December 30, 2012 N.C. Arboretum/Frog Jam

My friend, Catherine, and I drove up to Asheville and took a hike on one of the many trails at the Arboretum.  It is cold and snappy with a blustery wind in the clear blue sky. There is a dusting of snow here and there and on the tops of the distant mountains.

To get there from 26, take exit 33 and drive past the Biltmore Mall on your left, go past a big discount shoe store on your right, then 3 stop lights and turn right at the sign for the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Arboretum.  The parking fee is $8.00 per vehicle.  The trails are open 8 am to 9 pm in the summer and 8 am to 7 pm in the winter.  On the grounds are the Baker Exhibit Center where there are moving dinosaurs and prehistoric critters, and a gift shop, in another building is the Education Center and there is also a Bonsai Garden (of course in the cold weather, the bonsai trees are taken inside). There is also a coffee shop called The Savory Thyme Cafe and the National Native Azalea Collection.

We took the Bent Creek Road.  It is possible to see bears here, but not today as they should be hibernating.
When Eleanor and Ryan and the boys lived in Asheville, Ryan opened the kitchen door one night to put
chicken bones in the garbage container and found a large bear already there helping himself.  One day in the spring, Eleanor took Mathew into the backyard and was joined by a mother bear and her cub.
I also remember Mathew trying to put on his muddy boots left in the garage to find a snake was inside.

After our hike, we went into town and found the Early Girl Restaurant had an hour and ten minute wait.
Chai Pani (Indian Street Food and T-shirts that proclaim "namastee, y'all") had a 40 minute wait, so we went to Carmel, the restaurant with a corner location in the Grove Arcade. Catherine had a catfish rubin sandwich and I had scrambled eggs, grits, bacon and toast with FROG JAM.

Recipe for frog jam:
one part figs
one part raspberries
one part orange with zest
one part shredded fresh ginger.
Delicious.

December 29, 2012 Collards and Walking Sticks

Boofa and I pass Bull Hawg's Barbeque early on this damp cold morning.  The cooks are sitting at a window ledge eating their breakfasts and waving to us.
I can see young saplings in the now bare woods with vines encircling them, just right for cutting down and making spiral walking sticks or canes.
Men used to whittle objects from wood.  In my early childhood, I saw old men sitting and leaning their elbows on their knees whittling with a knife.  I have a candlestick my father made in school as a child.  He and his sisters went to the Quaker school in North Wales, PA.  My grandfather, Papa Welsh even made horns out of the horns of bulls.

An old man with a white beard comes past me pulling a light cart full of great bunches of collard greens.
"Got your collards yet?", he asks.

On the way home, I buy collards and cook them in chicken stock and season them with molasses, vinegar, soy sauce, and red pepper flakes.  Eat them with black eyed peas.

December 26, 2012 Christmas Tree O Christmas Tree

It has poured down rain all night.  My house feels empty after all the children and grandchildren departed yesterday.
In the distance I can see silver lights sparkling on the trail cedar.
Closer, I see that the heavy rain has washed the red from the  26 crystal balls and now they sparkle like
stars in the early morning overcast sky.

December 24, 2012 Christmas Eve in Berkdale

I spent the night last night in Hanah and Patrick's house and took Zipper for a long walk this morning in the cool damp air.  There were flamingos dressed like Santa Claus, Snow Men lights, the new- this -year lights in trees that look like snow falling, big red and green glass globes in the trees, light trimmed rooftops, bushes gleaming and twinkling.  We rounded the golf course on the cart trail and came back to sweet rolls and hot tea and the turkey in the oven.  Sergay is still asleep on the living room sofa and Liza helps me put out the traditional cookies to ice and decorate.

December 23, 2012 Christmas Tree O Christmas Tree

I was out at 7:15 am on the rail trail decorating a cedar with 26 red glass balls.  Dawn was breaking. Finally it is cold.  Pink and blue clouds streak the sky.
Only a wild cat watched.

This is my memorial for the children and their teachers.

December 18, 2012 Guns and Mistletoe

Wet and warming up this morning on the trail with big white and gray clouds moving out, a brilliant blue blue sky breaking through.  It could be spring except the trees have lost their leaves.  Great clumps of mistletoe grace their branches (in the order Santalates, genus Viscum). Birds eat the white berries and wipe their beaks on a branch leaving the seed to germinate.  The Navaho called it "the basket on high".  To the ancient druids, it was sacred.  It was thought to be the Golden Bough of Aeneas.  It is part of the Christmas celebration for kissing under.

My uncles used to shoot the mistletoe out of the trees during the holidays.  A right and fitting use for guns.
They had guns for hunting and they had the old muskets found in the woods after either the Revolutionary or the Civil War.  They used to tie them to a tree to shoot them as the kickback was so strong.  They did not have assault rifles, like the ones used in mass killings in our country, most recently the 20 children and 6 adults who died in Newtown, CT.

"Our hearts are broken," said the president.

I realize the red and green balloons resting in the bushes along the trail have fallen from the sky after they were launched in a tribute to those lost in the tragedy. The funerals have begun.

Where are you Christmas?

December 8, 2012 Deer In The Headlights

I came upon a DNR truck parked on the grass along my walk with Boofa down a busy street in town.

The DNR agent and a man in an avocado green T-shirt walked out of the bushes.  "I am surprised to see DNR in town", I said.

"If there are deer issues", the agent said.

"My girlfriend hit a deer last night and we found him dead back there", said the avocado shirted man.

The beautiful White Tailed Deer (a member of the cervid family which includes elk, moose and mule deer) has been here for eight to twelve million years.  Native Americans used fire to create habitats suitable for them out of the hardwood forests.  Today there are 750,000 deer in South Carolina due to conservation programs and other factors (which includes storms like Hugo flattening the forests), even though in the 1950's there were almost no deer at all in the Piedmont and the mountains. The population of people in South Carolina is 4,679,234, making that one deer for every 6 people.

I have deer whistles under the front fender of my car.  The wind blows through them as you drive and creates a high whistle only the deer can hear.  Once last year, out in the country, I hit a dog who was running straight at me in the middle of the road.  He ran into the forest.  Simon, riding with me the next day said,

"I guess deer whistles don't work on dogs".

Today, the houses have their Christmas decorations out, gleaming in the bright warm weather, almost like spring.  Here and there, there are even pink crab apples and ornamental trees blooming in sheltered places,

confused by the warm weather.

Here is a recipe from the 1977 Jr. League of Jackson, MS cookbook, Southern Sideboards:

Barbecued Venison Steaks with MULE JAIL Barbecue Sauce:

Venison hindquarter
Lawry's unseasoned tenderizer (optional)
Pepper
MULE JAIL BARBECUE SAUCE:
1 pound butter
2 cups water
1  5 oz bottle of Worcestershire sauce
Juice of 6 lemons (reserve rinds of 3)
2 onions, quartered
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper

Slice hindquarter across the grain into steaks 1/2 in thick.  Trim all fat and gristle.  Tenderize and lightly pepper each side at this point, if desired.  Make MULE JAIL BARBECUE SAUCE by melting butter in saucepan.   Add remaining ingredients, including lemon rinds, and bring to a boil.  Turn off heat immediately. Cook steaks over charcoal grill, with hickory chips added, basting with sauce.  Steaks should be cooked medium to medium well in order to be juicy and tender.  Cooked well, done, they will be tough.  Sauce is also good spread on toasted bread.
attributed to:  Mrs. Lewis L. Culley, Jr.

November 27, 2012 Walking in the Rain

I walked in the rain with a green polka dot umbrella at the Canal Park.  They have opened up another part of the path by building a safe but very slick walking bridge over the spillway between the canal and the Congaree,  just below the old bulwark of the Central Correctional Institution (the first state prison in SC built in 1866).

I read the inscriptions on the statue of Christopher Columbus erected by the DAR which includes a prayer attributed to him from 1492 landing in San Salvador, thanking the Lord for the new world..  Somehow I am suspicious of the origin of that prayer, as Columbus was quite interested in the gold he saw the natives wearing.  He actually enslaved some of them at one point and still believed he had discovered the islands on the coast of China until he went to Venezuela later on.    In that country, the natives refused to give the explorers food and he tricked them into believing he had taken the moon away from them as he knew of an impending eclipse.

Columbia was the first town or city in the US to be named after Columbus.  Now it is said that he opened up the new world to colonization.

500 years before him, Leif Erickson (son of Erik the Red) learned of new land from a trader named Bjarni
Herjolfsson and traveled to Newfoundland and set up a site there.  There is a statue to Erickson in St. Paul, Minnesota.

According to the scientist, Brian Sykes, who has studied the DNA history of Native Americans there well may have been travelors from the Pacific Islands who settled in the Americas long before that.

Five years ago, I went as a volunteer to the archaeological site called "Topper" on the Savannah River not far from the town of Barnwell.  The site is on the property of a Swedish chemical company.  Dr. Al Goodyear of  the University of South Carolina led a group of us in the continuing excavation of an ancient site where stone age tools were made.  Carbon dating has found that people were there many thousands of years before people were previously believed to have come from Asia across the Bering Strait to populate the
Americas.  We worked at the site in the day time and in the evening we learned about the site and others.
Dr. Goodyear made barbeque for us for dinner.  Other archaeologists visited.  A man at my picnic table drank everyone else under the table.  Another from the University of Florida showed us the artifacts he had found during the day diving alone from his boat into the Savannah River.  Some people wrote poetry and a pharmacist made hand cream for us from his own recipe.  Others demonstrated how flint knapping was done.    I became sick with bronchitis and went to see a Russian doctor in Barnwell.  When I got back to the site, I got to sleep in an old cabin instead of on the ground in my tent.  Later after returning home, I found a huge tick on my back in a hard to reach place.

November 25, 2012 Squirrels I Have Known and Loved

And alligators I have not.
Jasmine is blooming out of season on a sunny fence post as Boofa and I head into the woods.  Gray squirrels dart everywhere and Boofa is nearly dislocating my arm as he tries to chase them.

I have seen an occasional white squirrel in these woods and near my home and I have seen some of the famous white squirrels of Brevard, just north of here in the mountains.  These are not albinos but a variant of the gray squirrel.  The story goes that 50 years ago, a circus van turned over in the yard of a Mr. Mull and two white squirrels were left behind, which he gave to his niece, who kept them for a time until they were released into the wild and became the progenitors of a huge tribe of white squirrels.  In 1986, Brevard proclaimed itself a squirrel sanctuary and took the title of The Squirrel Capitol of the World.

