Browns

 Farewell Henry Brown

Intaglio etching 

Farewell, old Coila’s hills and dales

Her healthy moors and winding vale’s:

The scenes where wretched Fancy roves,

Pursuing past, unhappy loves!

Farewell, my friends! farewell, my foes!

My peace with these, my love with those

The bursting tears my heart declare,

Farewell, the Bonnie banks of Ayr!

Robert Burns

It was this week in 1976 we were in Homewood, Mississippi for one of our too few family reunions. It was the last time we would ever see

many, it would be years before we saw many again. 

My cousin Jeanne Bradford Rowland would know the relation, but before we left to return to Williston with mamma, Lewis and Goliath in the Dodge van, we stopped at William Henry and Juliah Hettie Browns farm. I gathered they were

a huge influence in my fathers growing up in Homewood. Henry at the time was 81. He would pass on ten years later. Hettie was 79 and would live until 1992. Daddy would live until 2011, mamma 2017.

These are the lost stories of a past I wish I had somehow recorded, heard and known. 

All that’s left is a love etched in a zinc plate.

Seeved

 Seeved 

Again, for the umpteenth time, they told me, you need therapy, why are you always

So angry?

Could it be

You are not seeved?

So I made an appointment 

Secretly you see

I did not want anyone

To think I wasn't 

Seeved 

And needed secular

Therapy

He made me lay down

And I began to expound

It went back as far as

Sopchoppy 

The day Janet Trice

Tried to drown me

And no one came to

Seeve  me

So I'm not certain

If all along I'm alive

Or dead.

That cost me

One hundred and fifty.

Two towel man

 Two towel man

When I was young

There were two

I wanted to become

Superman and Tarzan

Tarzan for Jane

And Superman

For X-Ray seeing

I would wear two towels

One a cape

One a loincloth

I had not the luxury

In the sixties

Of Lycra or Levitation 

I had to use my 

Imagination

Gadarene

 Gadarene

They do not prefer me 

In my right mind

Clothed and calm

They prefer me chained

To the tombs

Frothing and cutting

My flesh

Grounded

 Grounded 

Shoes of iron and brass

It was always Otis dream to be out at the

Williston airport flying

But his grounding came in the marrying

Of a domineering Dawson

Perhaps it was not always so narrow

They tell that once Pearl was a smoker

I'm not saying

But sometimes the giving up the

Card playing 

The Saturday night dancing

The flying

Is but a long and terrible dying

Otis would come home sullen from

The Gulf station

Where the jovial jokes he was making

And silently listen

The sound of Pratt & Whitneys ringing

Over the Roloff preaching

It never quite sank in

And when the little Kelly took wings

On that Cedar Key bridge in that

Terrible Christmas of sixty-four

It all became too much for Otis

On that final day

Long before March of eighty

He topped off the Piper Cub

Checked the gauges by memory

Cut the joker wild from the deck

Did a Pelham jig

And flew off for eternity

Leaving Pearl

And the girls with

A fifty-one card pick up.

Song of Solemn

 The Song of solemn

Sunday's I would sit stoic-like

Listening to the expounding upon

Romans 

All the time the King James

Secretly open to the Song

Seldom turned to

Daydreaming upon

Foxes, the little foxes

Feeding among the lilies

Shadows fleeing away

Revealing roes

Flocks of goats

Teeth of sheep

Pomegranate locks

And I'd stop at those

Two twins

Returning to Romans

And the wages of sin

And sigh.

In dream

 In dream

Again I dreamed I was running 

with all my old friends

No incline too steep to not glide up

Strong and swift

And I would lift

the trophy overhead

Smile and wave to all those 

not dead.

Moniac

Moniac

Once in dawns first light

we’d saddle up for the

long journey

silent and steady

through the planted pines

past the old homestead

to the fork that led to

Sanderson

but we’d continue on left

the log trucks would pass

we’d warn, one back

then settle again

abreast across the Gum Swamp

no need for drafting

As speed was not a factor

We’d make Taylor

for the fig newton and Pepsi

break so brief

soon to turn right then left

 for the final long stretch

into the upper reaches of

way down South

to meet the cashier girl

without her own teeth 

in her mouth

And we’d know we’d arrived

In Moniac

sweet Moniac

So far away now

I don’t think I shall

Ever make it back. 

The789

 The 789

It’s how one measures time

What one awaits to find

Sabbath mornings with Tucker

By the time the clouds uncover

The hidden sinking moon

The rays shall melt the dew

Upon the St Christopher’s

In full bloom.

Reward

 Reward

For my entire life I’ve yet to have bread pudding as Mrs Mary Rudd in Sopchoppy made for me. I’m not sure if my first Sunday School teachers recipe is exactly the same, but it came from Sopchoppy and that is as close to the source as possible. Bake it and bring it to me and if it’s as Mrs Mary’s, I will reward you generously.

Williston

 Williston

I never tire of traveling the sixty miles the “back way” down to Williston. I recall the day way back in sixty seven we pulled in to the white wood parsonage on Noble beside the four goal court and the three story Methodist Church, school right next door. Coming from the crowded duplex apartment in Wilmore, Kentucky, we were in wonder.

Then years later, in the eighties, after we had moved to Lake City in seventy seven, I cannot describe the elation of meeting a nurse at Shands in Gainesville, inviting me down to teach her photography at her home in Williston. The little CRV covered the sixty doing eighty.  And so the good times returned to Williston.  I will always look forward until the day they take me out to Orange Hill, of returning to Williston, though lately it has been sad traveling. 

The Methodist Church on Noble with the tree my father planted.

Next stop

Next stop...the conductor called...forget me not...One and all...Faces pressed...Against glass darkly...Thinking of caresses...Whom we'd see....