Flushed

It could be from the continual overcast and rain the past week, but probably that just tends to highlight the underlying cause. It is an effort of diminishing returns. After so much of this diminish, one begins to take inventory and see what is of value.
This blog is one example. After nearly three years and over a thousand posts bearing my soul in many, I still only have less than ten followers. The other is facebook. After garnering over eight-hundred friends, I still get less comments and likes than when I first began this venture.
The other is the gallery. After four months hanging work, I have sold one piece. That covers the cost of the rent.
I recently was looking at the top ten all time highest selling photographs. The top went for 2.6 million.
I also was looking at another photograph on Facebook with the story of an old house. 880 thousand likes.
It is a continual effort to discern what resonates. What resonates with me, old history, nostalgia, nature, surreal, mystery does not seem to have much of a following. There are a few of the old
timers, but mostly, including the poetry, is ignored.
Artists need feedback I keep saying, and I am just not getting it, at least in the realms I am circulating it. The question is, do I pull back all together and just keep it private, or do I change direction totally?
I am at a cross road. At times I think of moving from photography and back to painting and printmaking.
When the next three months rent at the gallery are over if I have not sold anything, I will not renew. Volunteering there is a pain anyhow as the Art Gallery board has set up too many rules and procedures for the normal volunteer. I think with all these heavy handed rules, the gallery will probably be short term.
I am musing, but like I have said in the past, since this blog has less than ten followers, it is primarily a vent, an outhouse if you will, to dump my pablum upon my little world.

Part 5 Of Strawberries, Bread Pudding and Sopchoppy

The last two years in Williston were times of joy and sorrow for our family. Spreading through the town was this new Charismatic craze and my father in his ministry was affected as well. A tent revival took place in Williston at the top to the hill with the evangelist Jimmy Strickland. It affected many families in the area, some for the worse sadly.
When my father started saying it is OK to raise your hands in praise, you would have thought he had gone into a full-blown tongues speaking diatribe. The chairman of the board, a local judge, would have none of this new found zeal. Thus, the cord or strife was struck and it was only a matter of time before it was time to move on. The beauty and the beast of the Methodist appointment system is the congregation if enough are dissatisfied can have a pastor removed. If those protesting are prominent enough, you do no even need a majority.
But by the time in June of 1977 it was learned we would be transferred to Lake City, my ties with Williston had already been severed.
Following two years from my high school graduation in 1973 to two years spent at Santa Fe Community College receiving my AA degree, my time in Williston was coming to an end.
Those final years for me were some of the best though, for in 1975, at the age of twenty, Dr ZT Johnson arrived for a revival. I was deep in a relationship with an older girl and my conviction of sin was great. As a pastor son I always thought I had immunity or an inside route to heaven. That clearly came crashing upon me while listening to Dr Johnson from the back of the church in the Sunday school room section. As Mrs Catherine Wilson one evening was singing Healing Love, I could no longer restrain my burden and as was the custom, mustered the courage to walk down the aisle and repent of my sin. My father I recall saying over me, It gives a father no greater pleasure than to see his own son come to the Lord.
Following the service I did the most difficult thing I ever had to do at the time and broke off the relationship with the older girl.
It was then that Dr Johnson, then the President of Asbury College offered me a way of escape, or a distance from the source of temptation. He said that I could come and live with him in his house at Asbury in Wilmore, Kentucky and attend Asbury.
It was an exciting prospect to return to Wilmore, the town we had lived in before arriving in Williston.
I had fond memories of Wilmore and looked forward greatly to my Junior year. After resigning from my loved job at Williston Memorial Hospital as a maintenance worker under Warner Morgan, I packed the yellow VW station wagon with 8 track and headed for Atlanta to spend the first night of the journey with my Uncle Curtis and Aunt Grace Stokes.
The next day afternoon I arrived in Wilmore to Dr Johnson's two story home on North Lexington Avenue. I was given the upstairs bedroom facing the campus. Across the hall was Keith Kempton, also staying with Dr Johnson. Behind Dr Johnson's was our old duplex apartment on Bethel Street where we had lived when my father was the Alumni Director and Director of Student Affairs in my 4th and 5th grade years. It was like returning home.
While I did not connect with my old twin brother friends Stuart and Steven Smith, also in the Junior Class, I did connect with many new found friends. It was somewhat more difficult to feel a part of campus happenings, not living in a dorm, but the time with Dr Johnson, having lost his wife earlier that same year, was invaluable.
I continued the study in Art and had two of the best professor's, Rudy Medlock and Edward Knippers.
My friends Keith, John Liddle, Richard Parker, Amy, Cathy and others had many grand days hiking Jessamine Creek, the fields around the college, Cumberland Gap and more.
It was a Spanish class that kept me from graduating from Asbury. Having never taken a foreign language, the class was too advanced and I received an F. I just did not see how I could recover from an F, having to take the class over.  It was in this determination of what to do that Dr Johnson said sadly Keith and I would not be able to stay with him the following year as his grand daughter Cindy and a friend were going to stay with him. I then determined to return to Williston and resume my job as a maintenance worker at Williston Memorial.
It was a long, sad ride home, driving straight through with three other students I was taking as far as Ocala, the yellow VW stuffed to the roof with luggage. I fortunately was able to return to the hospital where I took up mowing and painting, spending time with George Amica, Jeanette Faulk, my future father-in-law Gerald Hethcoat and Dick in the Lab.
It was my father who offered the answer this time, saying I could attend Florida Southern in Lakeland and receive a discount as a United Methodist minister's son. I applied to the summer term to re-take Spanish and set off again in the yellow VW for Lakeland. That summer while taking Spanish I stayed in a dorm and worked on the yard crew, mowing and pulling weeds around the Frank Lloyd Wright architecture campus. This time, the Spanish teacher, Dr Cologne was patient and at a pace I could comprehend well enough to muster a C. I was on my way to repeating my Junior and Senior years at Florida Southern.
Next....the Florida Southern Years....

