Alina's Adventures

Hanging out at Hurricane Creek before the clean-up.

Tulip trees 

When the King walked through the door at 5:45, I was ready to catch the sunset at Hurricane Creek. The kids were hungry, but I crossed my fingers and decided to see if the magic of a place might distract them. And it did. 

"Where are we going? What's the rush?"

"I want to catch sunset. I want to catch the way it intersects with the moon at Watson's Bend. I want to smell dusk and the first blush of tulip trees budding."

The King shrugged, changed from his work clothes, and hopped in the car. 

Micah at That Bench

On the drive. Micah reminisced about Mr. Jimmy Watson, and how he attended the clean-up and sat on that bench.

The bench that has become That Bench. Jimmy's bench.

She raced to find it-- her first stop. 

The girls watching Smoky Joe descend towards the creek.

Then back towards the tipi, where Smoky Joe was making his way down to the creek.  

The waters were higher than I've seen them at Clean-Up-- not beginner's waters but swift, high, voracious waters swirled by multiple eddies and rifts. 

John threw a few sticks and Smoky Joe retrieved them from the water. I don't think you realize how quickly water moves until you toss a stick and lose track of it almost immediately. Fortunately, Smoky Joe swims fast and knows his way in high waters. He retrieved two sticks before clambering out of the water to shake his fur dry. 

Micah wandering towards the tipi.

A mysterious yellow flower on the upper banks.

Moon rose behind yellow flowers.

John re-discovered a soft turtle shell from the year before.

The underside of the soft shell turtle.

Max can't stop laughing about Smoky Joe's antics.

The moon rose along the ochre cliffs.

Very high waters downstream from the Bend.

Sunset... setting the woods on fire.

Max regals Renee with stories of feral cats.

Milla emerges from the tipi to announce the first sparks of a kindling fire.

A fire that ended with laughter, joy, and gratitude. 

What you will see when you arrive-- John's tipi, brought from North Dakota to Tuscaloosa. 

If you can make it to the clean-up, please come. 

Learn more at the Facebook Event page. 

If you can't make it, please consider donating anyway to help us sustain the work of our Hurricane Creekkeeper in a very challenging time for waterways and water protectors. We need your help. 

Renew your membership or simply make a one-time donation online. We thank you. The water thanks you. The silent, ignored natural world thanks you. Our planet counts on us to preserve more than we destroy, and to honor more than pillage. 

Discovering a time when Leonard Michaels lived in Tuscaloosa.

Because I have never read a writer who can put so much tension in a single sentence and call it "prose". While searching for his essays online, I found a passage in Mary Ward Brown's Fanning The Spark: A Memoir, which describes Michaels' sojourn at the University of Alabama. 

All the exquisite writers who have walked along the Black Warrior... what would they recognize of our town if they returned? What unique history have been we preserved in the rush for Progress?

"I’d go mad with concern over semicolons. Conjunctions ruined my sleep. I wanted no needless sound in my sentences. I hated to use adverbs because of the “ly” endings. They seemed like sloopy trailers. They made the sense mushy and weak and artificial. I didn’t want to mean anything beyond what could inhere in the particular limited aural sensation. Idea and sound had to be exactly the same length, or the same density, as if a word could be flesh. That used to be my idea of real writing. Sculptural."

Personal rants aside, here is "The Lost Interview" from The Paris Review as well the relevant local history excerpt:

 

A paean to unpretty meadows.

I don't remember where I read that our conservation ethos is biased in favor of pretty places. Maybe it was Muir. Maybe the comment was actually about wilderness. Either way, it struck me as an unethical approach to conservation. Similar, in a sense, to deciding which kids should receive life-saving treatments on the basis of their good looks. 

I've seen this ethos hard at work in the case of Hurricane Creek, where some folks say the Eastern Bypass will be a boon for development. Then, behind a cupped hand, those same people whisper that Hurricane Creek is "a working class creek"-- and obviously "it's no Cahaba River". To preserve a wild area requires the discovery of some rare lily. Some impossibly perfect beauty. Because only the pretty people are worth saving. Only the tourist dollars count.

