years ago, a resident neighbor here sold their car. After her husband died she sort of lost track of a few crucial details and documents that would have made her life alone more easily possible. And it has taken months so far to put things back in place again. Do not do what she has done so that you do not get what she has got.

1. DO NOT LET YOUR DRIVERS LICENSE EXPIRE!

This is the perfect storm of what I have heard called the “identity inconvenience cascade”. The term is far too mild to describe what my neighbor has experienced. Instead lets call it the “night of the unnamed undead”.

She would need a state non-drivers license to fly. She had not driven in years and never intended to in the future. The expired license was useless. It had been too long inactive to qualify for a simple update. She would have to go through the whole authentication process all over again. Oy.

Whatever you do for yourself or another: KEEP your license active—driver or not, Real ID or not. It is more central to identity and access than I had realized.

What are the consequences in the 50 United States for allowing a drivers license to lapse?

She left the first attempt at RealID discouraged but hopeful. The man at the desk said she would need an original birth certificate. Fine. She started the process only to find that a real ID state-issued license was required to obtain an Illinos birth certificate.

The irony of this perverse conundrum was not lost on her.

But wait! If a valid license was not available, the alternative documents included an active passport. Great! She had the passport! It too had lapsed.

She received the birth certificate and returned to DMV. Now she’s making progress. This is good, but now she is told that the DMV-man needs to see an official marriage license since her old expired drivers license listed a name different than the one on the birth certificate she brought in.

That process also wanted a RealID. Snake with its tail in its mouth. Meh.

So to comply and with no small effort she located the clerk in the Illinois county where she was married. She paid for a replacement marriage certificate and it went in the mail around 18 February. As of 18 March it still had not been received. Enter IDENTIFICATION CRISIS NUMBER TWO.

2. A SMALL THING REALLY

Nine months ago she moved, within independent living, from an apartment on the first floor to one on the second in the same building. And apparently this period of profound grief and neglect lead to the prolonged and serious clusterpluck that ensued, all due to this one omission to officially change her address.

So failing in the first attempt, she filled out the online form and paid for a second copy of her certificate of marriage. And she has completed the required “change of address” form at last, so the local PO says she should get that document in days. They say.

It is easy to understand that seemingly trivial documents can be overlooked during the chaos of a move under emotional strain. I encourage you to open and act on mail from USPS during that time frame. Don’t let your mail go down.

3. AND LASTLY THE GOOD NEWS ⭐

Suffice it to say that Alzheimers Dementia is a constantly morphing chimera and no two days of confusion are quite the same. Each change that comes over time is almost universally a deformed and diminished version of the slightly healthier mental state that came before it. This down ramp can also include changes in personality and behavior. I’m sure some of you are too familiar with this sad state.

My wife was “pleasantly confused” for months after we landed in Columbia MO at this full-range retirement community in September 2024. Then she became not so pleasant— no longer contented, cooperative or gentle; no longer accepting of care. She grew to be more and more aggressive and belligerent with staff and other residents. I was called to walk her back from the ledge late a night, time and time again.

Her doctor called me and suggested an option that “was not exactly accepted medical practice” but has, he said, shown success with other residents similar to our situation. He suggested CBD gummies. I can’t tell you how vast a difference this has made in her demeanor and behavior. Caregivers are amazed. She is now getting two a day. I am known by name at the dispensary.

YMMV. It is a bit of a crap shoot predicting how someone will respond to this edible or that. We just happened on the right combo and things have been much much better. Mostly. We are never going to get out of the woods here but can at least enjoy life at the edge of the forest for a spell.

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A few days lately I have suited up against the wind and, when I got as far as I could stand to go, I gave serious consideration to walking backwards against an unrelenting gale from the north to avoid the abrasion.

But the exposure has been worth any whining and grousing that bitter cold might have caused, with only me and a gaggle of Canada geese to hear. I feel lighter; younger; free-er under SKY. I need to get outside every day, no matter the weather.

INTO THE LANDSCAPE

The images below are from a natural area north of here which was new to me (as almost all Missouri natural areas are) where the geological history is good to know (if not fully comprehended by me.) My source is reliable but the reporting thereof, perhaps not so very much. I was part of a small excursion to this destination just a few days ago.

The area we visited is not large in acreage but is vastly unique in topography and history. The terrain of the deepest rock tells that there was a river valley (300 odd million years ago) that filled with sediment, leaving behind a mostly sandstone river bed. Compressed by time and eroded over the millenia, we find today’s sculpted low-canyon walls that seep moisture to resident bryophytes and pterophytes (and so much more flowering life will become visible there in coming weeks.)

When the surrounding landscape was dominated by grassland prairie, this old river valley was an oasis of rich hardwood diversity—good for hunting and shelter—as evidenced by petroglyphs still visible but fading as the sandstone, grain by grain, is worn away by wind, water and time.

Above left: handprints Above right: snake Bottom: hooved animals

Old river bottom sediments showing inclusions and channels. Some of the smooth-walled “chambers” where much larger than this one, and extended a dozen or more feet into the walls of the ravine. Several of the larger ones would have been a good place for ancient hunters to shelter and rest out of the wind and rain.

I would have expected a lot of Rock Cap Fern in this setting but managed to miss it if it was there. The fern above is commonly called “walking fern” for its propagation by rooting at the tips of the long tapered “fronds.” I usually associate this with alkaline soil and rock like limestone.

The stone in the canyons for this visit were marbeled with iron and other minerals, which is no great surprise from rock formed by ground-up mountains from the interior of the ancient moving and heaving continental masses.

AND A SIDE TRIP SAME DAY

We had a picnic lunch at Union Covered Bridge that crosses the Elk Fork of the Saline River. And I learned a lot about salt springs that were common in the area. As modern farming demaned massive amounts of groundwater, the old springs dried up, chaning the landscape and the way people lived together on the land. The prairie is gone, and there is not much to see but vast flat fields. Things have changed.