There are beautiful Fox Squirrels on the South Carolina coast and low country, particularly on the many golf courses as they like places without undergrowth, such as pine forests. These southern squirrels are large with fluffy long tails and come in a variety of mixed colors such as gray and white and black and white and red and white.(They were described by Linnaeus in 1758, sciurus niger, perhaps Delmarva Fox Squirrel, s.n. cinereus) The Western Fox Squirrels are apparently a reddish brown .  I saw my first Fox Squirrel a few years ago on the DNR site on Highway 17 between Jonesboro and Yemasee when I took my mother and her sister, Elise on a rainy day while we were at Edisto. We visited the office where there was a gigantic alligator skull from Barnwell County displayed on a counter.

"Do you want to see some more alligators?" they asked us.  We said we did and we off in the car down a dirt road into the woods.  We passed over a dirt dam on the edge of a pond and went on to an old abandoned cemetery and turned around.  We stopped on the top of the dam to look more closely for the alligators and suddenly they were everywhere, approaching as if they thought they would be fed.
We were fairly terrified, especially me as I remembered my visit to a pond of sacred alligators in Ghana where the priest would paddle out in a boat daily to feed the creatures live chickens.  One day he fell in and that was the end of the story.

Here is a recipe for SQUIRREL COUNTRY STYLE from the Baton Rouge Jr. League Cookbook, River
Road Recipes, originally published in 1959.

2 squirrels
Salt to taste
Pepper to taste
Flour to dredge
3 tablespoons fat
2 cups water

Cut squirrel into serving pieces and shake in a paper bag containing seasoned flour to dredge well.  Fry in skillet until golden brown.  Remove squirrel from skillet and pour off all grease except 2 teaspoons.  Add water and bring to a boil.  Return squirrel to skillet;  turn to low heat, cover, and cook for about 1 hour, until meat almost leaves bone.  Turn squirrel occasionally and baste often.  Serve with grits, hot biscuits, and honey.
Serves 3 or 4.  Good!
Attributed to Mrs. H.L. Field

DO NOT MAKE THIS IN BREVARD, NC

November 23, 2012 Over the River and Through the Woods

Yesterday was Thanksgiving in Columbia at the home of John and Colleen and James.  An abundance of food, only three child injuries and not severe.
  I drove home over the river (the Broad) and through the woods (the Sumter      National Forrest) and past the tiny town of Peak where I learn today the body of a woman stabbed to death by her husband was floating even then in the Broad.  Today a body was found burning in a field in Waterloo in Laurens county and another in Asheville.

I am walking in the woods listening to the drumming and tapping of a woodpecker.  I see her as she flies above me to another post.  She is small without a red mark and must be a Downy Woodpecker, who drums and taps messages to her mate.  The drumming and tapping is not the same as the digging for insects.  This message was about the hawk which flew up just moments later.  A single crow also announced the hawk's presence.  A Red Tailed hawk, just like the hero of the book, "Rufus Red Tail" read to us by Miss Sheedy our fourth grade teacher and which she read to generations before and after.  She has been gone long years now and so has the school principal she pined after in vain.

November 18, 2012 The Cottonwood Trail

Another nature walk with Michael, Zack and Shane, 5 years old and 3 years old dressed in yellow and red slickers with hoods.  We saw a hawk and the boys found rocks and sticks and the heart shaped tracks of deer in the mud. We walked the boardwalk over the wetlands, went to see the beaver dam and climbed the ridge trail.

It's a little cooler now.  All the zinnias are brown.  There is a poster proclaiming the Jingle Bell Jog and photos from last year of joggers dressed in Santa Claus gear running the trails.

The Holiday season is on.

November 17, 2012 Glendale Shoals

Michael, Zack and Shane came and we took the boys on a nature walk.  They threw rocks in the Lawson's Fork Creek and along came two big geese, or perhaps they were big ducks floating and flapping down the
water rushing over the rocks.  They thought the boys were feeding them with the rocks.  These were beautiful birds which I cannot find in my two bird books.  One, which I think was the male, was black with red wattles on his beak and the other, a little smaller, but who looked of the same breed, was white with red wattles on her (I think she was a female) on her beak.
After our walk, we came home and drank hot chocolate with marshmallow fluff.

November 11, 2012 Huntersville, NC

A beautiful cool clear early morning in Berkdale where Hanah and Patrick have a new house.  I walked their dog, Zipper (half Cairn and half Yorkie) around their neighborhood.  The next week, Zipper, a previously peace loving creature, bit another dog's ear off.

After my uneventful walk, Hanah, Liza and I took our lives in our hands and went to the Southern Christmas
Show along with about ten thousand other people, mostly insane women.  And we had a good time.

November 1, 2012 Fall in the Wetlands

On the boardwalk, there was a congregation of college students like friendly seals lying on a wharf.  Accompanied by their Environmental Studies professor, they were making notes.  Someone's papers flew into the water.  Several grabbed Boofa by the head or the shoulders and petted him.

October 28, 2012 Cottonwood Trail and hurricane, Sandy

An incredibly beautiful fall day, the calm before the storm as the Frankenstorm, Sandy, is at sea off the coast of Charleston and the Outer Banks, aiming at the Jersey Shore and New York City on Monday night and Tuesday.  I parked off Woodburn and as we crossed the wide field, aromatic with scents of cut grass and fallen leaves, memories flooded my brain of the field behind my father's childhood home in North Wales, Pennsylvania.  After supper on summer evenings, Aunt Mae and Uncle Les would take us along with their several dogs in the twilight out across that field to the little mill house and pond where we would skip rocks.  That three story house, fronted by tall boxwoods, had been the home of my father, his three sisters, Ganner and Gapper, Aunt Mae and Les, their two sons,Andy and Bob (then grown), Aunt Joyce (whose friend came to dinner and stayed eight years), Uncle Charlie, (who was a successful song writer and later an alcoholic, whose wife had died and left him with his son , Charles, who died at eighteen of meningitis) Auntie (Gapper's sister Florence) and her husband, Uncle Doc(who was an opthalmologist).

My father, David, was born on Poplar St in Philadelphia and delivered by his cousin, Elizabeth, a medical doctor who trained at the Medical School for Women in Philadelphia. Later, the family moved to the house in North Wales.  Once, in the dark, I looked out of the second story bedroom window and saw a spectacle of fireflies lighting simultaneously on and off in the field across the street.  Once, we found a human skeleton in the loft of the barn out back which turned out to be from the cadaver that Uncle Doc dissected in medical school.

Today the wetlands are full to brimming.   There was a huge dam built with the genius architectural plans lurking in beaver brains. I saw a hawk alight on a branch which broke under him. Then crows chased him off through the cloudless blue sky.  A tall very blue colored, blue heron stood in the creek where it rippled over rocks.  Seeing us, he flew up and downstream.
I pointed him out to a walker arriving on the scene and he said, in his Norwegian/Minnesotan accent,
 "Yah, Yah, I have seen him before.
Yah, Thank the lord."

I picked a bouquet of flaming zinnias, red, orange, white, yellow, pink, salmon which have been planted along the path and along the edge of the field.  They grace my dining table.

I am recovering from an abcessed tooth which began to bloom on the trip back from Edisto.  Hannah told me that I looked very scary in my rumpled camp clothes and boots, my swollen and distorted face, carrying a pick axe which I brought for Patrick to chop up the stumps of the cherry trees. I look forward to a root canal next week.

October 21, 2012 More from Edisto

After breakfast of pancakes, toasted bagels and cinnamon bread, tea and coffee, we headed for the beach.

Surrounding the beach parking lot are myrtles heavily draped with a type of morning glory,  the breathtaking cypress vine, loaded with deep pink blossoms and around which a moving cloud of yellow butterflies dances.  These are sulphur butterflies, specifically pyrisitia.

Luke fished and the younger boys played in the sand. Finn broke away from Colleen and jumped into the surf.
A very happy dog.

We ate lunch at McConkey's on Jungle Road where there was a small plot of deep pink zinnias swarmed by
orange butterlies, called the Great Spangled Fritillary as well as their darker cousins, the Roadside Skippers.

Goodbye and thanks for all the fish.

And from "And I'm Glad":

The wild place speaks its own mysterious language
Place of panic, place of blessing.
Dive into the black swirl of the tide,
Touch bottom at the middle of the creek.
The small shrimp take small bites and you catch nine
To eat.  If there's a gator or a shark, he will
Return the compliment.  Welcome home. Join
The wild place, the mystic food chain: Edingsville.

October 20 and 21, 2012 Edisto Island State Park

Perhaps my favorite place on earth.  It is so hard to describe it's essence.  I will let these quotes from Bubberson Brown and Sam Gadsden tell you.  They were life long Edisto residents in their 90's when in 1999 they left oral histories to Nick Lindsay which were published in the book, "And I'm Glad".

"This is better, home here.  Me and my wife been together all these years now, sixty years.  Long water run out me eye how thankful the Lord been to me!  I sleep so good here, the world turn over."  Bubberson Brown

"If you get the full Gullah, it's a song language.  That's the deep Gullah.  It is a song language and not a deaf language like English.  The speaker of a song language doesn't mean exactly just the words alone, but when he has once spoken them, he really couldn't have said it any better.  If you catch the song, you can tell exactly what he means."  Sam Gadsden.

"How could I know the name of heaven I come from?" Bubberson Brown.

Driving onto the island we passed the Special Tree in the marsh decorated with plastic jackolanterns, then the huge oak with the mattress hanging from it, but the mattress was on the ground.  We parked and walked in to the primitive campsite where we set up our tents under an ancient oak beside the marsh.  A hundred yards away there is a bathhouse and a quarter mile away, the beach, where there are also campsites.  Two years ago, my cousins, Ann and Sylvia and I stayed in one of the refurbished cabins on the marsh and walked up the beach to where Jeremy inlet enters the ocean.  We crossed at low tide to the beach which is covered in big shells.  We stayed so long, the tide was coming in when we returned nearly up to our waists, carrying bags full of shells.

This trip, we took the boys, Zack, Shane, James, and Sergay on the Indian Mound trail (also called the Spanish Mount trail, officially that is).  There are other trails, including a bike trail.