Which leads me to a poem. The poem inspired by the desire to honor a meadow, regardless of its economic value to so-and-so apartment magnate. To honor even the un-pretty meadows. To ascribe value to even the unsexy lives.

Today, the awesome Matrix Magazine published the poem in question-- "I Don't Think We Should Use Words Like Meadow Anymore". Here's the first stanza of my paean to unpretty meadows:

 

There is a meadow across from our subdivision which does not belong to anyone. There are no lawnmowers on this meadow where a coterie of crows conduct their general assembly each morning. There is a four-way stop sign but the stop looks ashamed and some say there is a ghost that haunts the meadow and what the stop sign feels is akin to dread.

Read the rest online.

 

Like historic preservation which aims to preserve the antebellum mansion without an eye for the dogtrot cabin made from nearly-extinct longleaf pine, conservation can be driven by the desire to save what rich people believe deserves saving. Preservation can be a way of maintaining social status. Certainly, the choices made by state historic preservation commissions determine what our children are allowed to value of the past. So it's debutante balls and fainting couches and Scarlett O'Hara swaying at the top of a staircase. Most developers do very well for themselves and usually, they are the ones who have a money-making plan for the meadow or creek in question. Oh Progress, thou art a fine and wealthy god indeed. A god of brass placards and community development. A god to which our politicians appeal again and again behind closed doors and in open chambers-- the god to which some consecrate the awful tornado of 2011.

Speaking of tornados, there's this book you should read (edited by Brian Oliu) titled, simply, Tuscaloosa Runs This. I'm about to start quoting from it. I'm about to agree wholeheartedly with Andrew Beck Grace (and perhaps the whiskey-scented ghost of Walker Percy) when he writes:

"I'm the Southerner who, like an anthropologist living among the natives too long, informs outsides on their customs, their rites, their rituals, their speech."

In other words, I may live here and hike here and dream my way through life here but I'm always a foreign entity. My "ain't" lacks a certain spittle. My "cain't" never could. So I'm not trying to be one of you so much as to feel and understand you-- to savor your BBQ ribs beneath a steel-plant infused sunset. Maybe even tell a true story. 

Which brings me to the post-tornado story. A true story that's jam-packed with traffic and development. When Tuscaloosa Runs This was published in 2012, the development hadn't quite begun. But a Camus-loving prophet by the name of Erik Wennermark nailed it. Probably not because he loved Camus but let's face it, Camus called it over Sartre every time and he had the grist of a good prophet. Three years ago, Erik wrote:

"When they rebuild, they'll rebuild ugly. More cookie-cutter student condos. New look strip malls, Panera and Starbucks and Best Buy. Yes, when they finally opened the Barnes & Noble in town I went too, but with great reservation. Tuscaloosa may have been dull at times and prone to exacerbate my alcoholism, but at least it wasn't like everywhere else in this country-- when I first arrived it could have just as well been El Salvador, so different and unique it felt to me. I fear when they rebuild-- if they rebuild-- it will be just another strip mall suburb along the highway. The same shitty stores in the same shitty architecture. Clean and modern and lifeless boxes dropped to earth."

Did he say the word "life"? Because I feel like that's what we were talking about. I feel like maybe I was saying a pretty life isn't the only one worth saving. A lifeless box is not an upgrade. A massive four-lane bypass is nothing but an opportunity to expand the craven, pathetic strip mall style deeper and deeper into the woods. Then over the creek. Forget grandmother's house because that place was 1,000 square feet and we need bigger houses. Faster cars. Blah blah blah you know where I'm going. 

The fact is simply this: I don't want to go there. I don't want to imagine my hometown covered in highways and byways and neighborhoods abandoned for the latest prefab "community". I don't want to smile and pray to Progress. I don't want to call rampant, ridiculous consumerism a "blessing". I don't want to lie to you and pretend I'm a satisfied citizen of this.

Because...... there are meadows. And because there are people who care about life. And because there are children who might care about life if they grew up in a town saturated with life. Not just roll tide life and tailgating parties but trees and creeks and slippery rocks. Simple, uncomplicated, naturally-existing life. Unpretentious, unpretty, un-manicured life. Yes... WILDlife.