There is the matter of scale as farming has become mechanized: then—twenty close-knit farming families with adjoining 100 acre farms; today— two 1000 acre farms managed by two families far apart. The post-glacial landscape is flat and managed efficiently but would be hard for me to love. Meanwhile…

The timbers in the structure were impressive, as was the joinery (Burr Arch truss system.) The form of it was a thing of beauty—a creation of human imagination and engineering.

As the day’s excursion ended, we went to this location below (several thousand acres of a conservation-restored old surface coal mining operation) hoping to observe woodcocks in their courtship performance but only got fleeting glimpses of a couple of dark shapes against the sky as the sun settled beyond the horizon.

I am hopeful for the possibilities of my first free-to-roam spring ahead in Missouri. There are so many miles of trails nearby to explore on my own, and with the help of my friends who know the place well—like I used know southwest Virginia. I am still a stranger here but getting to know HERE better, and finding a lot to love.

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In this account from real life, desperation gave way to expectation. And I still expect and accept these omens of hope. And I still long for home and am finding small fragments of it, even yet.

The tiny cabin where I lived alone that year was surrounded by dark forest. Trees there were stark and bare, their bonsaied branches witness to the cost of living on a mountaintop in the unrelenting north wind. Winter’s monochrome already paled the mountainsides where only weeks before the brilliant colors of autumn had been dazzling.

Almost all of my neighbors on Walnut Knob were seasonal. They left for good when cold weather came; the crowds of leaf-lookers wouldn’t be back up for another year. I rarely saw anyone else as I drove the windswept Blue Ridge Parkway to and from work. As days grew shorter and darker, solitude devolved toward loneliness.

At the end of a week of cold drizzle and rain, the endless fog yielded to a frigid and unrelenting arctic gale. I stood at the window of the cabin that late fall Saturday morning, the wind pulling at the panes, drawing the heat away faster than the wood stove could make it. Over the roof and across the yard brown leaves blew, out over the sad gray bones of fruit trees huddled inside the garden fence.

Wind harbors a pernicious misery all its own. You can dress against the cold, but there are days when you can’t hold out the wind that blows cold to the bone and bears down on the spirit. Like a prisoner trapped indoors by the wind, I was forced to consider my weekend sentence. These two barren days were merely a foretaste of the short days and long long nights of winter’s coming judgment. The walls of my cell sucked life from me. By mid-day, the confinement was a worse misery than the wind.

Dressed as if I would walk on the moon, I pushed out of the front door, into a hostile world. With my first breath, the wind hurled ice crystals that stung my cheeks like needles; it forced the icy air back into my lungs before I took my first step; before I could find the lee side of the cabin.

There, protected by the house behind me and the deck above, I was sheltered from the abrasive wind’s full force while I split kindling that I didn’t really need. But the wind found me even there; eddies of the freezing gale licked over the roof and spilled like a cold liquid into my gloves and down my neck under the old plaid scarf.

The cold and the wind together conspired to undo me, but the heft of the axe and sharp resolve of a clean split brought me back to the necessity of keeping warm. Firewood gave me purpose. The busier my hands became, the less my mind settled into self-pity. As I fell into the rhythm of the chore, my muscles warmed and my pulse quickened.

But then, out of that vast impersonal sea of cold that raced south from the tundra, one pernicious tendril of air licked down and found the scarf. It lifted up the smell of the cedar from our closet back home—what used to be home. The scent filled my memory like a thing alive—the comfortable, reassuring aroma of a safe place I had abandoned forever. This fragrantly brutal truth transported me to a place where I had once belonged.

Could that have been my life only a few months before? Peace and security and warmth wafted from those aromatic dark lost places—a memory that warned of the loneliness ahead. Under that scarf at my throat a sob swelled, lifted and left on the wind, tumbling down over the garden fence, south, toward Carolina.

So. I was not a rock that feels no pain. For almost five months I had pretended for Ann’s sake that I was. I felt that I had to make it seem I was not deterred by the strains we were under, that I had no serious concern with the loss we had brought on ourselves, no fear of the risks that lay ahead.

She had so many of her own crosses to bear, and she, too, was alone with them a hundred miles away. But my self-delusion was shattered that morning, by that whiff of cedar—such a small thing, a few molecules in the memory of a moment that made me wonder. What had we done? Where were we headed?

Though the timing brought many hardships—including the year of living apart—many things had in fact worked out for good. Doors opened in auspicious ways that seemed to show it was ordained we should go to Virginia for the next chapter in our lives—perhaps the permanent, happy last chapter.

After waiting for almost two years for the physical therapy position to open in Floyd County, I had been called with the job offer. We found the cabin on the Parkway that matched our needs and our budget.

The big house in Carolina sold in a week at our asking price and Ann found reasonable if not ideal housing nearby. So much had fallen into place. Now, five months later, we were both living alone. I was in a flimsy modular mountain home and she in a single-bedroom upstairs apartment in downtown Morganton, a half block from the perpetual wail of fire engines and the sound of breaking glass in the alleyway just under her window.

We were three hours apart and there were stretches when it was many weeks between our visits, split between the uncomfortable hospitality of “my place” or “her place”. We were not at home in either.

We found small comfort in each other’s occasional company. Ann’s pharmacy studies were difficult. They took every bit of her energy and attention away from me—with the exception of those tense moments face to face or over the phone when we wrestled with the Gordian knots our family affairs had become.

Both of our children had moved to new towns far away. Suddenly our nest was empty—and not only because our children no longer lived at home. Neither did we.