From "And I'm Glad":

The sea surrounds the earth of Edisto
Surrounds the salt mud and palmetto-praise
Sands of the island, the salt mud where ten thousand
Fiddler crabs pray to God each  morning,
Pray to God who made us, pray with their tiny
Arms raised in unison, raised heavenward
In the morning of mud flats and rising tide. Surrounding
Us the always salt sea with sharks
Swimming and carnivorous money men circling
In. God made the ways sharks go within the sea,
And He made money men, and He made mud,
Made man and woman and the lovely salt embrace
Of tide and earth, of bramble and crop, of man
And woman that makes children-- a tough week's work
For Him. And He pronounced them good.

October 14, 2012 Kings Mountain State Park

Established in the early 1940's, the State Park borders the National Military Park.  My brother and I went to Camp Cherokee in the State Park as did some of our children and now the third generation is attending.
We used to sing "There Was a Desperado" "Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer", "Stewball", "That Good Ole Mountain Dew".  We ate in the mess hall where we chanted "  Bhah, bhah, strong and able, get your elbows off the table, this is not a horse's stable, but a first class dining table."  I remember coasting down the mountain with a counselor in a car who allowed Mary Moore, a year older than me, to sit in their lap and steer the car down the curves."

Today the extended family picniced at Lake Crawford, where there are paddle boats and canoes to rent but there is no longer swimming.  I remember that the Kings Mountain lakes were full of leaches and apparently still are.  Buddy says that fish love leaches and there is probably good fishing there.  All the little boys ran around and around with the bigger kids chasing them.  My brother has a new three month old grandson, so sweet.

I got to the park at 8:45 am so that I could get squatter's rights on a shelter (there are six).  Going into the park, two wild turkeys crossed the road.  I took the trail from the shelter to the visitor's center at the National Park and back (six miles) and saw a deer bounding through the woods on the other side of the creek.  I came to the primitive camp site and found 60 to 70 boy scouts saluting and raising the flag.  The trail follows a gurgling mountain creek and then up and down to mountain ridges.  The big acorns have fallen and are all under foot.  The hard wood tress are green, yellow and almost pink and here and there a brilliant red maple flashes its color.  I was alone in the woods until I met a couple with an 8 month old Yorkypoo and a five month old Bishon frisking about.

There are other trails and one as long as 16 miles.  There is camping with hookups.  A camp store. A playground.

You can bring your dog and even your horse, as there are equestrian trails.

Sunday October 7, 2012 Yoshina Cherry Trees

The sign on the trail says, "Yoshina Drive" and indeed it is lined with these trees on both sides.  They have been among the first to lose their leaves.
In 1912  Japan gave over 2000 Cherry Trees to the US and most of them were the Somei Yoshina variety.
An American woman, a Mrs. Schidmore, had traveled to Japan in 1885 and had urged the US president's wife to obtain these beautiful flowering trees for Washington, DC. A Dr. Fairchild imported them for his home and gave them to an elementary school.  Finally, Dr. Jokicki Takanine (who first described adrenaline)
arranged for the 2,000 trees to be sent from the city of Tokyo as a gift.  These trees were found to contain insects and nematodes and were destroyed.  A second donation came from the shores of the Arakawa River and in 1965 another gift of 3, 800 trees arrived which were planted at the Washington Monument.
A cycle of gifting occured over the years with the US sending grafts of the original trees back to Japan.
The history is not without drama as vandals destroyed some of the US trees when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  And when some of the trees were to be moved to another location, US women chained themselves to the trees in protest.

Patrick is having an aborist look at the Cherry Trees in the back yard of their new house.  Their roots are digging up the brick patio.  He is thinking of cutting them down or moving them.  Perhaps I should chain myself to a tree.

Peter and I lived in Tokyo where the weather was so much like the weather in South Carolina.  In the spring there were moonlight viewings of the blooming trees.  Now in Washington in the Spring, there is a two week Cherry Blossom Festival.  I love the viewing of the trees in the light of the full moon.  So Japanese to create a beautiful ritual in response to nature, the tea ceremony, flower arranging.

Sakura sakura
noyama mo sato mo
mi-watasu kagiri
Kasumi ka kumoka
asahi ni niou
hana zakari

Saturday October 6, 2012 Footrace or Crime Scene?

Swarms of police cars are zooming down the road, blocking the streets, parking behind businesses along the trail.  I ask a police woman if it is a race or a crime scene and she replies, "crime".
I hear her radio say, "He was just behind the bicycle shop on the trail."

On the evening news, I hear a man approached two women with a knife behind the Ingles Grocery Store, hit two other women and bounded down the trail.  So far, they had not apprehended him.

October 1, 2012 Kings Mountain National Park

I was last here in early spring with Hanah, Liza and Sergay.  Yesterday they  moved into a new house with a big back yard full of irises, Japanese Cherry Trees and River Birch.  You can sit on their big back porch and watch the yellow finches and cardinals bounching around on the limbs.
I have stopped here on my way home.  It is no longer summer.  The leaves are turning yellow and red and falling to the forest floor.  Big acorns are plopping all around.
Here is where Colonel Campbell and his 910 patriots from Virginia joined with the rough men from the Carolinas to rout the British troops.  There were three African American patriot soldiers as well.
And here on the saddle of the ridge where the British were camped, Patrick Ferguson was shot eight times, a perfect target in his red and white checkered duster.  Three men from each side gathered beside his body to witness his passing. A stone marks where he fell.  I carried a small rock and tossed it on his cairn which was what we did when I was as child.  Later I heard it was considered disrespectful to throw a rock onto the big pile, but for me, it is a ritual of remembrance of the brave Scottish soldier and of the past as well.

Boofa is in solitary confinement( meaning not going on walks) since he attacked the big white lab puppy.  Boofa is a wired dog and may need mood balancing medication.  I talked to the breeder who sold him to me and she told me that cockers have this tendency and that she was recently bitten while trying to take two female dogs apart in a fight.

September 14, 2012 A Bad Dog, Kudzu and Confederate Jasmine

Boofa twisted out of his collar and attacked a six month old yellow lab, resulting in a trip to the vet.
I walked alone today and found the owner and told her I would pay the bill.

My vet gave me the name of a Department of Defense Patrol Dog Handler graduate.  Boofa may have to go to Boot Camp.

Kudzu is blooming, hard to notice the beautiful puple blossoms. Confederate Jasmine blooms on fences. Kudzu was brought to the south from Japan to hold back erosion and it quickly took over.
Like clouds, children see animals and shapes in its luxuriant folliage which covers the ground, bushes, trees, everything in its path.  Nancy Basket, a craftsman of Native American heritage has made baskets, paper, various food products, nearly anything you can imagine out of kudzu.  There are Kudzu festivals where you can buy kudzu jellies and wear kudzu hats.

It is cool now. Fall is coming next week.

September 13, 2012 Colleton County State Park

I drove up from Beaufort on the Tuskegee Airmen Memorial Highway ( I-95) and past Walterboro where there is a memorial to the Airmen at the Airport.  Even though the World War II African American fighter pilot unit 332 originated in Tuskegee, Alabama at the Tuskegee Institute, they trained at the air base in Walterboro.

To get to the Colleton County State park, exit I-95 to Canadys.  This is a small park on the North Edisto River which borders a cypress swamp.  There is a very short Nature Trail (.33 miles) but it is uniquely well marked for plants and trees which include: live oaks, covered with resurrection fern and Spanish moss, huckleberries, river birch, loblolly pines, red buckeyes, wax myrtle, horse sugar, magnolia, cinnamon fern, royal ferns, red maple, tulip tree (yellow poplar), black gum.

The walk goes to the river though minions of cypress knees.  Here the Red Bank Canal was built by slaves and was used by loggers to float timber out of the swamp and down river to the saw mills.

The beautiful sunlit black watered Edisto gets its color from the tanin (the same element that colors tea) which leaches from dead leaves along its banks.

This is a fantastic place for putting in a canoe or kayak and paddling, drifting down river.  In the summer, the park holds a riverfest with a number of different guided canoe trips available.  One summer, I took one.  We were hauled upriver by a local outfitter in a rumbling old land rover with Beethovens Fifth blaring over the speaker system. This was certainly unexpected and very exciting.
We were given instructions and guided down the river in our canoes.  At one point, we stopped and jumped into the water for a refreshing, cooling swim.  I plan to do it again.

September 13, 2012 Woods Memorial Bridge, Beaufort, SC

Just a short walk over the draw ridge which spans the Beaufort River and connects Beaufort to Lady's Island and beyond to St. Helena, Hunting Island and Fripp.  And the view is stunning.
To the north is the waterfront park and behind that the old buildings on Bay Street which are now filled with restaurants and shops, the steeples of two churches, the marina with small boats.

To the south is the bridge connector to Parris Island.  Below are the oyster beds and the green spartina grass now turning golden.  I breathe in the wonderful fishy smell of the pluff mud and am bathed in fragrant sea breezes.

Beaufort was the home of Robert Smalls, the African American slave who commandeered a ship out of the harbor in the Civil War and the childhood home of Pat Conroy, who wrote so eloquently of this corner of the south, of Dafuski Island, Charleston and the people who inhabit the low country.
It was also the home of J.E. McTeer, sheriff for 37 years in the decades between the 1920's and 60's.
His book, The High Sheriff of the Low Country is a classic of the period, recounting wild tales of rumrunners, murders and various crimes.  He also has a unique understanding  and connection to the cultural issues of voodoo and conjuring of the time.

September 12, 2012 Hunting Island State Park

There are at least 10 trails at Hunting Island State Park.  Today, I walked my favorite combination beginning at the north end of the lagoon, walking south in the direction of Fripp until coming to the lovely arched walking bridge over the lagoon.

Three Halloween's ago, we stayed at cabin 8 on the ocean side of the bridge.  Cabin 8 had been on the second row and now the first row was gone as the ocean eroded the shore.  The ocean was, in fact, just 20 feet from the cabin door and the cabin was no longer accessible from the old shore road.
The park gave us a big golf cart to ride from the  pier, through the woods, over the lagoon bridge and to the cabin. On Halloween night, the kids put on their costumes and we rode the cart to the pier where the goblins and pirates and princess walked the pier to the delight of the fishermen.  Patrick drove us back through the woods, frequently stopping in the dark to scare us.

Now all of the cabins are gone and the ocean rolls in where they once were.  Only the lighthouse keeper's house remains.