There. I said it. 

Before I go wash out my mouth with soap, you should know there is a beloved meadow in Northport, Alabama currently under siege. You can sign a petition to preserve it here. And I can thank Amy LeePard for caring about life. And I can thank Roxanna Bennett for her sailor's mouth and the wide-open heart beneath. Thank you to all who work to save meadows-- and to all who publish poems about meadows to conserve or preserve the unpretty-perfects of the world. 

At the UA Arboretum with Suebee and Pops.

Suebee flips through The Tuscaloosa News which, of course, is not exactly the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She and Pops were thrilled to pose for this morning photograph in the front yard. Thrilled, I tell you.

Suebee and Pops came for the weekend last month, their trunk filled with toys and the backseat bearing a surprise visit from cousin Jael. The girls caught up on gab and bikes and pinecone tossings. 

We spent one afternoon traipsing around the Arboretum.

Okay, that's a lie. They traipsed while I hid behind a tree and worked on a fiction collection. When I say worked, I mean a strange combination of scribbling, editing, and trying not blur the ink by crying. 

The King took photos of what I missed. As Suebee started off on the trail, Pops ushered stragglers forward. 

Suebee tells Pat very clearly NOT to take photos of her hiking up the trail from behind. Having viewed the entire roll of film, I know for a fact that he refrained from taking rear pictures.

A beautiful golden flower filled with yellow stars. A face that could launch a thousand stories.

Among the missings was a dance performance at the open-air amphitheater.

Jael bops. Prophet looks cinematic. Gnome explores head-banging.

Clearly, there was booty-shaking which took place.

Let it be noted that there is nothing I appreciate like a good, mid-forest booty shake.

Gnome, Prophet, Sueebee, and Jael pose for a photo along the trails. Poor Prophet refused to apply chapstick around her mouth-- "it doesn't make sense, mom... my chin is not the same as my lips". So I had to formulate a term called chapped upper chin to describe the way the space around the lips gets chapped if you lick it during cold weather.  

They sauntered to the top of the treehouse.

A serious version of something in the treehouse.

My favorite version of anything. Because it happens to include Him.

And then this.

A stunning secret garden in Holt.

It begins with flowers out front.

Earlier this summer, the King snuck the kids to visit the home of a lovely Holt couple with brilliant green thumbs. 

The knockout roses demanded attention. None of the half-hearted blooms you find in my untended yard. 

"Flower faces", we call them.
Because-- what else?

Gnome wanders among snapdragons.

I remember the childhood feeling of being dwarfed by plants. Wandering through paths which grew like whorls in the bark of an old oak tree. Nature's natural lines are curvy, as, perhaps, ours should be.

Lettuce and maples and wonder.

The pond.

Lilypads... and koi hiding underneath.

Roses hold the dew like cheeks hold childhood's tears.

A testament to what can be done in a tiny yard.

I admire this couple so much for what they made after the tornado's wreckage. What they cultivated and tended despite the damage. So many days when I wish I had a green thumb- or, at least, the persistence and dedication to put a garden higher on the list of things to honor in life. 

The Eldest came home with a tiny stalk of a crown of thorns plant which has developed into a happy, boisterous, multi-stalk crown of thorns sitting beside our front door. Every time he waters it, I think of how our lives have been enriched with blossoms handed along by others. I will always be grateful for these small gifts that grow into something bigger.

"Goodbye Tuscaloosa", a poem by Bruce Smith.

I read the poem in a 2014 issue of Five Points and I spent all morning being struck-- and restruck-- by it. It's a beautiful paean to the time from 1998 to 2002 which Bruce spent in Tuscaloosa, "equidistant from William Faulkner, Otis Redding, and W.E.B. DuBois.... the axis of bourgeois ante-bellumism among the legacies of blood and blues."

Italics are mine, things that spoke to me, people I've known or imagined, places I've tasted, plants I've touched. The familiar re-envisioned in the wave goodbye.

Lee Bains playing at Druid City Brewery last month.