Bewildered, I buried the blade of the axe into the tough locust of my chopping block and stepped out to the edge of the terrace, empty and unsure. The yard sloped away down past the garden into forest and the forest fell away, on and on until the woods became a gray abstraction against an empty sky. I scanned the faint line between cloud and mountain as if I might find an answer out there, a clue to explain what was to happen to us now.

Just then, the wind blew back the hood of my parka and I was no longer under its shadow but under sky. Maybe it was this —that made me, at just that instant, look up.

On a bleak morning when apparitions of past and future had come and gone like scenes in an endless bad dream, at first I doubted my eyes. Maybe this too was a wraith, a mirage. Above me barely higher than the roof of the cabin, an adult male Bald Eagle floated motionless as if painted on a canvas of low clouds. Every feather was distinct, sharp-edged. His powerful beak parted the wind like the prow of a ship against strong current.

Facing into the gale, the massive bird did not move, neither forward or back. He turned his head slightly and looked down at me with one piercing-cold yellow eye, as if he had known that I would look up. Maybe he had been there watching all along, from the moment that the smell of cedar had made me admit my true helplessness and fear. I will never know.

I do know that the overshadowing of those wings at that moment was my burning bush. This was my sign, this bird that hovered above me like an angel, motionless while the wind lifted him, held him up. This was my messenger come to proclaim that, while there would be strong winds in days ahead that would make us pull inside ourselves unsure of tomorrow, we would stay the course, face the hard times, and make our way forward.

The eagle hung there until the winds slackened and he could move on, into that force that both opposed and lifted him. He came unpinned from the sky, soared out of the painted canvas of heaven, and moved on. He was heading north.

Ann and I made our peace with the uncertainties. We agreed that while we would go on planning and dreaming, we would be patient, present in each day, ready when the right home place came along. She moved up to join me in the cabin in the fall of 1998. Six months later we were working to restore the old home place here on Goose Creek. Two years almost to the day after the eagle appeared, we spent our first night in our refurbished farmhouse on a plot of land we now call HeresHome.

In late November on the anniversary of the day of the eagle, we climb to the rim of our valley and look down on what is now our home. It is a time of remembrance and thanksgiving, a time to look back and see the Providence that has hovered over us as we have walked haltingly and not always by faith.

We reach the summit and stand, breathing heavily, facing due south towards Walnut Knob. We remember the day that the eagle looked down on a bewildered man who did not understand then that a few miles north into the wind, he would one day find home.

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I find it especially meaningful and rewarding, with a soft pastel or charcoal, to immerse myself in the details of a place I know so well from memory—places that are the stories of my life.

Two such renderings appear below, both from Southwest Virginia in Floyd County and Patrick County, Virginia. I remember the day the photos were taken. I remember the winter chill, the smell of cold, the alone-ness standing against the wind with my iPhone of the day.

BUT IS IT CHEATING?

Now this is the “issue” I have as I continue to explore both the medium and the method. At 77 and a first-time “artist” I cannot expect to gain much skill for accuracy in proportion, perspective or placement of the line details that form the basis for the things I want to reproduce.

As I began to grapple with the frustration of distortion and inaccuracy I first encountered in fully free-hand pastels like the couple I have shown here before, I began learning that even the early masters struggled with these same concerns.

Enter the Camera Obscura, then the Camera Lucida. The needs of artists and scientists over the years have found solutions with the use of optical tools that allow for lines on the page to “line up” with those in a real-life eye-view of a village, flower structure or nebula (John Herschel and others.)

THE TOOL IN MY POCKET

So the solution I have discovered and adopted to address my inadequacies is called Da Vinci Eye. It is a smartphone app that works by Augmented Reality, showing both the image to be recreated like any other image in your photo collection while also showing that same image ghost on the canvas or paper, allowing the lines of the image to be accurately drawn with precision on the page.

[For the two pastels above, I spent maybe 15 minutes each getting the lines right using the app, and another two hours or more adding secondary elements and fleshing out the colors as realistically as I could render with the artist’s tools at hand.]

In use, the camera is supported up off the drawing surface by means as simple as placing the camera on a tall cup. However, I recommend spending the money to get the “official” stand that holds the phone magnetically on an adjustable arm. If you’re interested in knowing more, leave a comment and I’ll tell you what I know.

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SO HOW DO I CONFESS?

So I am not showing my finished pastels shown up top to anyone but YOU until I figure out how to admit my deficiencies and my crime of passion on each image where my cheating tool has been used.

I am inclined to be vocal about this and share it readily with the others in this elder-commuity with similar interests (and similar frustrations) as a way to achieve successes with their art that will make them enthused and encouraged and persistent to learn to draw without the crutch of augmented reality. Should we live so long.

What would you do in this situation? Should I say nothing and take credit for skills I don’t possess? Pile up finished artwork in a dark place that the kids will find when I’m gone? Create for my own purposes and pleasure and let the judgement of others fall as it may?

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The paragraphs below come from winters past—memories for good or ill. Winter wind especially is without excuse for its cruetly and persistence. … the following from the twenty-oughts and far away.

Today we enjoy the mixed blessing of the January Thaw. It is a bit early, but why not? Every other aspect of the weather has thumbed its nose at the predictions over past months. A weatherman’s air mass, we have seen, can be mutinous and surly as a spoiled teenager, and without warning, aim a high-powered wind that brings down the roof on the heads of unsuspecting Wal-mart shoppers in Texas.

The January Thaw is a teaser, a tiny packet of pretzels on the agonizingly long flight to spring. After more than a month of deep freeze and ice in December, the subsoil is still hard as iron, down to the frost line. But this week’s thaw has temporarily softened the top few inches that slip and slide around under foot and tire like chocolate pudding on a rock.

Working pastures and fields are rutted with brown swerving parallel scars from trucks that finally reach the livestock, who stand around in muddy boots, up to their hocks in pasture muck. Should the seasons relent their rebellious tirades and decide to play by the rules, the Season of Mud won’t start for real, more or less predictably, until sometime in late March.