Back to the walk, turning right onto the path which goes from the bridge to the pier, then taking another right onto what I think is called the maritime forrest trail (which is 2 miles if you take the entire trail back to a public beach beyond the end of the lagoon) until you come to the Marsh Boardwalk Crossover (.35 miles) and turn left.  This takes you across highway 21.  On the other side of the highway is the Marsh Boardwalk trail.  There is a parking area here and then the boardwalk.  Today the tide is in.  The Spartina  grass is green and gold and shifting in the full marsh.
First there is a small hummack with a shelter, a grassy area with bushes and trees, a sandy area to the right with more trees, birds alighting and what looks like a wood stork perched in the top of a crooked tree across the way.  The boardwalk continues out to a dock with wooden seats where a family is setting up for crabbing.

Walking back through the hummack, a big raccoon runs on tiptoe acorss my path. When I look to the right, I see two adolescent raccoons trying to hide from me in the bushes.  I am so happily stunned by this glimpse into their world.

As Liza once said on another trip:  "It is the beautiful deer world...the beautiful bird world....the beautiful dolphin world."

It is the beautiful raccoon world.

September 11, 2012 Beaufort National Cemetery

The stillness here is nearly palpable.  The original graves were of men who died in the Union hospitals during the occupation of Beaufort in the Civil War.  Others were from Savannah, Charleston and Hilton Head.  About 2, 800 remains were relocated from cemeteries in Millen and a prison cemetery at Lawton, Georgia.  In 1989 19 Union soldiers, missing in action since 1863 and discovered on Folly's Island were reinterred here.

As I leave in the car,I can hear taps  playing from a 9-11 ceremony in the White House Rose Garden.
And later, I hear the news that the American ambasador to Libya and three other Americans were killed in an attack on the consulate in Benghazi.

On 9-11-2001, I was driving to work when I heard on the car radio that a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers.  I stopped at the bank where the teller and I discussed our puzzlement over the
event.  At work, I had to do a mental status exam on a 65 year old woman. Outside my office, workmen were on a ladder working on something above the ceiling.  They had a small radio and at times I would open my door and they would tell us what happened next.  They told us another plane had crashed into the second tower, then one into the pentagon and one into a field in Pennsylvania.  We are stunned.  The woman did poorly on her exam.  I have often wondered if this was a valid exam or whether it was impacted by the events happening simultaneously.

That night, we were facilitating a therapy group for perpetrators of domestic violence where now the discussion rose to violence on a global level as well as in the hearts of human beings.

Sept. 7, 2012 Death in Paradise, Hunting Island

I arrived late in the day and began walking up the beach toward Fripp.  There were very few people on the beach, but in the distance I could see small groups gathered, a red blinking light beyond the shore and some kind of boat or what looked to me like two parallel jet skis sailing rapidly in the ocean.  Closer up, I could see the people were rescue and law enforcement personel, the red light belonged to an ambulance parked on the shore road, a fire truck, a covered stretcher.
I learned that a marine had drowned.  Today he had graduated from his training program at Parris Island.
The water appeared to be particularly treacherous as the hurricane, Leslie, passing east of Bermuda, was kicking up high surf and there are rip tides here as well.

When Michael was only four years old, he nearly drowned in a pool while visiting a friend and while wearing a life preserver and being watched by two women poolside.  He had taken off the life preserver and was floating under water when they noticed him and pulled him out, bumping his head on the side of the pool.  They called EMS and did rescue breathing.  I got the call at work and my supervisor drove me to the hospital.  It seemed as if she were driving 10  miles per hour when she was actually breaking the speed limit.  He was in Xray when I got there, very lethargic and an ashen color.  His pediatrician was there already.  He said, "He is going to be alright."  I was enraged. But he was alright.  After three days in the hospital, he came home.  It was raining lightly that afternoon and I put him to bed. Shortly afterwards I looked out the window and saw him lying face up in the front yard in the rain.  He was fine.

And Peter nearly drowned in the Bay of Bengal.  A stranger rescued him.  Long ago, now.

August 26, 2012 Cowpens Battleground National Park

Go north on Hwy 110 from the town of Cowpens.  The land here is flat before the escarpment to the mountains.  The green fields are turning tan and scattered with bales of hay.  The park itself is of flat green fields and forrests.  The monument stands beside the visitor center where you can buy a CD to listen to in your car as you drive the 3.4 miles along the route of the battle.  On January 17, 1781, the patriot forces led by Brigader General Daniel Morgan and Andrew Pickens defeated the Britist forces led by Lt Colonel Banastre Tarleton. 110 British soldiers lost their lives and 712 were taken prisoner.

There is a picnic shelter on a loop of the route with a nature trail though the hardwood forrest.  It is probably not more than 3 miles long, well maintained with study briges over the stream which winds through it. 

It was a perfect sun dappled day with temperatures in the high 60's to 80's.  Down below hurricane Isaac is battering Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and the Florida Keys.

There are two very beautiful ground covers along the trail, one is a tiny heart shaped leaf with bright red berries.  The other is a four inch tall branching plant living in large colonies.  It looks like a type of cedar.

We meet only a couple with two boxers and a grandmother and child with their chichauaus, Homer and Ciara dressed respectively in a blue T-shirt and a pink tutu.

August 16, 2012 Cooler on the Rail Trail

"The force that drives the green fuse through the flower...", has driven.  The dark green trees and bushes stand quietly with expectation, bearing nuts and berries.  The end of summer can be sensed this morning.
I spot "Popcorn" (so named by Martin) flying up from the ground into a tree.  He is perhaps a red tailed hawk, a red shouldered hawk, or a broad winged hawk.  He or she lives here by the trail, has a speckled breast.

I can smell the bacon frying at Ricky's Drive In.

We pass two women with a Blue Tic Hound who gets very excited and hoots his low toned howl at Boofa.  Papa Welsh raised hounds, cooked for them in big pots and always named his favorite one "Rip"..  My mother told the story of Papa Welsh driving his car along the country road in the darkness of early dawn listening to the men and dogs on a hunt in the woods, when he fell asleep and was hit by another car coming up behind him.  He was unhurt.

John Quigley (Katherine Quigley's father) was a veternarian in Roscommon County, Ireland whose wfie died in childbirth.  He kept his sons and sent his two daughters, Jenny and Katherine to his sister in New Jersey.  Katherine was twelve years old and Jenny fourteen.  As punishment, their aunt would make them wear their dresses inside out to school.  Soon Katherine was working as a nanny to a Jewish family in Philadelphia.  When taking the children to the park, she met my grandfather who asked her employer for her hand in marriage.  She was only fourteen.  She loved dogs and always had a black scottie.

August 15, 2012 Poinsett State Park

Poinsett lies between Columbia and Sumter, SC, approached from hwy 378, then 261 through the small town of Wedgefield, about 40 minutes from Columbia and 20 from Sumter.  This park is in the Wateree Swamp (Manchester Forrest) of the Cowasee Basin, before the Wateree and Congaree rivers flow into the Santee.  Spanish moss drips from the pines and oaks and heat loving water lilies float in the water beyond the visitor center.

No one is here.  At first glance it looks like a good place to hide out if you are running from the law.  There are trails of 1.5 miles and one called the Coquina trail (Coquina is the  geological mix of shells from what was once the floor here of an ancient ocean. The lower level of the cabins here is made of coquina.)

Deeply rutted dirt roads lead to the five rustic cabins (built by the CCC in the 40's) and picnic shelters.  There are vehicles at two cabins but  no signs of life.

Poinsett is named for the South Carolina statesman, physican and amateur botanist, Joel Poinsett, who is known for bringing the Euphorbia pulchirrina plant back from Mexico in 1825 and propagating it in his greenhouse. Of course this is the poinsettia, so named for him.

Boofa and I left the park and walked at the Columbia Canal in the hot noonday sun where there were sailboats made by local artists out of dried palmetto palms and bamboo.  (Only mad dogs and Englishmen walk in the noonday sun.)

I phoned the park after 4:00 pm and spoke to the ranger who told me that during the week, there are few people who visit, partially due to the heat, but on the weekends they are "packed".  He lives on the park, with his family and children and it is quite safe.  During the fall and the cooler months they have many visitors.   Three of the cabins were renovated 10 and 15 years ago. Two cabins are on schedule for renovation soon.  They are awaiting  the legislature to make a decision on repairing the roads.

The ranger tells me that Joel Poinsett is burried down 261 at the Church of the Holy Cross.

I will return in the fall.

August 12, 2012 Pine St.

For a long way, we walk under deep rose colored crape myrtles, breathing in their fragrant sweetness and I am wondering why there is no candle scented with this fresh sweetness, no perfume, no bath salts.  The path is littered with blossoms from the heavily laden trees.  Bees buzz.

The crape myrtle (lagerstromemia) is native to India.  It was a plant taken to Linnaeus, "the father of taxonomy" by a Swedesh merchant named Magnus von Lagerstrom and so the tree is named after him.  In India, a silk worm eats the leaves.

In the American south, the tree is incredibly hardy.  Even a cold winter or a draught can't kill it.  I love this tree.  I have three 40 ft tall pale pink, one white, one purple, one new watermelon pink ande several small soft pink ones, all of which I planted in my yard.

We went down to St. Charles, Louisanna about 15 years ago for Ryan's brother's wedding.  We rented a van and also visited "The Myrtles", an old plantation (owned at that time by a friend of Ryan's mother's) which is famous for its ghost.  The ghost is a servant who had posioned the family with   oleander, another beautiful flowering southern plant.                            .

There was a small restaurant on the grounds where we had crawfish etoufee and delicious bread pudding.  We did not see the ghost.

August 6, 2012 It's Deja Vu All Over Again

Early on this hot, clear mornng with huge cumulous clouds, there is a tall bearded man walking with an oxygen cannister.  I spy something large gleaming in the woods and find a Schwinn boy's bike circa 1980's, somewhat rusted, with tires torn off and inner tubes wrapped around the spokes.
At the Great Escape, where I take it to get tires, they like the old bike.

I name it "Mail".

August 1, 2012 Passion Flowers

It rained all day yesterday and this morning there is a fog with the morning sun trying to break through.  This glowing mist makes parts of the Glendale Shoals look like English landscape paintings.
I took a footpath on the other side of the creek as far as I could go until the path was obscured by brush and then went back to the more traveled paths.  Over the bridge I noticed ten or twelve bobbers handing from a high wire like Christmas decorations where fishermen had missed their cast.
A deer bounded across my way and then another with big ears flared, high tailing it into the woods.
Everywhere there are spider webs, some are writing spiders.
I find passion flowers  (passiflora incarnata) growing on the edge of a field.  It is said that the name "Passion" refers to the crucifixion, with ten petal like parts standing for ten of the 12 disciples (without Peter and Judas).  The five stamins are the wounds on the cross.  The knob like stigmas are the nails and the fringe is the crown of thorns. 
Be that as it may, my mother and her sisters thought that these incredibly beautiful flowers which grew on their land, looked like little ballerinas with tutus.  They played with them as if they were dolls until they wilted.