GOODBYE TUSCALOOSA 

Goodbye Rufus and Ditzy, Goodbye Don Dove, Goodbye Tim Early,
     Goodbye Bebe Barefoot.
Goodbye to the Brooklyn Jew-boos and the boys from Des Moines
     who wandered in their trail of tears to Tuscaloosa.
Goodbye to the Ur ovens of Woodrow's. I loved the slaughtered hog,
     the gloried grease, the human nature standing around,
     standing around the fire.
Goodbye to the state flower, the shredded layer of rubber
     the truckers call alligators.
Goodbye to my face in the window at night.
Goodbye to the songs I sang to you beginning in bright vocals
     continuing through licking to the dark lies
     ending in parlando where our burdens are put down.
Goodbye to those I could not understand and could not understand me.
     When you said, "Troy" I heard, "Charlie."
Goodbye All-American Storage and my birthright exchanged for a mess of
     postage.
Goodbye rained-on cardboard box. Goodbye corrugation--chart of my          heart.
Goodbye roach, you were my ontology.
Goodbye wind twisted in the Gulf and bitch slapped
     and spun through Tupelo
     and sent like the Po-lice to the homes of the poor.
Goodbye Druid City Car Wash whose spray was scrupulous to me at two
     ayem,
     whose mist was an exercise by St. Ignatius.
Goodbye to my face in the window at night.
Goodbye Blondel. Goodbye Aquanetta.
Goodbye, too, to the West Alabama Veterinary Clinic where I waited
     with the sick furred thing with the owners of Wabbles,
     L'l G'l, Dollbaby, Mrs. Pinkerton and Honey Bun
     for yours is the pure devotion.
Goodbye to the Crimson Tide fans who worshipped the hypermasculine
      for yours is the pure devotion.
Goodbye Mr. Vaughn of the 103rd bomber squadron, blind, kind, for no
      white reason.
Goodbye to the machinery of the horizon and the fried foods of Ezel's
     Catfish Shack,
     where I could taste my mud and slumber.
Goodbye crepe myrtle and the vertigo of the last hundred years
     when I lived here (there) George Wallace died
     the coach was fired and you were my alibi.
Goodbye three hours drive to M'fs. Goodbye elsewhere.
Goodbye red Camaro in a black bra. Goodbye hairdo as the Kabuki
     of the South. Goodbye blues.
          If there's a labial among y'all, let it be heard now.
Goodbye Alfonso. Goodbye Tyrone. Goodbye Stella. Goodbye student
     who prayed for me in my sin and affliction.
Goodbye freight train for yours was the pure devotion.
Goodbye nights of the fragrance I never named and days of noon,            tongue,
     and handgun.
Goodbye manners as tongue and handgun.
Goodbye unknown woman with a drink in her hand who burst through the        tea olive
         without spilling, walking in the back and out the front door.
     I kiss your Jack and coke goodbye.
Goodbye to the bird saying Preacher, Preacher.
Goodbye to the three legged-dog who suckled the twins, Tusk and Lou,
     who founded the town on snarl and hunger.
Goodbye to the dirty silence clarified. Here's my reparation.
     Here's my face in the window at night.
Goodbye to the 4X4's on lawns and the Pain Care Center.
     I became an orphan like you here (there).
     There was no shade for me under pin oak or magnolia.
Goodbye to the Black Orchid and your transvestites. Goodbye Miss
Mystery.
     I kiss your post-op lips goodbye.
Goodbye and thanks for the Jesus.
Goodbye Time as a pure form of sensuous intuition. Goodbye Immanuel Kant
     of Queen City Boulevard.
Goodbye Bible verse on the cash register receipt.
Goodbye pool hall, cabstand, pawnshop, and storm door company.
Goodbye He's as Rude as a Yankee.
Goodbye red velvet cake and ersatz rue.
Goodbye Little Zion Tabernacle Church with your brush arbor
          built from wood milled in the hollow
      and your darker than blue.
Goodbye bathtub covered with a mattress during the tornado.
     You took my form.
Goodbye tetchy, goodbye triflin', goodbye mama love and moonpie.
Goodbye my little scuppernong.
Goodbye interlocutor with the lost. I kiss you reluctantly
     as one kisses the forehead of the child
     whose fever will kill.
Goodbye to the Enola Gay of race, and to Mr. Vaughan, who flew in you,
     blind, kind for no white reason.
          Thank you for the two-dollar bill.
Let me lie down between Rama Lama's and Vinyl Solutions one last time.
Let me lie down between the porch and the battle reenactment,
     the bombers and the lambs,
     the bonfires and the birthplace of Sun Ra.