The streets of downtown are stained by cinders and salt, leaving crime-scene outlines to mark where the gray mounds of snow have finally vanished. The warmth of the January Thaw this week has sent flake and crystal down the city drains, heading now for Little River, and then north through the New, the Kanawha and Ohio, then looping back south to the Gulf of Mexico where inland cold waters will retire on a warm beach on the Mississippi coast.

Cars and trucks along the street during the Thaw are gray-brown, the color of lost dogs, embarrassed to be seen looking so forlorn. But what’s the point in taking a bath, they ask. In this short, warmer chapter that falls between pre-winter and real winter, the mud falls on the godly and the ungodly alike, so the new Subaru and the old farm-use truck next to it don’t look all that different, mud being a great equalizer in Nature’s homogenizing democracy.

WINDS IN WINTER

Last night the wind screamed overhead like a great circling bird, back and forth from ridge to ridge. Every now and then it would swoop down to clutch at our porch roof and ruffle the metal, making a strange rumbling studio-thunder sound effect. Then the invisible wind would lift again and circle a thousand feet above us, coursing the high places round and round, like a great locomotive caught in a switching yard above the trees, bare and ravaged along the western crest.

Now summer winds throw angry tantrums like this just briefly, and only when performing the accompaniment to a summer thunder storm. A million green living leaves modulate the pitch and timbre of the wind, so that even in the summer gale there is a softness, a lifting and cleansing quality—a redeeming nature and attitude that is altogether missing from wind in winter.

Summer wind appears at the height of the storm, strutting and fretting about briefly; and then it exits stage left and its pitch falls off, Doppler-like, and only a cooling breeze is left behind. I have no complaints to register against the winds of summer.

But winter wind arrives here irritable and there is no cheering it up. Dense and gray, heavier than air, it sinks into our valley like a glacier of broken glass, pushing down against the hard and frozen earth, and it will not relent. When the wind howls at midnight, I dream of the Old Man Winter of children’s books, his cheeks bloated full, lips pursed and brow furrowed, exhaling a malevolent blast below at frail pink children in cold, wet mittens.

If you listen, you may think you hear a tone to the roar of January wind, a discrete pitch of a note that you could find on a piano keyboard. But this isn’t so. In the same way all rainbow colors blend to make white light, January wind is the sound of all tones that nature can create, at once together as the Old Man overhead blows through a mouthpiece formed of ridge and ravine, across reeds of oak and poplar trunks.

Winter wind is the white noise of January that won’t go away.

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WINTER WALK

When winter comes, our morning walks do not end. But they are no longer a come-as-you-are tiptoe through the woods. Winter walks are a deep-sea dive into cold and dark, in a submersible of wool and down.

Peeking out from under visors and toboggans like diving helmets, we trudge heavily against the stern and biting currents of polar air flowing like waves over us. Without our encumbering spacesuits our frail pink flesh would turn blue and brittle as December leaves, and our expedition would never be heard from again.

It takes determination, planning and a certain degree of masochistic joy in suffering, or at least a willing deprivation of comfort, to take a walk in winter.

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Our first stop was an overlook above the wide Missouri, this first day of February populated by ice pancakes slowly spinning as they moved along at a fast walking pace towards the Mississippi another 140 miles downstream.

The Senator Roy Blount Bridge is one of the increasingly-rare trussed-arch forms being replaced by structures that are easier to build and maintain. More efficient is not always more pleasing to the eye.

The Missouri River no longer hosts steamboats or even barges, having mostly become a domesticated drainage free of historical flow or prior purpose. Channelized and shortened by several hundred miles over its course, the domesticated artery no longer serves in the historical role of a river, trading an increase in hydraulic efficiency against the loss of floodplain agriculture, and meandering sandbar-wetland natural populations.

The coming of the railroads supplanted the slower and more risky water access to the interior of the country as the young nation of the 1800s moved west. The old railroad bed along the river corridor now hosts a portion of the 239 mile Katy Trail Bike Path that can be reached via a connecting stretch (The MKT in blue) from a few miles northwest of me in Columbia. It follows the old railroad bed along the base of the bluffs along the river in Jeff City.

I imagined Misters Lewis and Clark poling up the river, glancing over at brightly clad clots of bikers having lunch on the banks, waving them north.

The Capitol Edifice

Again, there is just too much visual overwhelm to tell what you can see and learn from this place. Here is the river view (WikiMedia) followed by statuary near the entry doors.

We had not even gotten inside before the architecture amazed us. We were greeted by this 1400 pound statue of Ceres, the goddess of grain (highlighting the states historic strengths in agriculture). She was approachable at ground level on our visit, but has been perched on the very top of the capitol dome most of the time since installation in 1924.

I can’t explain the Fight Club images on the pedestal but I thought they all should have sweatshirts, including Ceres. It was COLD!

Struck by lightning 300 times, the goddess needed a vacation make-over before regaining her high perch in 2019, but now obviously she’s comeback down to Earth again and is easier to get to know.

The capitol building was burned in 1837 and again in 1911 and rebuilt. And was it ever made over! Artistry and story is present everywhere you look, surrounded by historical drama that will bring us back again at least a few times to take it in.

And so there is a LOT to see, and much of the building is freely open to the public and you can roam all four floors until closing time.

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Finally: FOSSILS

One of the features most tourists to the capitol building miss is the presence of fossils in the Missouri limestone interior wall panels. There is a brochure to guide you to them if you don’t happen to be with companions who know their way to locate them in the walls or floor panels. We knew such people.

So to wrap this up, two images side by side: first from the architecture, the foot-long embedded calcareous “stem” upon which the lacy “fronds” of this early Bryozoan were arranged; and second, one of the creek fossils I found last summer that puzzled me for months. Turns out it was the screw-shaped central stem of Archimedes pressed into limestone that I had mistaken for tooth marks.