July 30, 2012 Beaver Dams

My third day of exploring the Glendale Shoals and neighborhood.  I have noticed that there is a second blooming season this year for the Japanese Magnolias as well as some the traditional azaleas. Wildflowers are abundant:  Rose moss on the shoulder of the road, Joe Pye bush in the tangled woods ( Some say the name derives from the name of a Native American madicine man who used the plant to cure fevers), Wild Blue Plox, and on the shores of a small tributary to Lawson's Fork Creek, great bushes of Jimson Weed (Datura Stromonium) rising five feet tall.  The Jimson Weed large white flowers are faded and drooping now.  The name is a corruption of Jamestown Weed where the early colonists first noticed it.  All parts of the plant are extremely poisonous, even causing a skin rash if you touch it. Cows and sheep have died from eating it.

I notice that the beavers have built a dam nearby.  The summer before John and Colleen's wedding, we were invited to Colleen's family's home in the Mississippi Delta.  Their farm land is bordered by the Tallahatchie river.  We all put on boots, covered ourselves with mosquito repellant, boarded pickups and drove out to a stream where there was a beaver dam, which Colleen's father and brother blew up with dynamite while we watched. Quite a sight.  I used to think the beavers live in the dam, but they do not and it is illegal to kill beavers in Mississippi.

July 29, 2012 The Secret of the Magnolia

We walked up Hilton Rd, past an old cottage with a new "Cube" parked in the overgrown yard. A bird had usurped their mailbox by the road for her nest inside. Here and there small houses had tomato plants full of ripe fruit growing at their back doors.  Alice Hilton, my grandmother, used to keep a kitchen garden outside her kitchen door with tomatoes, peppers, eggplants (we called them cackleberries) and Jerusalem artichokes.  Traditionally, the kitchen garden was nourished by basins of used dish water thrown out the kitchen door.

Boofa and I walked down the wooden steps out onto the wide rocks below the old Glendale Mill Spillway and stood for a while breathing in the cool mist of the splashing water under the morning's buttermilk sky.  A pair of ducks were preening, cleaning their feathers and taking sips of water on top of the spillway.  We took the bridge and met a man with binoculars watching them.

Not a soul was up and around this morning as we passed the old houses with gardens full of blackeyed susans, cosmos, zinnias, butterfly bush, canas, lantanas, chaste trees, coriopsis and rose of Sharon.  I saw a hummingbird among the flowers.

Back near the bridge, there is a 10 ft black metal sculpture of a magnnolia.  The bronze plaque tells me the artist was Barry Bate, done in 2000 and I paraphrase the legend:
"Listen to the waterfalls cleansing the river, just as the communities along its banks are renewing themselves again and again.  Like the  magnolia whose secret is renewal.
The sculpture is called "Rebirth".

Again, curving back along Hilton Rd, there is a kind of spa with a Zen garden.  No one is there so early on a Sunday morning.  There is a kind of Zen garden with a metal bench on an outcropping, overlooking a stone fire pit with stone benches and then the river below.

July 28, 2012 Walking with the Carolina Dog

The Carolina Dog is also called the American Dingo.  It has a faun or ginger colored coat, usually with a dark brown or black muzzle and often dark colored ears.  This is an indigenous dog which can be seen in fossils of  Native American dogs.  DNA testing has shown it to be of ancient origin like the dingo and basingi  and the Korean jindo.  Most of these dogs are now domesticated and are recognized
by the UKC.

Boofa and I went for a early morning walk through the Glendale Shoals area over the bridge which is at the top of the old spillway on the Lawson's Fork Creek, breathing in the negative ions from the
spash of the water tumbling onto the rocks below.  We walked through the old mill town where there are houses in disrepair as well as beautifully refurbished homes with well tended gardens in the huge back yards, the old white columned colonial home of the owner, completely deserted and overgrown with bushes and towering pecan trees.  The Glendale Fire Dept is at the top of the hill and beyond that, in a lovely vacated church is the Glendale Outdoor Leadership School. Beside the church is a very old graveyard with dates back to 1867 on the stones that can be read, but there are older headstones whose legends have been erased by time and weather. (Nearby Graveyard Cycles
takes its name from the cemetery).

We were joined here by a Carolina Dog who followed us for our entire walk even back to our house and then disappeared.

July 26, 2012 Cat Rescue

Under the shade of the leland cypress, I spotted a skinny adolescent kitten with beautiful dark calico markings.  When I came back again, a woman on a bike was holding the little cat with no resistance from her.  She rode off carrying the kitten in one  hand while steering the bike with the other.

Someone had painted a neon pink robot on the cement path.  The temperature is climbing to 100 degrees and cooking.  Everyone's T-shirt is soaking wet.  After a while it feels like soggy air conditioning.

In a little village near Dungapor, Doris and Tom and I would dip our pajamas in water and put them on wet to lie down on the charpoys we had dragged outside.  In the dark, with the bright stars overhead, a breeze with sand and tiny rocks would cool us as we slept.

Lake Hartwell State Park, July 22, 2012

Just a half mile off I-85 before you cross the South Carolina/Georgia state line, turn left into the park.  On your right is the old fashioned visitor center which has registration for the many campers and fishermen,  basic foods, free fishing rods to borrow if you forget yours, drinks, snacks and souvinirs, even those wonderful caps with the South Carolina palmetto tree logo (I bought a brown one and a yellow one for Martin and Mathew).  There are restrooms and a big comfortable sitting area with overstuffed couches and chairs.  Very cozy.

There is a short 1.8 mile trail which begins to the left a short distance behind the picnic shelter which has a full scale outdoor basketball court beside it.  In the road, just at the trail head, I found a football shaped magnetic sign saying, "Save the TaTa's".  I kept it.
This is a beatiful winding path through hardwood forrest.  Once you come near a cove of the lake.
There are five or six one-person size footbridges that cross tiny streams.  I had to encourage Boofa to go across the first one.  Beside the path, yellow and red toadstoods grow.  They remind  me of the toadstools in old Disney films, yellow underneath with red tops, splattered with yellow freckles.  Katherine Quigley could go out into the forrest and pick mushrooms as she knew which ones were poison.  Since these are red, I suspect they are poison.  There are many ferns here too.
Cicadas sing softly and I hear a few birdsongs.  You come out in the parking lot at the visitor center.

We leave the park and cross the Tugaloo River into Georgia.  (I read that the Tugaloo were a  fierce Native American tribe who practiced cannabalism and chased the Edisto onto Edisto Island.  I do not know if this is true).

A Volvo station wagon passes us.  On the back window in hand painting, it says, "Beware of the
Woods."

July 21, 2012 Bicycles

8 miles up and down the rail trail this morning in high humidity.  The cyclists speed by.

Peter and I had bought bikes in Rajasthan as well as one for Nawal Singh, our companion. Nawal Singh named the bikes for the great trains that crossed the Indian Sub continent. Peter's was Mail and mine was Urti Rani (the Flying Queen).  Once he took us out through the desert on our bikes to his ancestral home where the Rajput head of the large extended family lived in an ancient medieval castle surrounded by a high wall.  A carriage hung from the rafters high above the entrance.   I remember meeting this interesting man, who was now the Block Development Officer, on the second level of the castle. By now, it was dark and he sat behind a desk reading about the psychic, Jean Dixon, in a Reader's Digest by kerosene lantern.  After our visit, we slept on a clean straw bed on the first level.

I have a bike now.  It's name is Urti Rani.

Sesquicentenial State Park, July 18, 2012

Sesqui can be found off Two Notch Rd. in Columbia near the intersections of interstates 20 and 77. It was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1937, has a lake with canoes and fishing , a dog park, camping, hiking and mountain cycling trails and lots of Canadian Geese.

The ranger suggested I take the 6 mile blue diamond trail and I started out with Boofa before 9:30. "Follow the blue diamonds", she said and I did.
The landscape here is typical of the Sandhills of South Carolina, flat  where long ago there was ocean,with white sand, tall pines and scrub oaks.  The trail is winding and twisted, covered with a soft blanket of pine needles.  It is the kind of land my grandparents lived on in Lancaster County where my cousins and I would take the old pickup and load the younger kids in the back and drive sand roads like this through woods like this.  Afterwards we would go to the spring where a dipper gourd hung from a branch and get a sip of the cool clean water.

There were little or no landmarks on this trail and after I had gone more than two hours and passed a tall dead pine where beavers or deer had eaten away a large chunck at knee level, I knew I had been traveling around the same path again.  Finally I came out of the woods onto a large trail in front of a sign pointing right saying "bike trail".  The problem was I didn't know whether to go left or right.
Along came a hiker with a small gray terrier. Unfortuntately she was also lost.  We hiked along together in the direction the sign pointed.  Soon we met a gray haired man in a T shirt emblazoned with the word, "Finland".  He told us he walks there every day and pointed the way to the park office and water.  "Keep walking and lower your cholesterol and blood pressure and then go home and drink a big glass of whiskey," he said.

Mandy, her dog, Daisy and I made it to her car and she drove us farther on to my car, before she drove on to her next destination at Peach Tree Rock.  It was noon, we may have gone ten or twelve miles today by accident.

In the car, I turned on the new radiio station, 92.1, The Palm, and heard:

Bless my Heart
Bless my Soul
Didn't think I'd make it to 22 years old.
There must be somebody up above
You got to hold on...
Got so much to do
Aint got much time...
Girl, you got to get back up...

July 14, 2012 Humid at 70 Degrees

Everyone's T-shirts are wet.  It has rained every night for a week.  Trumpet Vine (Campsis radicans) decorates all the fences along the way with its orange trumpet flowers. There was  a trumpet vine in the corner of the stone garage and the fence of my childhood home.  My mother said that if a black cloud came up from the direction over the garage then we would have rain.  The fence separated our yard from that of the Archers, an older couple who were the only people in town to employ a liveried butler.  Mrs. Archer was deathly afraid of our gray Persian cat, Madame Overpuss.  One day, Madame Overpuss lay dead on our side of the fence next to a dinner of meat laced with ground glass.
That was when we, my brother and sister and I, began to crawl out our second floor window onto the flat roof and spy on the Archer's butler.  We could see him carefully washing Mr. Archer's many used whiskey glasses at the sink beyond the lighted window.
We told each other fantasies of how the butler had murdered Mrs. Archer, usually by serving her a pork chop laced with ground glass. 
That was long ago now.