Wisteria growing through the tin shed cannot find me.
From now on the law against kudzu is lifted.
From now on I will be translated into this.
You were my Dollywood. I was your Judas.
     Maybe some Tara will save me.
I will look back.
I will become cold and salted.
I will go up into the morning, sometimes.
I will be measured. I will be shattered.

Mary Tylosaur concert at Kentuck Art Night plus Druid City Brewing Company this Saturday.

I think the French word for Mary Tylosaur is super.

The band played live at the most recent Kentuck Art Night in downtown Northport. For those unfamiliar with Mary Tylosaur, here's the skeleton as offered in an interview with The Tusk.

D.C. Moon: guitar and vocals, composer and music director
Sandra J. Hunt: lead and backing vocals, percussion and sass 
Celesta Riner: bass guitar and attitude 
Katie Grayson: keyboards, composer and sex appeal 
Robby Roberts: drums, percussion and general wizardry

When asked to describe the band's sound, D.C. Moon said: 

Noted author John Shirley had this to say: " ‘My Boyfriend is a Zombie' opens the fun rockin' first album by Mary Tylosaur, kind of B-52s meets The Ramones meets Southern rock, with some Cramps happening, too. And fans of my old friend D.C. Moon will recognize his distinct touch here, too, in guitar, vocals and ... ‘The Communists, The Martians and the CIA' (which is a damned funny song). Some vocals by Moon, most of the lead vocals are by the sexily deep-voiced Sandra Hunt. Check it out."

I think the French word for a hot pink guitar is incroyable.

I think the French word for what my husband kept wanting to do is dance.

I think the French expression for what they did is playing down the sun.

I think I'm not speaking French anymore when I say they rocked the spring night.

Free pinot, free oven-baked pizza, and good live music. A few French subtitles. Husbands who want to dance like robot puppets. Pink. Black. Whatever color comes up.

You can catch your own Mary Tylosaur this Saturday night, 8:00 pm, at Tuscaloosa's favorite place to show up beardy (or post-beardy, or pre-beardy, or recently-seen-with-beardy)- the treasure known as Druid City Brewing Company.

If you haven't spent five hours at the Taproom yet, the weekly schedule includes Live Trivia on Fridays at 8 pm and Open Mic on Sundays at 6 pm. Bo and Bob are the best- good people who brew delicious beer. Oh, and one more thing about Druid City Taproom: the saison never stops.

Two fun May dates for Tuscaloosa residents who love gardens and shrooms.

Can you see the frog hiding?

Our Isla is taking a voracious two hour nap while Gnome and Prophet chomp at the bit for her to wake up and play. I'm just happy she's sleeping so well and so peacefully. The girls and I discuss gardens and read a book about frogs. 

On that note, garden-lovers should mark their calendars....

MAY 16: Organic Gardening 102 (Druid City Garden Project)

They are also hosting an Organic Gardening class on May 16th. Register online- it is open to the public. Druid City Garden Project is looking for summer volunteers. Great opportunity for teens and college students.

 

MAY 17: Oh Shitake! (Sassafras Center for Arts and Environment)
On May 17th, locals can benefit from Jeremy "Wild Man" Crosby's incredible knowledge of plants, fungi, and natural life by registering for an afternoon workshop on how to grow your own gourmet mushrooms. Tickets sold by the Sassafras Center. Register online today. Incentive? First 25 registrants get to take home an inoculated log from the workshop - up to five years worth of mushrooms!

 

 

Innovation Fair at the Alabama Museum of Natural History.

Last weekend, we motored over to the Alabama Museum of Natural History to sample the sweet conceptual bones of the Innovation Fair. This hovercraft, built by UA students, was among them.