Go here to get an idea of what the creature looked like in the ocean that, a few hundred million years ago, would have submerged me at my desk in what is now Missouri on what is now North America.

Leaving Home to Find It

So here after 16 months of life in Missouri, I am extending my sense of place, with the help of my friends.

The river is such a big part of the history of Boone County and I can learn much with a little investment of time and curiosity.

There will likely be more travel tales in the coming year. Or years. One never knows at this stage. But so far, I have my health and much to be grateful for—including you fellow sojourners out there who join me from time to time. Thank you for riding along.

I have all day most days with no commitments other than what I choose to do with my vast amounts of time and my less and less vast energies to create, recreate or daydream.

It has now been eight months that I’ve been in this awkward state of having more than enough personal time on my hands I should be good at filling it by now. I am not. Yet.

The first two months were awful, living alone and isolated every day for the first time in more than half a decade—living under roof-not-sky, and at a distance from the natural world. Living in a rows-and-boxes setting of apartment life among my age peers, I was a lost boy those first months, a hapless wanderer going nowhere, alone in a sea of strangers.

Now I’ve had sufficient time to adjust to this new normal. I have some routines and engagements that get me out of my box, but there are a half dozen or more hours a day when I can choose what to do. So what should I choose?

FREE AGENCY: THE BURDEN

I could read uninterrupted for hours. I admit to being a lazy reader of books. Almost all my reading takes the form of web pursuits within my special interests topics. I thrive on digging those holes as deep as I want, given our age’s amazing access to information. But I do not always benefit from those thousands of words a day by becoming wiser or even smarter.

We have a very complete library here when I am done with the books on my own shelves—largely my wife’s book club selections from the good ol’ days in Floyd. And so I will contract with myself to read x number of pages per day from the physical book list I’ve deferred now for years. I will do this.

My digital reading is ostensibly bound for curation. Think newspaper clippings taped along every wall in your office. But curation for its own sake? You’ve probably encountered elderly relatives who have been secret hoarders. That would be me, only my stacks of old magazines and newspapers against the flowered wallpaper all live neatly compressed on my hard drive and in vanishingly small clusters of nerve cells whose grasp is not as strong as it once was.

Out of those digital-cerebral stacks do frequently come AHA!s of connection and comprehension that somehow makes this practice rewarding enough to not stop doing it, mostly in the wee hours. (This habit is a whole nuther story.)

This computer-based research urge has been set on fire by the new-ish tools that are now available to take notes and find them later; to dig deep, expand infinitely and comprehend at a practical level. NotebookLM, ChatGPT and other tools have their pitfalls (as all technologies are two-edged swords) but I count myself as very fortunate to sit in my ergonomic office chair and have all this within my reach if not my grasp.

I should make myself focus and refine these excursions of curiosity and finally own the conclusions I have been moving towards all my adult life. My personal manifesto is out there somewhere-somewhen.

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NO SHORTAGE OF OPTIONS

I have a wonderful 88-key piano keyboard and the educational software to learn by sight and by ear the classical pieces I purchased (Piano4All) a year ago, May. I have plug-in headphones so I don’t disturb my neighbors. I should get back to Eric Satie’s pieces I started on some while back and learn them “by heart.”

I do almost daily play along by ear to Spotify playlists (transposed into the key of C) but do not have a practiced repertoire of a dozen songs I can play on the spot. I should do that, not that I will ever perform where others can hear.

This running list of failures at goal-setting and discipline could go on. The last one I’ll mention is to say that art creation has become an invigorating focus where I can easily spend an hour or more a day and come away feeling like I’ve accomplished or learned a thing or two. As a beginner (so far, only pastels) learning by early mistakes makes frustration certain, but there are enough successes to keep me trying.

Lastly, the gym is just across the hall from the art studio, so I have two enticements to alternate between with just one five minute walk down the hall. Is it possible I could stick with both art and exercise long enough to grow aesthetic and actual muscle? I ought to, but will I?

THE BLESSING and OBLIGATION OF CHOICE

I’ll have more to say about several of these topics in some depth perhaps over the winter months, if I can convince myself to actually post these personal morning pages unselfconsciously.

This somethng I have done, more or less, (for more than 23 years) with the assurance that my persistent readers have always known and tolerated hearing what was going on in my word turned into words. I have not run you off quite yet.

And I guess I need at least one final image, so here’s the Karaoke disc I purchased for the Friday event downstairs. The plan is to sing a duet with our young bartender. I’ll let you know how that turns out.

I have jotted and journaled intermittently but without discipline. There are no breadcrumbs to follow for a monthly review over the last half century.

I have flitted from one digital notebook to the next (Workflowy, Dynalist, Roam Research, Tana, Obsidian) but without staying in place or returning even at weekly intervals to lay down meetings, calendars, events, people, memories by place in time to be able to find patterns that might become maps going forward.

I do know that the concept of Janus, standing at the threshold with a face looking back and a face looking forward always makes me take stock this time of year when molecular motion outdoors threatens to come to a standstill.

And now that I think of it, it is not journals proper but the writing I have done in the month of January that hold the story. I still have access to the blog—Fragments from Floyd—that survives back into 2007. The first 5 years after the first posts in 2002 have been lost to history.

I do know now that journaling can be a help when things fall apart. They have fallen apart or morphed drastically for me especially in Januarys since 2019. Those portal months have carried me exactly here, exactly now.

January 2019

It has become clear that Ann is losing her grip on logic and language. She is making stuff up, and will not hear me when I suggest it would be helpful to get tested, to know where her mental health lives and where it might go.

We might be dealing with plain vanilla Mild Cognitive Impairment at age 71. It happens. But I’d like to know for sure. If this pattern continues and gets worse over time, she will not be able to safely negotiate the tortuous roads between Goose Creek and the grocery store. She aleady is more hindrance than help in banking, planning and imagining what becomes of us in the future.

