Time was running thin as it was near time to leave. The deep fog was being burnt off in pieces as sporadic light entered. Viewing the sequence on the screen of the camera, it looked promising.
It wasn’t time to go, but is it ever?
D850 with 200-500.
Today Roscoe and I drove over to Williston to get some seed cane from Jack Whitehurst, who came to our parsonage the day in June of 1967 when we rolled in from Kentucky, with his brother Bill and sister Harriet, to welcome us and give us some watermelons. That makes them the Williston friends I’ve known the longest. Jack, Bill and I were in the class of 1973, my sister Paula and Harriet the class of 1970. I am really stoked that he is making syrup and in the generous Whitehurst way, is offering his cane to the Trenton FFA and others to help perpetuate the art of syrup making. It was also nice to see his wife Charlene, also in our ‘73 class. 2022
We moved to Williston in 1967 to the Methodist parsonage on Noble Avenue by the stately yellow brick church my father pastored for ten years. Across the street where Hardee’s is today was the two story Wilson home with a trailer park. Valerie Jones Blackburn lived in the little trailer by the road beside the service station with her tame mockingbird. She had a daughter Marguerite Davis and son Harlan. Her husband Henry died in 1958. I often visited her, for she was a painter and she would always tell me, I am praying you marry a Williston girl.
I would dismiss it for I’d run through my list of old girlfriends and most were hitched or getting hitched. We moved from Williston in 1977 to Lake City and Valerie died on April 3rd, 1978 at age 77. Her prayer I forgot. In 1986 my niece Jessica was in Shand’s hospital and her nurse was a girl from Williston my sister insisted I meet.
The day arrived and Melanie entered to check on Jessica and we met. Though I mustered courage to later ask her to go with me to fanfare and fireworks, she turned me down since she was dating a doctor. I thought, that was that.
But then, a full year later, I got this letter from Williston. It was Melanie wanting me to show her how to use her “cannon” she recently purchased. She had remembered the zoo pictures I took and taped on Jessica’s bedside wall. She had broken up with the doctor too.
I had just returned from finding a note in the bottle at St Marks wishing who found this the same happiness Bob and Carolyn White had found. The timing was beyond coincidence.
As I drove to Williston the following Saturday, I thought of Valerie and her prayer.
That prayer was answered January 8, 1988 at Whitehurst Memorial Chapel, just a Mockingbird call from Mrs Blackburn’s trailer.
john clare
On the day
They will pay
Coach two million
Yearly
Covering the seven
Million buyout
On top
Sat one wondering
How to make
Ends meet on
Poverty
Having to get out.
How it seems
So unfitting one
Should admire
The flowers
While all another
Can see are so
many
Flies
landing.
Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.
What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels,
Admit them, admit them.
DH Lawrence
I draw much inspiration from poetry, perhaps I'm an anomaly. This from Emily Dickinson.
From the chrysalis
My cocoon tightens, colors tease,
I'm feeling for the air;
A dim capacity for wings
Degrades the dress I wear.
A power of butterfly must be
The aptitude to fly,
Meadows of majesty concedes
And easy sweeps of sky.
So I must baffle at the hint
And cipher at the sign,
And make much blunder, if at last
I take the clew divine.
Zebra Longwing on Morning Glory
john clare stokes
How do we envision
Our ending
The color fading
With persistent
Yellow permeated
Long since pure white
Parchment pages
Turning toward
The Revelation
That it was more
Than just a dock
More than a mere
Walk
That to Orion
It leads
And Sallie pulls
Upon the leash
Knowing finally
Tonight the stars
We will chase.
Bill Chandler and Sallie
Watertown Dock before rails
Wildlife photography is quite easily addictive. First, you have unattainable carrots always dangling before you in the thought, you can make photographs like the guys and gals you emulate and aspire to. This in turn leads you eventually to fork out way more plastic than you can ever afford, in the hope, if only I had the same gear, I would arrive. But it seldom is so easy. There is no camera or lens out there that will put you on the level. I’ve been shooting since ‘71 and I’m still third shelf. Others I know have only been shooting less than 5 years and they are already top shelf.
It all should come down to, just enjoy the challenge of daily improving, shoot the daylights out, study, experiment, but mostly, enjoy it and don’t let it get you down you are not there yet. So what if you never get there. It beats golf.
Ava from back when even the rocks smiled out.
How exactly good it is
to know myself
in the solitude of winter,
my body containing its own
warmth, divided from all
by the cold, and to go
separate and sure
among the trees cleanly
divided, thinking of you
perfect too in your solitude,
your life withdrawn into
your own keeping
-to be clear, poised
in perfect self-suspension
toward you, as though frozen.
And having known fully the
goodness of that, it will be
good also to melt.
Wendell Berry
My life has loosely been
Defined
By going to take a hike
If it wasn’t along the
Suwannee at Bell Springs
It was often
Telling someone to
Go take a hike
John Clare Stokes
Ashes ashes we go round
Merry the circling spin
Joyful the lads sound
Pockets full of posey’s
Oh how the lasses grin
The blush of cheeks rosy
Breathless they all exclaim
Let it never end
Swift this ageless game
Youthful exuberance gone
Spent the wheezing bend
Slowing the frail hobble on
When to still silence all around
Well done my old friends
Ashes ashes we all fall down