We started at the catapult-making table. The girls were eager to make their own catapults, though Gnome struggled a little to get her launchpad oriented just right.

Prophet crafted a fantastic monster bookmark torn straight from fabulist fiction.

The Eldest and Erin send their rockets for a first flight.

Meanwhile, pet snails Cheddar and Velvet look on from the sidelines. This glass jar is their traveling vehicle. If you have experienced spring rains with homeschooled kids, then you know it is impossible to keep them from collecting snails. In our house, jubilation follows rain- "flowers and snail hunts" the battle cry.

Upstairs, the exhibits included explosions and buzzes and beeps and all sorts of effects but none was quite so intriguing to the kids as the river table.

Gnome and I sat on the stairs and talked about the mososaurus who roamed this land-sea prior to us. What does it say about me if an extinct species is my totem animal?

Small people watch the hovercraft demo rev up its fans and engines outside.

Small people get distracted by presence of an ROTC rope climbing which crazy mom swings upon in her rope-unfriendly skirt and thus inadvertently legitimizes miscreant activity.

Dinosaur teeth are not really primed for popsicles.

Small (brilliant) people suggest that, in fact, ice cream is an innovation on ice crystals and therefore shouldn't we find some to admire with our mouths.

Last week of April events in Tuscaloosa.

Without further ado, note that an asterisk marks kid-friendly events. That's not to say kids aren't welcome at all these events but only that kids might be more welcome at some events rather than others. 

APRIL 25TH, SATURDAY

Slash Pine Press Writer's Festival 

 

APRIL 26TH, SUNDAY

Innovation Fair at Alabama Museum of Natural History*

 

APRIL 27, MONDAY

"Love's Labor Lost" film screening at Bama Theatre.
Presented by The Hudson Strode Program
in Renaissance Studies.

 

APRIL 30, THURSDAY

"13 Paintings" by Marc Burnette
Opening Reception at The Abbey
131 41st Street South in Avondale
Birmingham

Morning Drive: A paean to Alabama Public Radio.

While the King was dressing for work this morning, the public radio's annual membership drive drifted over my half-sleeping head. Since April is National Poetry Month- and because I woke up in a world of familiar soft voices- I penned a quick paean to APR which added so much value to my life as a child and continues to inspire my adult version.

sunlight in slivers and slants
golden meanish
geometry of car interiors
glimpsed from a familiar backseat
home between silent scandals

on the morning drive to catholic school
the stories i remember are curious
and calm public radio voices
never at odds with what
sunlight can do if only
we listen

dropped off in a classroom of giggles
and whispers, a baroque brocade
edged with babysitter’s club, barbie talk, who
did what and now the boys don’t like her

now confess: i held the morning drive
against ornate pidgeon voices that made life less

wonder if it's wrong
to believe alabama public radio
enlarged a world that often felt
classroom contra world
too little

 

To support Alabama Public Radio, take a few minutes to make the call this morning or visit their website. There are so many ways to help. Patronize the local businesses that help keep APR running. Donate your used car. Donate stocks. Or earmark birthday money for grandchildren and join the Leadership Circle. I think it would be such a cool gift to receive as a grandchild- to be a member of the APR Leadership Circle and sustain the radio programs that linger in childhood memory.

Exploring Sanders Ferry Road.

Stopping along a very windy dirt road along Black Warrior Road, the Eldest bundles up. He spotted an American Kestrel a few minutes after I snapped this photo.

A nodding donkey took a nap nearby.

Our field trip to Sanders Ferry Road was inspired by the Alabama Birding Trails website, a terrific resource for birdwatchers and nature lovers in general. The West Alabama trails map included a myriad of local nature study hideaways but the Sanders Ferry Road inspiration came from a post on the Bird Talk blog.

The afternoon light didn't add red shades to the ashy white palette of the field.

An unidentified bird with a large wing span dipped through the shrubs. Can you see it hiding? Well-camouflaged, isn't it? 

Prophet beat the Eldest to the deer track identification. We thought it might be a hind foot.

Imagine the bales.