January 2020

We have spoken to our realtor about putting the old refurbished farm house on the market, not knowing that over the next few months the world would fall apart and the word pandemic would enter our vocabulary and our lives.

It was the worst time to show a house—when people were scared to travel even in familiar places—much less to the remote reaches of a rural mountain county. But then again, remote independence would have its appeal to the right buyer. The die was cast. We would leave Goose Creek for Rock Hill in June.

January 2021

We now live in a newer home closer to town, with good roads and nearby friends and good neighbors. I will soon need their help more and more.

Ann consents to see her Family Nurse Practioner for a simple cognitive test. She was very much NOT happy to have been coerced into this when she was certain there was nothing wrong with her! Why wasn’t I getting tested too?

She could not remember in this mini-test even one of the five THINGS she would be asked a short time later to repeat. She could not draw a clock showing ten minutes after 11. It was by that time not surprising but her struggle was a gut punch to witness.

We would rule out every other explanation (brain tumors, vascular changes, infections, sleep apnea) and the full battery of cognitive testing was scheduled for June. The scores would be stunningly low on the percentiles against other age-and-education matched test takers. And the world spun backwards.

January 2022

We have a neuralogist now and Ann is taking medications that might help slow down her mental decline. She would be taking a second full battery of test in six months, to compare against the first. Hopefully the downward curve would be gentle and give us time to figure how what to do with all of this. We avoided direct talk about it. The test results sealed our future.

January 2023

We were safe from the pandemic but isolated in our new setting and it was starting to feel like home after leaving Goose Creek that was home for twenty years. But we knew this was not where we could live until we died.

The second tests in June ‘22 confirmed my worst fears, showing a precipitous decline and confirming a diagnosis of Alzheimers. I asked the neurophysiologist how long victims at that level might have before requiring full time care. She said “probably about three years.” She was spot on.

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January 2024

By now, we knew what lay ahead for us in broad strokes. We could not stay in rural Virginia where we would not have access to health or housing for our needs. Just before the new year, we had committed to move to Missouri where our son lived and the continuum of care was available.

Ann had stopped driving after a “soft accident” in August of ‘23 and I was on duty full time, doing the shopping, making meals, keeping medical appointments and planning to bug out within the year—specific month unknown but late summer to late fall.

We did not know on New Year’s Eve 2024 that our final Floyd home would be under contract within two months.

January 2025

When the new year came, we lived in an apartment in a mid-Missouri community where everyone was a stranger and every meal or activity was complicated by confusion and agitation.

We did not celebrate when the ball dropped at midnight. Ann would be up pacing at 2 a.m., maybe even drinking coffee, talking out of her head and denying the next day that she had missed any sleep. I knew for sure that I had.

I was not holding up at all well. At least there was a caregivers group that offered support from others who were or had been down the road I was trudging. But there was no fix; no finger in the dike; no distant hope that anything I tried to do would help.

I have never dreaded the coming of a new year with such brutal certainty and lack of hope as this one. I began talking with the admin here about availability of memory care for Ann, but did not know how to cope or who to ask for my own care. I did finally see a counselor off campus a few times to talk it out, but there was no prescription for what to do to avoid burn-out and overwhelm.

January 2026

Janus, the god of portals. A face that looks back through the wrong end of the binoculars that makes huge gone-by events shrink as if they were tiny and trivial; the face looking forward with magnification that compresses time and space and can drown you in the grotesquely huge and likely realities that lie ahead.

Looking back from the portal of this new year, Ann had been in the Memory Care neighborhood since the middle of May. She was okay. She was not okay. I was okay. I was not okay. The opportunity and obligation to move forward on my own was a terrifying as it was liberating. I paced the wood laminate for miles a day muttering to myself.

But now in this new year living alone and looking ahead—even as I sense my physical self in inevitable if slow decline and in “perfect health” for my age, I have hope for the year to come.

I’m journaling regularly now and with benefits, learning what I think by seeing what I say. I am setting down benchmarks to guide; moving forward with the intentions of a man who wants to grow wiser, kinder, and more grateful and not merely grow older by a year.

Life is not over. I am not alone. I am no longer desperate. And I have hope for my own life, even as our future life as a species comes into question.

January 2027

The long-range look by the god of portals need not peer so very far off now, as I will by now be approaching 79. The looking back extends to the vanishing point, while so many memories do not vanish but persist and inform. What am I to think standing here at the brink? What am I to do with the calendar pages that remain beyond the barely-visible horizon of another day?

I hope I will have good visions and good words in the turmoil of 2027; but that might not be my worry after all. I guess we’ll see. Some of you will have traveled with me through it all. It’s been a good ride. Thanks for your companionship.

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ExTRA: You can listen to a slightly different version of this, as it was broadcast as a three minute essay on WVTF, Roanoke’s NPR station, in 2006.

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High up against white cumulus, a pair of red-tails rode the thermals above the rocky tailbone of the ridge where it comes down to meet the creek. One bird traced a wide path four hundred feet above the top of the Hemlocks; the other, a hundred or more above. They circled together in opposite directions in a single rising kettle of warm air, aware of each other—probably male and female.

The lower bird called its rasping tee-DEEER! and as if in response, the higher bird tucked its wings tight against its body and plummeted straight for the tallest White Pines along the spine of the ridge. He pulled out nonchalantly at the last instant, to climb the warm air again and soar in lazy spirals above his partner.

I’ve watched red tails perform this power dive before, and it always thrills me. For that moment, I become the bird I’m watching, I see what it sees and feel what it feels, falling. My head swims as I pull out of the dive, climbing once more, to look down on the tiny white house where the man stands looking up, shading his eyes with his hand.