July 12, 2012 Keys to the Past

I found a set of car keys on the trail and later a policeman found yet another set, this one to a black Audi. Both runners got their keys back and drove away with their dogs.  I keep my keys attached to my clothes with a big safety pin from the Rock Hill YMCA.  The pin has the number of the wire basket they would give you to keep your clothes in while you swam.  I remember walking three blocks to the Y at 2:00 pm with my neighbor, Reedy Montgomery in the summer. I was about 12 years old.
 A man dressed in dark shirt, heavy long pants, curly hair and granny glasses, toting a large backpack passed me saying,"I stopped smoking in October and gained 52 pounds.  I have never weighed this much." 
"Keep on walking." I shouted as he passed on by, opened the door of a gold Mercedes, tossed in his pack, got in and disappeared into the traffic.
Along a stretch of old railroad tracks, large colonies of cathedral like Common Mullein (Verbascum thapsus, related to the snapdragon) is flowering yellow blossoms, some 6 feet tall.  I found this interesting note in my wildflower fieldbook:
"...an introduced biennial with very velvety leaves, it has long been used for many purposes.  Roman soldiers are said to have dipped the stalks in grease for use as torches.  The leaves are still used as wicks in some areas.  Indians lined their mocassins with the leaves to keep out the cold, and colonists used them in their stockings for the same purpose.  A tea made from the leaves was used to treat colds, and the flowers and roots were employed to treat various ailments from earaches to croup.  The leaves are sometimes applied to the skin to sooth sunburn and other inflammations."

July 11, 2012 Singing in the Rain

It rained all night and we walked for a while and then it began to rain again and we kept on going.
The crape myrtles are so heavy with blossoms and rain that they are bent nearly to the ground.
Ripe persimmons have been knocked out of the tree.  Boofa wanted to attack a black poodle and a weimaraner.  I guess he will protect me in case of a poodle and weimaraner attack.
8 miles in the cool morning before work.

July 8, 2012 Breaking the Six Mile Barrier

The heat wave continues. Certainly you could cook eggs on the sidewalk, but walking at daylight is good.  Boofa and I walked 8 miles today by doubling back on the rail trail.  We saw another rabbit, a smaller brown one that hopped to and fro and ran into the bushes.  The great elk horn shaped clusters of sumac are blooming red and brown.  Driving home, I saw men in their wife-beater undershirts sitting on porches drinking giant glasses of iced tea. Late in the day, the thunder rumbled and only a few drops fell.  I am nursing along some spouts of lemon grass I bought from the farmer's market.  I am not sure how to grow them, but I chop them up and stir fry a teaspoon full with the onions and veggies in a rice stir fry.  Tuesday, the heat is supposed to break.  So say the weathermen.

July 7, 2012 Rabbits and Squirrels on the Trail

Boofa has the DNA of a hunting dog.  We approached a beautiful brown Albrecht Durer rabbit still as stone (or as Roy Blount, Jr. would suggest in elevating a traditional southern fruit) still as a
watermelon.  There are squirrels too, scampering everywhere, but we move on.  Today I notice that there is a funeral home, complete with six gleaming white heares, just beside the bicycle store with the backs of the buildings facing the trail.  I don't know if it has sprung up overnight like a poison mushroom or if it was always there.  The bicycle store has a walking and riding ramp built out the back and onto the trail for people to come and go.  Fortunately, the funeral home does not.

It is already 80 degrees at 8:00 am when we leave to go to the farmer's market.  A string band is moving from the sun into the shade. Vendors are selling vegetables, fruits, baked goods and essential oil soaps under canopies.  There is even a huge man in a stetson with his son from a ranch selling hormone and antibiotic free beef and pork.  I buy  better boy tomatoes and a bar of mint lavender soap.

And when I get home I make an old fashioned tomato sandwich out of a better boy tomato, white bread and mayonaise.  Oh yes, and salt, that's all.  It is so good.  It is the food of my childhood.

July 5, 2012 The Heat Goes On

Even in the early morning, it is hot to walk.  Every day the temperature breaks the record. We met the lady who walks 8 miles a day and she had begun her walk at 6:20 am.
Peter and I were married on July 5,  1966 in the Catholic Church in New Delhi, India.  It was also a very hot day.  We spent the night in the International Hotel where the Beatles had stayed the year before and then the next night we rode the train to the hill station of Mussori in the Himalayas.  When the clouds parted, you could see Anna Purna.
For the wedding, I wore a white hand woven short dress with mirrors embroidered into it and a yellow glass bracelet that a seller had massaged onto my arm in the bazaar.  I couldn't get it off until I tripped and fell on my honeymoon and it broke.  In Mussori, we met a fortune teller who told Peter that he would be a king and live by a river.

July 1, 2012 We're Having a Heat Wave

The walkers were out this morning by 7:00 am.  A bow legged man passed by  me wiping his neck with a towel, "It's ghastly, isn't it?" he said.  By afternoon, it was 107 degrees, the hottest it has ever been here in recorded history.  And the cicadas knew it. They are here and they are blasting their song.  In the night, violent thunder erupted breaking the red hot bowl of the sky and releasing blessed cool rain with hail and fallen trees.

June 27, 2012 Saluda Shoals, Irmo/Chapin, SC

A beautiful park, with several water features, splash and spray for children, guided canoe trails, tubing and a leafy shaded walking trail by the Saluda River, 2.5 miles in one direction (about 5 miles round trip). You may not even need your sunglasses or sun screen, it is so canopied with leaves. There are benches at intervals to sit and watch the dappled green and yellow water.  Even Renoir would have liked to paint it.  Today there is the sound of the cicadas playing their violins.  They have not yet come to the upstate where I live.  I have heard that some people say the temperature can be gaged by the loudness of the cicadas.  The more loudly they sound, the higher the temperature.  The weatherman says that this weekend, the temperature is to be 109 degrees.
Shane is having his third birthday party here at the park on Saturday.  (His actual birthday is July 3.)

Hunting Island State Park, SC June 21, 2012

We used to come to Hunting Island and stay in the State Park cabins until they were all closed down to be demolished or else were washed away by the eroding surf two years ago.  We thought it was paradise where the tiny deer came up to your cabin, the raccoons to your door, the pelicans flew overhead and the dolphins swam up close to you in the water.  You can still hike there by going into the woods/jungle at the end of the lagoon, following the lagoon almost to the far end and meeting up with a trail that winds around until you cross the highway and go out onto a boardwalk across the marsh which goes to two hummocks inhabited by birds and crabbs and sometimes an alligator.

Harbor Island, St. Helena, SC June 17, 2012

Harbor Island lies in the marsh between the Harbor River and Johnson's Creek out from Frogmore and before Hunting Island and Fripp.  We have rented a house on this island for the past three years.
It is a bird scanctuary and on the beach, the turtles come in May and June to dig holes to deposit their eggs.  Today if you walk from the Harbor River end past the houses and the condos to the far end of the island, you can see nine false turtle crawls.  This is because there is a rack of wattles that has been pushed ashore by storms during the winter and fall and many of the turtles will turn back to the ocean rather than crawl over them to dig a nest.  I have talked to the turtle volunteers and they tell me that some turtles have been brave enough to crawl over the rack and lay their eggs and one nest is due any day to release the turtle babies into the sea.  Some nests have been predated by foxes and raccoons and if they are, the volunteers move the remaining eggs to another location.

June 6, 2012 Greenwood Heritage Rail Trail

It was a dark and gloomy day.  There was a low cloud cover like a dirty grey blanket.  The temperature was under 65' at noon.  The Heritage Trail begins "Uptown" beside Circular Avenue and the now defunct branch of Palmetto Bank.  You can park in the deserted bank parking lot.
(You can read "Palmetto Bank" where the letters used to be.)  This looks like what could be a great walking trail.  It was recently bushhogged and along the way there was purple verbena growing wild where at one time it must have been planted.  The trail was completely deserted. Not a soul in sight and after the fourth Neighborhood Watch sign and the Greenwood Police Jurisdiction sign, I decided it was not safe to walk there alone and turned back after about a mile.
The great surprise was wonderful Uptown Greenwood, blessed with the long ago insight of some one who planned this wide wide square which is still alive with trees, plants and even plant sculptures such as Ari, the lion with cubs crafted out of ivey and the Lander College Mascot, a large bear like animal,  made out of what might be privet.  What was once the movie theater is a grandly refurbished venue for local theater. There is the McCaslan Bookstore which also has Melissa and Doug kids toys for sale, Harold's Deli, and what appear to be thriving business offices and the brand new library whose gray dome is also a landmark on the right just before the trail head. While talking with clerks in stores or greeting friendly people on the street, I had the impulse to use my best Southern colloquialisms.

On July 13 and 14 of this year, the annual "BBQ and Blues Festival of Discovery"  takes place with more than 13 free to the public blues performances. You can also sample the competition BBQ's for only a dollar.

My plan is to come to the festival and walk the trail with friends and enjoy the festival.

June 2, 2012 The Swamp Rabbit Trail

Greenville.  Today I joined the Walk for NAMI (National Association for Mental Illness) which was supposed to be a 5K beginning at Fluor Field and proceeding along the Swamp Rabbit Trail.
The trail goes from downtown out to Furman University and on to Travelor's Rest.  It is shaded by river birch, young oaks and many many blooming fragrant mimosas.  Oddly, no one knew where the end of the walk was and so we continued on and on until someone decided we had gone too far and we turned around.  The walkers were people with mental illness, their families, employees of hospitals and psychiatric offices, and others, even a large dental office group.  Schizophrenia is the disease that took Peter and his sister, Maria.

May 30, 2012 A Walk to the Park

James and I walked to the park on Gregg St from his house this morning.  We took his wagon with all of the  superheroes he had gotten on his birthday party on Sunday.  His party had been in this park too where all the children wore the superhero capes his mom, Colleen, had fashioned out of T-shirts.  They all sported a yellow flash of lightening on the back (I glued them on).  Today James is wearing his cape and running like a flash of lightening through the park with me chasing him like one of the "bad guys".  We found a bird nest on the ground and also some muchrooms growing in the sand boxes.

