Last Ride with Mom

Winding between the foothills, the road finds it's way to the last spot on a short trip in time.  The last curve yields to the view of a small house, blue and trimmed with lake rocks.  Passing back through the time in the mind, the site was unfinished and begging for the attention of a meticulous dweller.  The memory triggers thoughts of a less glamorous time, a time when thoughts are fleeting and messages lost in translation.  This place, this untimley place, leaves a ghostly flair of forgotten memories, of future forgotten moments and all the moments that pass.  A different time in the rotation of the Earth, a moment frozen and trapped in the corner of the brain becomes once again real.  As though it snapped back like a rubber band, the thought of her in the car fed the consciousness and opened the pathway to vivid memories. Joyless memories haunt the soul, yet turn to joy as the turn signal clicks.  

White Horses

White streaks run in unison through the green grass in Chatham.  Unaware of their 

muscular beauty and strength, 

they turn their heads and splash their tales 

as the wind gathers their manes 

to one side then the other. 

Free and unemcumbered by 

earthly desires, jealousies, or unkept promises, 

they are just themselves. 

A devotedness to gleeful play is indicated by their lively gait.  

Togetherness looks so delightful!  

Lovely white horses live and play 

at Chatham Hall School 

in beautiful, 

bucolic 

Chatham, VA.

AFTER THE STORM

The color of the day was pink and gray.  It swirled and whirled it's way across the sky like a painter's brush on canvas.  Patchy and pink, it looked like ink, painted and polished just waiting to pop.  

Wanting to savor the moment, my camera snapped up those colors into their digital home.  No photo, no words can match the raw beauty of the work of the wind and sun joining hands to paint this glorious masterpiece in the sky.  

As I drove, the patches elongated and drizzled high above the horizon.  One second pink, the next moment gray.  It was, after all, the end of the day.  

Tell me, I pray, have you ever seen the sky look this way?

Kudzu in the County

Cobweb canyons of kudzu flourish as summer flees and fall is freed.  Drooping drapes of giant leaves close windows to the past, a temptation for imaginations to run wild.  Lengthy tendrils travel to the light, driven by hormones kept out of sight. The viewer finds fascination in fomenting questions:  did the occupants of the hidden house leave because the kudzu overtook the house, or did the kudzu take over the house because the occupants left?  Fields of the stuff look fluffy and innocent like a new born bunny before it, too multiplies and runs rampant in the yard.  Lush, green, almost jungle-esque it lounges over trees and stumps, highways and byways, poles and lines making an impervious veil for shy cows and crows.  
It's Super Food, nothing can harm it; bugs won't touch it, cow's won't eat it, people can't eat it!  Super Food can leap tall buildings in a single growth spurt.  It's the big green monster that grows out of the woods into the fields and over the hills and fences and houses and sheds, oh my! 
 If you don't believe this silly tale of chlorophyll curtains and monsters and such, then come to Pittsylvania county and see for yourself!

TENACITY HAS WINGS!

Tenacity has Wings
A vision of persistence hops across the pavement, it's determination and perseverance apparent in every movement.  Pecking and pulling with a dogged strength of purpose, it's reward is fleeting and must be repeated with resolve and purpose.  Seeing it's endurance and stamina brings to mind the human condition.  We must never give up.  Obstinacy rules the day.  Peck, peck, peck away with the stubbornness of a splinter in the finger, the obstinacy of a desirous child for candy, the resolution of a persistent Preacher in the pulpit. Intransigence pervades its' constitution.  There is no stopping the insistent pecking, searching, finding the minute morsel of worm.  The end game is so delicious and sweet, endurance is the only option.  Steadfastly listening out its' prey, feathers unruffled, red breast puffed in accomplishment, beak full of booty buried in leaves, soil and grass, it basks in it's glory.  Lunch in Pittsylvania County, a virtual cornucopia of nature, nurture and determination.  Listening and learning, step by step, the goal is met. 
Tenaciousness grows wings.  

Tenacity:  the quality or fact of being able to grip something firmly.

BRICK BY BRICK

A gateway to knowledge, maturity and futures untold unfolds brick by brick in Chatham, VA.  The skill and expertise of all the ages has built a fortress of an entrance, a bridge and a work of engineering art. The eye is fooled by the majesty of bending bricks as they lay and overlay, curving and bending lending their solidity to the illusion. Month by month, brick by brick the gateway has raised it's form under the diligent hands of skilled artisans who's stories remain untold.  A story-book entrance is writing an invitation to adulthood, to education, to cultural experiences.  Higher hard skills meet higher soft skills and welcome awaits each on the other side of the precipice.  Chatham Hall has commissioned a fairy tale gate to the future.

Leaf by leaf green appears and each growing soldier stands in lock step with the next in calibrated rows.  Uniformly curved across the sloping hill, they spread their wings and grow.  Week by week the layers form, marking time with the sun.  The rain falls, the sun shines, the soldiers grow.   These emerald spectacles have no mind, no emotions, no pain,  They are unwitting players in a centuries old game.  It is everything in one compact product: glamour, power, relaxation, sex appeal.  Dark hands from across the ocean tended and tilled it, and; it filled their days with pain and fear.  Those hands traveled here in ships just like the layers of gold leaf piled one on top of another in the carts carrying it to market.  Backs were beaten, families were decimated. It caused a war! Such natural beauty nurtured by human hands wreaks havoc on the human condition, from its’ very beginnings to this day: from slave labor, to destruction of the human body, to ecology, to illegal trafficking, to addiction, to profiteering.Statesmen tax it, laws relax it, doctors tell us what the facts is.