But that man had never witnessed the display that followed moments later. The two raptors flew circles together in close formation in an ordinary kind of way, when the one pulled away alone and soared to a much higher berth.

And then, from that great height, the raptor tucked his wings. His silhouette against bright cloud became the shape of a wingless fuselage of a falling missile, a feathered arrow. The trajectory anticipated the arc of his partner along her slow circle.

At the very last instant as I was about to believe I was witnessing an attack, the perfect line of the free-falling bird veered just enough to miss his target. The nearness of the pass pulled his victim sideways into the turbulent undercurrent of the dive. And at that instant, he unfurled his wings full, breaking his descent, and he rose just enough that the two birds were suddenly side by side. And they embraced.

Talon in talon, wings wide and fixed, they fell—yet not a fall, but a dance, a sacrament each bird for and with the other. A russet, feathered carousel twirled with the smooth choreography of a maple fruit in slow motion in a giddy centripetal act of play— or thanksgiving.

Round and round through the buoyant air, their outstretched wings traced circles in space and they held to each other for life, for joy, in graceful descent. At the last moment, they parted as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and resumed their silent scribes in the kettle of warm air above the ridge.

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Was this performance practiced or spontaneous? Was it a ritual, fixed by instinct or a creative and cooperative act of will? My inner poet even considered for the briefest moment that perhaps these two birds chose to offer this aerial ballet there and then because I had acknowledged their presence by looking up, and I had been an honored and appreciative audience of one.

I know better, of course. But having seen this, I will be more inclined to expect small, personal miracles of beauty in the years that remain. And I will ponder the likelihood that we create these revelations simply by being expectant and receptive and ready to witness them in the ordinary of our busy lives.

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It has not always been so. And I think of how many memories in my consciousness that would not be recorded anywhere else for revisiting if I had to carry the massive tripod and gear once required to hold the most portable of cameras.

The 35mm format and the beginning of photography in the modern age had its 100th anniversary in the year about to fade into history. The 1925 Leica camera (with rangefinder function in 1932) changed how we see the world.

Spontaneous shots, changing perspectives: The Leica I gives journalism a new language, too. Real photo reportage is beginning to replace staged shots and illustrations – vibrant, human, and on the move. The writing that comes with it also gains more depth, as it can now refer to the image, and no longer needs to describe the scene from scratch. Accordingly, the new visual form of journalistic storytelling conquers both magazines and newspapers at an equally fast pace.

So today, it is images from the camera in my pocket I will share, having no story to tell. Words are hard to find from such a simple cloistered urban-apartment existence that has replaced my former feral rural rambling life among mountains and forests. And so it goes. Life is good but it is not very large.

This image is one of several from a morning solo walk along Jacks Fork of the Current River from an overnight visit back in October. I could not conceive of such folding and layering apart from volcanic effects on molten rock.

I have learned since from a reliable source that it is probably a mineralized stromatolite—a colonial mat of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) that represents some of the oldest life on the planet.

LOOKING BACK: How I long to know the full history of this one hard fact in my hand.

LOOKING DOWN: The headwaters of Clear Creek pass through our Lenoir Woods, on its way into the storm water system of Boone County. It’s not much as local creeks go, but enough for the coyotes and foxes, deer and squirrels—and the occasional pedestrian reluctantly content to peer into its lens of sky and token forest microcosm of the greater whole.

Also from recent travels (and evidence that my “new life” has taken me out of town and into the land-and-cityscapes not far from Columbia. This is from the historical town of Boonville, less than an hour away.

I don’t know why I have not written about these travels here. I confess I have not felt very connected with the larger world that blogging and essay writing and public speaking once brought me and my camera into such contact with.

Maybe I can overcome the inertia that has made me mute and robbed me of purpose and the desire to connect—to know and to be known.

Also from Boonville—once the hub of both river and rail traffic in a nation moving west. I am saving images for possible art projects as I continue to dabble in creative media in which I am a total noob. The notion of reproducing yet again images that my eyes and my camera have seen before me is making me SEE the world through a new and different lens. And I need new in my life.

Welcome to my world— the second floor of the Maplewood apartment building on the campus of Lenoir Woods full-spectrum retirement community in Columbia, Missouri—where I am one of 400. Out my door, carpet under foot and ceiling tiles for sky.

It is a comfortable setting where everything a body needs is under one roof. But not everything a soul needs—at least not mine. And so, after 15 months, I continue to feel malnourished, missing the nutrients that, for 30 years, were just outside my door. How blessed I have been to have accumulated so may memories—many of them sealed in light gathered by the cameras I have known.

And I just happened upon this one of the Badlands, South Dakota, circa 2010 from a visit to see our daughter in Rapid City. The wind was blowing so hard I had to kneel to take the three images I stitched into this panorama before it was easy to do. Nikon D200.

Share Earth Alive: Field Notes From the Southern Mountains

It has been a transitional year—a liminal space—not so full of outdoor images and nature to share as has been my habit since 2002. But I’m still alive and well and have hope for a richer 2026 with more words and pixels to come.

Hope to see you there!

So just when I think I know what the lay of the land (in my county of residence) is like, I am transported not so many miles north of the city of Columbia (in the yellow Ozark border counties) into the (orange) land left behind by the last southern advance of the final period of glaciation before the current era.

And just for comparison, our tour guides stopped and let us stand in the flattest patch of Earth I have ever witnessed—out of a history exclusively Appalachian and far south of anywhere a mile of ice had ever been.

The division line was distinct and we were upon the boundary suddenly, driving back south over the orange-yellow border, to arrive at the miscanthanus field which was our destination.