May 26, 2012 Walking Where the Trains Ran

Now there are five bronze sculptures of trains along the Mary Black Rail Trail.  One was the Glendale Trolley which used to go downtown from near my house.  GE 44 "The Dummy" carried cotton and textiles.  The Clinchfield Caboose was famous for the Santa Claus Special which hauled out gifts to kids living along the route.  The Big 6 ran from Spartanburg to Greenwood and was powered by electricity. The J Class 611, Norfolk and Western Steam Engine reached speeds up to 100 miles per hour.
Today there is the intoxicating aroma of barbeque pig mingling with the mimosa and magnolia along the trail.  Boofa enjoys the Dog Park along with Caleb, the German Shepherd (trained by a New York Policeman), Sophia, the white Yellow Lab just 7 months old and the champion of catching and retrieving tennis balls, Abby, a chow mix with short legs rescued from a shelter in Colorado and Homer, a Golden Retriever, who, inspite of her name, is a girl. Caleb's owner is very knowledgeable about canines.  She wears gem studded turtle earrings.  A young Asian girl is the owner of Abby and Sophia and a middle aged couple bring Homer.

There are 14 new maple trees planted along the trail behind the "Y", where the new building is now open.

May 23, 2012 Shinrin yoku, Bathing in the Forest

Zach's official birthday.  It is getting hot.  I took the path along the Congaree from Gervais to Cayce
which is deeply forested and shaded.  The red cana lilly flowers are perched atop dark green and brown leaves reaching 8 or even 10 feet upwards. Beside them are orange lillies with moss green leaves, less tall but equally exuberant. Negative ions surround me from the river rushing over the rocks.
A man drifts quickly in his yellow kayak, fishing.  I spy a river cooter crawling up from the river bank.
It sees me and Boofa but does not withdraw into its shell.  It is as big as a platter for your Thanksgiving turkey. Behind me a man arrives with his camera to photograph him.

We meet a woman with a pug named "George".  My sister had two pugs named "Sally" and "Elizabeth".  My cousin has two now, named "Nick and Nora" from the Thin Man TV series. Once she had a pug named "Dr. Watson", who now rests in his grave at their old house.

May 19, 2012 The Cottonwood Trail Wetlands

Today was Zach's fifth birthday. He had a party at Melrose Park in which all his friends, brother and cousins were dressed as superheros and ran wildly all over the place having a great time. When I got home I walked the Cottonwood Trail in the early evening.  The water in the wetlands is an avocado green with algae now.  The Blue Flags are no longer blooming, but there are bunches of Pickerel Weed  of perhaps three feet in circumference and a height of 2 to 3 feet blooming fantastically.  "Weed" seems like a strange name for this large beautiful aquatic plant which has big thick dark green pointed leaves extending upward and spires of 6 to 8 inches covered with tiny purple blossoms.  It is said the seeds are edible and animals like them, if they can get to them.
"pointederia cordata", it's latin name,  is much more fitting.

A man asks me if I have seen the Palmetto Palm near where the trail goes under a bridge.  I have not and when I looked for it, I did not see it.  He said he was making a study of the different types of Palmetto Palms (The SC State Tree).  There are mulberries fallen on the path.  And later in a sunny spot, a mimosa in full bloom and full lovely aroma, reaches toward the path.

May 16, 2012 Walking the Ravenel Bridge Back and Forth

Charleston, the Holy City (so called by some because of the many historic churches).  The Arthur Ravenel, Jr.  Bridge, dedicated in 2005, spans the Cooper River from downtown Charleston to Mt.
Pleasant.  Eleanor and Hanah both ran the Cooper River Bridge Run on the old Cooper River Bridge when they attended The College of Charleston.  Michael entered the poster contest for the run twice. His entries hang in a hallway of the Medical College downtown. John and Colleen's wedding
was held at Lowndes Grove Plantation on the East bank of the Ashley River near the Citadel.
Today I was on the bridge by 6:30 am along with a handfull of other runners, walkers, and bikers.
Low hung grey clouds were beginning to part with scraps of blue sky peeking through. I began from the Mt. Pleasant side of the river near Patriot's point, Ft. Sumter and Ft. Moultrie.  The view from the top is breathtaking.  I can see the old Yorktown over to the left and downtown Charleston to the right.  I call all my children on my cell phone and tell them where I am.  Soon I am on a kind of walker's high rounding the water fountains on the Charleston side and walking back up again toward Mt. Pleasant.  I meet two women with T shirts that say "Census" and "Airforce". They say they walk the bridge once a week. A thin bike rider with a neat white beard and an eye patch pumps bravely past me up to the top.  Back on the ground, I see a sign that proclaims: East Coast Greenway, Maine to Miami.

Here is an exerpt from a letter my great great grandfather wrote to his son, G.G. Welsh  (my great grandfather, Christopher's brother) on July 18, 1861:

My dear Son, I now employ my present moments in writing you a few lines informing you of the condition of our public and private affairs at home.  We are all well at home as far as I know, and hoping this may find you and your friends and associates enjoying the same.  You wanted to know the No. Bales of Cotteon.  About 110.  I had one stolen and have had no news of it.  Parker is gone. Jammon Gardner is my overseer and I think he has made a very good start and hope he will hold out.  My pork is not all killed yet.  We have had quite an exciting time of it ever since the ordinance of Secession was passed.  The Militia of our up country are almost daily on parade and the domestic interests of the country are almost entirely said down. The appeareance of the Harvest Lane in view of the Cartistonians, but first, the evacuation of Fort Moultrie.  Next the Harvest Lane and third the attempt of the Star of the West to reinforce Ft. Sumter all added to the excitement of the people.  But our crowning glory is the way in which our leaders and those in command acted on that perilous occasion......We will all be down soon if called for.....If I have to leave, the family may move to the village.  I saw Dr. R.V. Crawford one of our  Delegates to State Convention and he told me he did not know you were there.  I also gave him 50 dollars for you which he said he gave to Col. J.H. Witherspoon for you.  You ought to make youself known to all the men from Lancaster  Many of them would be proud to see you.  If you do right which I hope you will always try to do.  I told Dr. Crawford to tell  you to remain in Charleston until the  last gun was fired. A father's counsel - be diligent, be frugal, be temperate and be doing in every sense the best you can for you may use well  your conduct.  Your conduct will be closely scrutinized......All sends thus Love and affection to this.
Write soon. J. R. Welsh (John Rushing).

May 10, 2012 Confederate Memorial Day

Boofa and I walked five miles, noticing the great hills of fire ants that have come up after the rain.
The rain has also drummed the catalpa blossoms out of the trees and washed away the stains of the huckleberries from the walkway.  I am remembering my mother's grandfather, who was a surgeon's assistant in the Civil War and Captain Blackney, who was probably in the war and who loaded up his family and possessions in a wagon drawn by oxen and walked to Mississippi. He was then 65 years old. But I want to remember my father's grandfather who served in the Union Army in most of the great battles of the war, including Gettysburg and Bull Run.  I have his photograph.

And here is the photograph of Grandfather Baer,
Dressed in a suit and tie just like Mark Twain,
Even the straw Panama hat, the leather shoes,
Which lace up the ankle, an arch, a short heel.
He was a music teacher in Philadelphia
And before that, a soldier who came home
From Bull Run, Antietam and Gettysburg
Unharmed.

It is late summer, the first leaves have fallen
To the ground from the elm tree behind him.
There is the garden full of ripe tomatoes
And raspberries and even flowers.
I can see the tall spires of hollyhocks.

He is sitting on a bench made of thick twigs
Built into a sunburst design on the back.
And there is a little boy with him
Dressed entirly in white, except for
His tiny dark leather shoes. His hair is
Thick and straight, caramel with bangs.
The little boy holds his grandfather's thumb.

He is my father, long dead these thirty years.

May 9, 2012 Landsford Canal Lilies are Blooming

The Landsford canal in Chester and Lancaster Counties was a dam partially across the Catawba River and Five Locks designed by Robert Mills in 1820.  I approach by I-77 North from Columbia, exit for Fort Lawn (a woman I met named Fannie Fort told me that there was not a fort there, there was the lawn of a family named Fort), take 21 towards Rock Hill for about 8 miles.  This is still the real country.  We used to drive this way from Rock Hill to "down home" on Sundays to visit Mama and Papa and many aunts, uncles and cousins out in the country at Pleasant Plain.  I looked for the old store along the way owned by a man who introduced by mother and father, but it is gone or the kudzu has covered it  up.  The road has not changed much, there are some farm houses surrounded by pecan trees and huge magnolias, their size testifying to the age of the homes.  Near Mineral Springs road, a sign declares "Deer Skinning $20.00".  On the road side, there is purple vetch and miriad yellow flowers.  Another sign proclaims "Home grown greens and oats". A large brown State Park sign points down the road to the canal and it comes up in a few miles.  There is no one at the park, except a ranger I call down  from his second floor office.
He tells me he likes it this way, that it has rained all night and more rain is coming. That is why  no one is there.  There are restrooms, picnic tables, a children's play ground, a meeting house made of stone.  And there is a 1.5 mile trail along the river.  The forrest is wet and fragrant. Many blue spiderworts are strewn beside the path. After 3/4 mile you come upon a a wooden platform for viewing the Rocky Shoal Spider Lilies (Hymenocallis coronaria).  The sight is astounding.  The wide, wide Catawba is a kind of Garden of Eden. As far as you can see in either direction, the river is full of blooming white lilies (they are also called the Fall Line Cahaba Lilly).  They grow only in South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. Since dams have been built on the rivers, they have begun to lose their habitats.  Their roots require the craggy rocks on the bottom of the rivers and some of this is gone now. If you go farther down the trail, you will pass through part of an old stone mill owned by William Richardson Davie where they cut lumber and milled grain.  At the far end of the trail, there is a large part of one of the old locks and a sign which tells  you that you are on the "Great Indian Warrior Trading Path". This path stretched from the Great Lakes to Augusta Georgia and part of it includes the Nation's Ford of the Catawba near Rock Hill (up river about 13 miles).  There was a ford here as well and when the water is low, it is possible to walk across this very wide river.
The rangers used to take people, but now if you want to walk across, you must try to find out from Duke Power Company at what hours, the depth of the river will allow you to cross.  And you are on your own.
I drive away toward Rock Hill in a downpour thinking of the Native Americans who were stewards of this paradise and how they lost their lands, their hunting grounds, their medicine and philosophy, their very culture, their language and their religion and of the transgenerational trauma which follows them.

