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.