I only knew the plant as a cultivar—what we called Silver Plume Grass—growing just off the porch in our final Virginia home setting. But it is planted intentionally (and escapes cultivation) on large tracks of land across several continents:

Wikipedia gives a summary:

Miscanthus’ ability to grow on marginal land and in relatively cold weather conditions, its rapid CO₂ absorption, its significant carbon sequestration, and its high yield make it a favorite choice as a biofuel.^[10][11]

Miscanthus is mainly used for heat and power,^[12] but can also be used as input for ethanol production (if harvested wet). If harvested dry, it can be burnt directly in biomass boilers, or processed further (pellets, briquettes). It can also be used as a “green” building material, for both wall construction and as general insulation.

An experimental house based on Miscanthus straw bales was built in 2017.^[13] Miscanthus cropping enhances nutrient cycling in the plant–soil system.^[14] In a 2025 research dried stems of Miscanthus giganteus, together with other materials, were used to create a biobased concrete substitute called Xiriton, which offers a low-carbon, eco-friendly material that can support shellfish settlement and salt-marsh restoration.^[15]

Wetland Birds Making Do

In the present circumstance as we stood at the edge of our destination miscanthus field, it was the bird population we expected to plunge into this tall grass that was the reason for our travel north of town.

The field is no longer harvested as a biofuel but persists as winter roosting for enormous numbers of blackbirds. We stood in the cold and waited for them to converge and dive in to roost for the night.

We are talking literally millions of black birds—mostly redwings. This phenomenon certainly is known by the local farmers, who see them as pests when they roost to close to homes. But birders by and large have not known about—and seemingly are not much interested—in these common birds, even in such impressive numbers.

But why these birds in these fields of this tall tough grass?

The thinking is that, as birds who prefer and evolved in reedy marshes of rushes, reeds and cattails, they are out of luck in modern human times where former prairie wetlands have been drained. What comes close is this tall sturdy grass. A half-dozen birds will roost vertically stacked on a single plant—the most cattail-like perch they can find.

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The Long Approach to Landing

For an hour before they finally converged on our field in view, we saw barely visible in the distance “rivers” of birds stretching literally miles across the sunset skies, just above the tree line.

I am disgusted with myself that I did not come home with stills of the scene, so a screenshot from a video will have to suffice. The experience is hard to convey; you had to be there.

Yes, it was a visual marvel; but I remember, too, the sound of a million birds moving in waves, surging east and west in restless masses, unsettled and searching, flowing like a poured substance made of legions—individual birds following the will of one discrete phalanx and not another; united by what—family groups? Socially-bound or habit-bound aggregates?

If you closed your eyes, you heard the sound of the beach, ebb and flow, as wave after wave surged onto the shore of tall grass moving with the wingbeats of so many individual birds given over to the will of the whole.

And they never stopped chattering—on the wing, circling and settled—they used up so much hard-won fuel in their seeming random coursing back and forth, calling to each other the whole time, saying: what? It must be important and necessary, but it is a mystery beyond the brains of birds.

Little work has been done, and dozens of interesting questions are open for exploration. Where do these birds feed and why do they forage so far from their nighttime roosts in the miscanthus? Where do they spend the summers and are the same birds returning year after year to this particular location?

And so I have expanded my own home range beyond the bounds of Boone County, thanks to my peripatetic friends. I have seen far more birds in one hour than the sum total of every bird I’ve observed over a long lifetime.

And I am amazed at how life goes on in divers ways, with every single make and model of living thing obeying its own rules and urges, earning a living, getting by—hardwired and willing to survive, one among the many.

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Life in this setting is quite tame and rather bland, though it is comfortable, safe and convenient and I am grateful to be here, under the same roof with wife Ann who has now been in Memory Care for seven months.

You might remember that we left Floyd County, Virginia in September of 2024 to enter a retirement community here in Columbia, Missouri when our son’s family moved back here, which determined the destination of our necessary and final relocation.

Especially now as cold-wind shut-ins, we frail and susceptible elders don’t get out much, so the photographic topics I have enjoyed sharing with readers over the years will have to wait a few terribly long winter months to come out from hibernation.

Meanwhile, under the roof here, I have re-entered an art class I was not able to sustain when responsible for wife Ann.

The class is currently exploring pastels as a medium and I quite like its immediacy and simplicity compared to oils or water color (both of which I suppose I will attempt with trepidation and the teacher’s advice and support.)

PAINTING MY MEMORIES

I especially like the idea of celebrating favorite photos (of favorite places or moments) as subjects for any future art I might attempt.

This was a memorable image taken our first winter after we moved up out of the deep Goose Creek valley to the vast vistas of Rock Hill near the town of Floyd. This image marks the farthest southern tilt of the sun before the days began to lengthen towards our first Rock Hill spring.

I learn something with every mistake and so I learned quite a lot with this first effort. I should not have revealed the original since the attempt to reproduce it shows how far I have to go yet.

The facility has a nice art room downstairs that is open 24 hours a day, fully loaded with all the media, paper and such for use by residents like me. This is an image from the first PASTELS class, where the teacher started with a not-so-simple shape of a sycamore leaf and brought it to life.

GETTING TO KNOW AND TO BE KNOWN

Meanwhile, I had the opportunity at “Hobby Day” a few weeks ago to share my books and 25 photo-note cards with residents and visitors along with quite a few other hobbyists who displayed and/or sold their works in wood, wool or clay.

I had hoped that this first-time display of the things that had been central in my former life would connect me through conversations with fellow-residents (especially guys) who might wander by my table, and create a bridge towards new relationships. Not so much. But at least a few passers-by now know that I was once a writer and photographer in my distant former life, for what it’s worth.

Also, in the tradition of the place, I have some doorway adornment at my apartment door—a total of ten of my cards, and a few framed photos as well, to distinguish my cubicle from others here in the Borg.

So maybe it will not be so long between this long-overdue post and the next one. Though it will be a very long time before cabin fever gives way to the rebirth that spring will offer. Bring it on!

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