May 7,2012 Anne Springs Close Greenway

After seeing Liza perform in her school's production of Cinderella Friday night in Charlotte, I drove home down Hwy 21 to the outskirts of Ft Mill, through the peach orchards and into the greenway.
(There is a $3.00 fee for hickers), park the car near the restrooms and showers, the Rush Pavilion.
The restrooms have that summer camp in the woods smell.  At the beginning of the path, a sign tells you that you are on the Nations Ford (Occaweechi Path), one of the oldest and most historic routes in North America.
It was traveled by the Catawbas and the Cherokee from Virginia to Augusta before the Europeans came. In the Revolution, General Sumter camped his troups here along the path.  In the Civil War, the Conferate army marched through here to Virginia and Gettysburg.  Jefferson Davis came back this way in defeat.  The ford of the Catawba River is nearby and today, Nations Ford Road is a highly commercial byway in Charlotte where probably few people realize the significance of its name.
I hike around the lake named for King Haigler (Nopkehe, Artoswa, Oroloswa) chief of the Catawbas in the 1700's and down the Blue Star Path, back around the lake.  There is a tiny island in the lake with a big tree growing on it.  Three Canadian Geese have claimed it, honking.  When I was a child, the geese came south to the Carolinas in Winter and flew back to Canada in the spring.  Now they stay here all year long.  There are daisies and Queen Anne's Lace in the sunny places along the banks of the lake.
Driving down 21 again I stop at the Springs Peach Shed where my mother would take us to buy a bushel of peaches. We would eat them on cereal, on vanilla ice cream and even make homemade peach ice cream.  Now it is a bustling gourmet shop and restaurant, where there is a butcher stop, artisan breads and condiments from the world over.  The parking lot is jammed. The restaurant is full of people eating breakfast. There are lines to the cash register.
Generations ago, my great, great grandparents had a general store out in the country in Lancaster County where the orginal Springs Mills founder bought goods and paid for them in Springs stock
(his name was Springsteen then).  When my great grandfather died, he left his daughter the Springs stock and my grandfather the land.  The stock was quite valuable and Papa's sister and her family made trips to Europe. The children wore fine clothes which were handed down to my mother and her sisters.

May 2, 2012 Rocky Shoals Spider Lillies and Memories of Oshima

From the path between the Columbia Canal and the Congaree, you can see the beautiful white Spider Lilies blooming in huge clumps from the crevices in the rocks of the river.   These are a Federal Species of Concern and grow in only a few places, another being in the Catawba River at Landsford Canal in Lancaster County.  I walked the 3 miles to the dam and today there were 12 Great Blue Herons standing on the rocks as well as dozens of white herons camped on the shoals near the far bank.  I discovered that the old Lock Keeper's House has public bathrooms,  water fountains and even a stainless steel bowl for water for dogs.  On the way back, under the Broad River bridge there is a big red heart that says "MM and HW, Love Forever" and I am taken back to that far away time when Peter and Paul C. and I took the baby, Eleanor, to the Island of Oshima.  We had met Paul in India where he was a Fulbright Scholar and we were Peace Corps Volunteers.  We got jobs teaching English in Japan and Eleanor was born there.  We carved the baby's name on the rock face at the end of the Island and the date of her birth, June 10,  1967.  Paul went on to graduate study at the East
West Center in Hawaii and to Laos during the War in Vietnam and Laos where he disappeared.
He had had polio as a child and wore a brace on one leg. I think of that brace lying somewhere in the jungle of Laos.

It is 85 degrees. Leaving in the car, the radio is playing  "I've got this easy feeling that you'll never let me down, cause I'm standing on the ground.....I've got this easy feeling that I'll never see you again..."

April 29, 2012 Walking in the Full Tilt Spring

As I exit the front door I can see the three little Fly Catcher chicks sitting in their nest under the eaves, looking expectant and intelligent. Last week one fell out and was eaten by Big Cat.  Every year the Fly Catcher builds it's nest here, alternating the side of the door.
My clematis' are blooming (these are the flowers, my grandfather, Gapper, liked to tape measure every morning).  The yellow iris' I dug up out of the woods are in full bloom in front of my house in the sun. There was a house on this spot many years ago, so many that its gardens are now out in the woods, shaded by trees.  Surely it is a miracle that after 60 or 70 years, the dormant iris' are blooming and propagating again.
Boofa and I meet a mucular white bull dog named "Handsome" at the dog park. 
On the trail there is the vista of a new painting on the back wall of a warehouse.  It is fantastic. There is the large face of an Irish Wolfhound or is it Chewbaca, or Big Foot with a benevolent smile and pink lips. The face is also a high abutment of land overlooking the sea.  In the sea there is the Loch Ness Monster or another sea serpent and a gigantic fish.  From the top of the Wolfhound's head there are waterfalls.  One falls into the mouth of the big fish and the other drops down beside a mermaid.
A five mile walk and then home again where I see that the little chicks have found their wings and flown away.

April 28, 2012 New Things on the Rail Trail

Now there is a dog park on the rail trail.  There is also a big red and white port-a-potty for walkers and runners.  There were people from a church performing acts of kindness, giving out free bottles of water.
I took Boofa into the dog park where there were two beautiful, gentle adopted Grey Hounds with their owners. Boofa ran and growled and chased them (the dogs).  So we left. We'll try again tomorrow. Boofa needs socialization badly.

April 26, 2012 Nuked. Walking the treadmill.

"Does your dog know how to call 911?" the doctor asked.  I found myself full of radioactive isotopes, feeling claustrophobic as the imaging machine moved back and forth, singing "Old MacDonald had a Farm", going through the domestic animals, the jungle animals of South America and Africa and the creatures of the sea (sharks and whales) as well as the animals of the frozen continents, finally ending with "And on his farm he had a walrus" when the machine stopped.
The nurse practicioner said I did well on the treamill part.  I drove away with relief, listening to
Rasberry Beret and heading for a cup of hot tea (which cures about anything).

April 25, 2021 The Columbia Canal

Today we walked to the end of the trail at the Columbia Dam  The Dam was built in 1891 and is still in use today.  There were three great blue herons standing on the rocks in the mist from the spilling water.  Along the green canal, hundreds of turtles.  Now the trees are leafed out and it is more difficult to see the Congaree flowing along beside us.

April 18, 2012 The Three Rivers Greenway

From Downtown Columbia, take Gervais over the bridge and turn left immediately at the end of the bridge, then take an immediate left into the park.  On the right the New Orleans Riverfront Restaurant is for sale. By the river workmen are constructing a stage in the amphitheater for a band to play on the weekend.  Down in the wide wide Congaree, out in the middle of the river, two men are standing knee deep, fishing.
Riverside markers tell the history of the rivers:  From the mountains, the Pacolet, the Enoree and the Tyger flow into the Broad.  The Saluda flows into Lake Greenwood and then Lake Murray.  The Waccamaw flows into the Saluda. The Saluda and the Broad come together into the Congaree.  We are on the banks of the Congaree.
Today there are many dogs walking their people: golden retrievers, yellow labs, a brown labradoodle, miscellaneous brown-yellow dogs with black muzzles. Boofa drinks at the Gamecock Dogs Only water bowls.
A young woman runs by, slim, lythe, quick and sleek as a deer. She resembles those Somalian runners who consistently win marathons.  Her white T-shirt says "USC Track and Field".

Two men tell me to walk on the left side as there is a snake on the right.  I did not see it.
Dark clouds are threatening rain.  The  sweet heavy scent of honeysuckle floats in the air.
There is also the more cloying strong sent of the Spiraea Latifolia. This scent is like the
scent of some lillies.  There is one lovely sweet everlasting bush.

A sign tells of the steam boat called The City of Columbia which hauled lumber and other supplies from Columbia to Georgetown between the years of 1905 to 1916.

We walk the full three mile length and back.  Just as we get in the car, the rain falls.  There is a man with a long pony tail wearing a black brimmed hat, a gordon plaid long coat, white stockings and black shoes walking briskly toward the State House.

April 14, 2012 Blue Flag in the Red Wetlands Ponds

Cottonwood Trail again.  I took a tennis ball for Boof to play with.  He catches it and runs in big circles but won't bring it back until he gets tired of it.  We meet Lil'bit and her owner, an athletic couple walking, but who turn back to back and skip together to pass us, another runnning couple (the young man says as they pass "Have you been to Rome?", "Yes" she says, "Can you dance?" he says- I do not hear her answer).
I am shocked by the water in the wetlands.  It is a deep, deep red color, studded with the blossoms of wild white rose and blackberry.  There are huge clumps of Blue Flag Iris ( Iris Versicolor) growing in the water.  (these are usually found farther north on the east coast from Virginia upwards to Canada in marshes and swamps).  The color of the water may be due to iron leaching from the soil, but I grew up near the Catawba River where the banks and water ran orange from the iron.  This was the soil that the Catawba used to craft their unique pottery which comes out black and white after it is fired.
This day was the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.  It was launched on April 10.  So was I. That was my birthday and now I am 69 years old (I can't believe it).  I am not sinking yet. My mother was actually born on April 10 in 1912 on the very day of the launching of the Titanic.  If she were still alive, she would have been 100 years old, but she died two years ago at the age of 98.
I am still thinking of how to honor her.  I find myself telling her in my mind about the yellow irises blooming in my yard, the gigantic Knockout Rose bushes laden with hundreds of blooms.
In the grocery store parking lot, I spy a license plate on a SUV that says "IWALK18". Do they walk 18 miles?
Then I see a very fat woman dressed in a strapless white dress with big colorful flowers.  She is laughing loudly.  I love her on this loud, beautiful laughing day.

April 7, 2012 Croft State Park, SC

Camp Croft was an Army Training Facility until 1950 when it was sold in parcels to the state or to businesses.  It is a beautiful wooded area with two lakes and the possibility of "unexploded and dangerous bombs, shells, rockets, mines and charges above or below ground" so that you are advised to stay on the trails. Since 1950, no one has been blown apart there that I have heard of.  I took Boofa on the trail that goes off to the right from the boat ramps at Lake Craig.  Croft is visited by fishermen, campers and especially horse back riders.  There are mostly john boats on the lake quietly drifting while people fish.  Some trails are for horses and after rain become mud holes by the trampling of  horses' hooves.  The picnic shelters have electric outlets where you can plug in your deep fryer to cook up your fish.
Leaving the park we met two men in straw hats riding expertly on beautiful horses and speaking Spanish, they waived and turned their eager mounts in circles as we passed.

This part of the park is reached from highway 56 which stretches from Spartanburg to Clinton.
The park is perhaps 5 miles outside of town after the SC School for the Deaf and Blind.