Bridge Series

One of my favorite places on my grandparents farm is a wooden bridge.  To get there you had to leave the main yard and go into the pasture (sometimes goats or horses were out here, but mostly just rabbits and deer).  The grassy path was usually cut fairly short because my grandmother has a horrible fear of snakes.  You go almost to the middle of the pasture and then turn down a fairly good hill before the land levels out right up to the creek.  It was so far from the house that it always felt kind of magical.  And the fact that there was this long exciting trek leading to a bridge with no visible path on the other side made is mysterious.  When you get down there nowadays all you hear is the wind in the trees, hounds baying in the distance, echoing off the mountains.  Most of the birdsong is hushed and there’s a pleasant tension as if the forest had been waiting anxiously for you all day.  My grandmother (who is rumored to be Fae herself) used to tell stories about fairies in the woods, and maybe there are.   2003  Spring 2007        Winter 2007      Winter 2007     Winter 2007     Winter 2007     Winter 2007     Winter 2007 

Mema Stories Picture #2

My grandparents until this year have managed to keep up a fairly good sized vegetable garden.  They are in their mid 80’s.  A large part of my childhood was spent praying for rain, and then regretting it when it came and I had to “work” the garden.  I’m kind of sad that my children won’t get to be a part of this culture because I’m afraid it will just be dead by the time I get any.  My parents most likely won’t keep a vegetable garden when they retire and move up here and let’s face it my grandparents (contrary to popular belief) aren’t going to be around forever.  So towards the end of the summer after we’d planted, prayed for rain, dug up weeds, picked endless ears of corn, bushels of green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, ochre, salat, blueberries and whatever else they planted we had to do something with the excess.  This is excess after we  gave away to various friends and family members literally hundreds of dollars worth of produce (this is true organic produce mind you, and have you seen the price of blueberries lately? Outrageous.) My grandmother would spend about a week canning vegetables, making jams and jellies, and freezing anything else we couldn’t eat.  By this time  if I never ate another fruit or vegetable until the next summer I would have been perfectly fine.  She has a wonderful story about making jelly and jam you can read here  ”In the summers of my childhood I learned to depend on Mother Nature and her bountiful gifts”. 

Mema Stories Picture #1

I took a combination Women’s Studies and Southern Studies course last spring entitled “Southern Ladies Lives”.  We read memoirs by several women, mostly african american, who had grown up around the turn of the century in the South.   What I discovered was that there was a vast shortage of material from poor white southern women.  So I undertook as a final project for the class and now a personal project of mine to write about one great southern lady in my life.  My grandmother, who I call Mema, was born in 1922 and grew up in the first depression and started her adult life at the beginning of World War II.  Her stories are rich both in content and language.  She’s lived her entire life in Pickens, South Carolina surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains and her Scotch-Irish heritage.  It has been a great joy of mine to experience this culture and I hope through my own art to allow people to see it as I see it.  Here is one of my favorite photos of my grandparents farm.  Mind you, this was not done out of aesthetic reasons as much as the necessity to keep things orderly.“For a large family the washday was just that an all-day-long job for Ma and me. ”(For more of this story click here)