Richard Martin Orander

I have no evidence, but could this be my grandfather returning to the scene of his mining accident for a photograph? He seems to be favoring the right leg, and in the background it looks like the narrow entrance of a coal mine shaft. The suit of clothing and the background just seem out of place. But in the early 1900's, the dress code was vastly different from today's standard.

Richard Orander

A most kindly man, I have faded memory, as he died when I was six on March 30, 1961. He was born November 12, 1887. He married my grandmother Carrie Ethel Dodson on  Dec 26, 1909. She was born March 14, 1893 and died April 19, 1969.

Dick Orander Comes

 

My grandfather Richard Martin "Dick" Orander with his buses. In the bottom photograph to the left was my Uncle Kermit, Richard's oldest son of two, the younger being Don. My mother Clara Jean was the only daughter, the apple of Richard's eye.

Dick Orander and the four mule team

My grandfather Richard Martin Orander of Bluefield, West Virginia in his early years in Virginia with his four mule team wagon. I assume the man to the right is one of his brothers.
My grandfather worked in the coal mines early on, but was injured. This led to his life work as an independent bus driver, owning his own small bus line from Crumpler to Northfork and Bluefield.

Cracker Part 3

Teas and brews from native plants and herbs supply remedies for most of the cracker's ills, although few households are complete without a drugstore malaria medicine, usually a volatile draught of cathartic and quinine to cure 'break-bone' fever. Panther-oil, when it can be obtained, is prized for easing stiff joints and rheumatism.
Superstition rules the life of the cracker; hunting or fishing or planting--almost everything he undertakes--is done according to accepted formula. He would no more set fence posts in the light of the moon than he would plant potatoes or other crops that mature underground.
Any windfall, or a considerable profit from crops, goes for an automobile, preferably a Ford, since the old Model T proved to be the most trustworthy on woods trails. His economic status therefore is known by his transportation, which falls into four categories: mule, Model T, Model A, and V-8; but the garage is the same, an open shed or lean-to.

Cooper Hawk

Today the Officer from the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service came by. He said Landon's license was several years old and he asked if he was still doing falconry. I had to tell him that he no longer had a hawk, that he was in the Air Force. It was a sad time knowing Landon is not communicating with us and the hawk pen is empty.

Cracker part 2

The cracker's wants are simple...his garden plot, pigpen, chicken coop, and the surrounding woods and near-by streams supply him and his family with nearly all the living necessities. Fish is an important item of diet, and when the cracker is satiated with it he has been heard to say: 'I done et so free o' fish, my stommick rises and falls with the tide.'
Any small income from his place is spent at the general store, and Saturday is the day to go to town and stock up with 'bought vittles'. His one luxury is tobacco. Snuff-dipping is still prevalent among the older womenfolk, though they scorn cigarettes as immoral.
from the 1939 Florida, American Guide Series.

Before Sixty-One

There is an old sharpening wheel I have from my father's place. I think I tried to count the rings recently in the large,heavy sandstone wheel and it was over seventy. At the rate it wears down with the sharpening of hoes and farm implements, it should last well into the next century, long after its metal stand has rusted away and we too, are long gone.
This very stone could very well have sharpened swords from the late,great war of Northern Aggression. We can only imagine at this point.

Gone the Fronds

I enjoy musing upon old Dixie and the South. Much of my reading material stems from this era and I am drawn to the old ways, always in search of some remnant from old Dixie. This is a fictional account of a soldier returning to Florida after a long journey home from the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia in April of 1865.

"It  was Palm Sunday and our long journey home was not lined with palms and shouts of joy, but littered with the charred stubble of cotton fields, the rubble of a lost cause strewn before us, not the Kingdom of Jubilee we had fought for, the old home place on her last breath of an iron-lunged re-construction. Not even old Gabriel the family mule to lift the joist to level the sunken porch, taken to bear the strain for the rogues now in control. In the overgrown grass out back, I bent and picked some of the wild hurricane lilies growing under the pecan canopy. I found one of the few unbroken jars and made an arrangement. It stood in stark contrast. But I knew the rubble called the South would some day, like these white lilies, rise despite the hurricane that came upon us, and bring again a beauty to the land of Dixie.

Water and the Word

Between the water and the word
There stood a mile of wood
Brother Eubanks would wax long
Long after our thoughts had turned
to water

This photograph is from the last visit Melanie and I made up to Hopewell
to visit with the Shining Congregation. We took Rocky along our old Golden Retriever to swim in the Suwannee at Cone Bridge. He enjoyed that.
We took the oil lanterns with us in hopes of capturing the inside of the church in a golden glow.
I could never get enough glow from them, so in the end resorted to an orange diffuser over the flash.
I told Melanie, if everytime we got it right, we would have no excuse to return.
So before long, perhaps in the fall when things cool and the myriads of biting varments are dormant, we will return and give it another shot.