Late winter colors along Black Warrior Road where a man stood in the road and stared us down until we drove away. Nature study can be quite a risky endeavor in a state where property rights trump human rights every single time.

GPS coordinates for Sanders Ferry Road: 33.1645525 -87.6788507

Plug in, pack the binoculars, and tune out the media out. And here's some interesting local history for the Sanders Ferry Road trip:

News article about Old Sanders Ferry Road six miles south of Coker (Tuscaloosa News, 23 July 1989)
Matthew William Clinton explains how Sanders Ferry Road was involved in Tuscaloosa's earliest recorded history (Tuscaloosa Early Days)
Druid City Bicycle Club rides this way

Exploring the nasty red pond in Cribbs Mill Creek watershed.

After the Eldest and E. sampled and tested the water at what they called "Red Pond", we entered the data online at the World Water Monitoring Challenge. The results weren't pretty-- the PH low as 1 and impossibly high turbidity.

Latitude and Longitude:  33.183157, -87.494773

The King wanted to see for himself so we set off to find Red Pond again, this time by foot. The Eldest debriefed him on the parameters- this is part of the Cribbs Mill Creek Watershed which has a watershed management plan and the problem area is right next to a massive storm drain in Lakewood Circle.

The Eldest took us through the woods between Cherokee Hills and Lakewood Circle. We entered just after Hardy's property and hiked our way through the underbrush.

Oh man.

Gnome kept getting snagged by thorns.

When we came out of the thick underbrush, we were behind the big kudzu patch in what looked like a fairway.

Granted, finding seven golf balls gave us the fairway impression. The girls "hunted eggs."

Poor Gnome was distraught at only finding one- "everyone else found balls but me."

There was something metallic, shiny like gasoline weeping from the creek beds further downstream. My pictures aren't very good but you can see it here- looks white because of the light.

A foot further, the banks have a reddish tint where the water empties into the creek.

And here it the gasoline-looking fluid is sitting in a marshy area. I wish I'd taken better photos...

Further downstream, where the boys like to build dams, the water is still ruddy and the smell is sewer or sulfur.

The view still further downstream, moving towards the lake in Cherokee Hills.

Hurricane Creekkeeper John Wathen said it looked like an iron seep but needs to put eyes on it. I am so grateful for everything I've learned about waterkeeping as a Board Member of Friends of Hurricane Creek, and the way this education has involved and included my family and children. The world is a better place to the extent that we invest in its care. And there is no investment without knowledge. 

So the story continues...

A morning in the life of junior waterkeepers.

The Eldest and E. were dressed, fed, and out the backdoor by 8 a.m. this morning in pursuit of a noble cause. Last night, they regaled us with stories of a "disgusting, blood reddish pond" in the woods abutting Cherokee Hills and Woodland Hills. They were determined to investigate further this morning.

By the time I rolled out of bed and doused my face in coffee, the boys had returned- "You've got to see this!"- and convinced me to hop in the spaceship and drive over to Lakewood Circle to photograph the curious pond. I parked on the street and crossed my fingers that no one would report us. 

We entered the woods just past a water drain.

"Watch where you step," warned the Eldest. The kudzu hibernates during the winter but everything we see (and every step we take) is a mass of kudzu come summertime. Not what you'd call firm ground.

The Prophet and Gnome walked down the slippery slope, eyes peeled for holes and loose soil. They wanted to throw sticks into the "bloody water."

The boys were right. It wasn't pretty. And it came straight from the stormwater drain.

You could see the high degree of sedimentation just beneath the orange skein.

After having followed the water upstream and downstream, the boys had their theories. E. mentioned a possible sewer line spilling into the woods. We concluded the storm drain near the street was the probably source point of pollution.

Looking downstream from the pond.

The Eldest pontificates.

"Shouldn't we map out the watershed so we can see where all this is going?", I asked. The photos of watershed landmarks come in handy when map time rolls around.

The boys wanted to follow the water back to Cherokee Hills so I hiked back to the spaceship (which hadn't been towed) and drove back to wait for the budding waterkeepers.

"The water looks super yuck!"

Back at the castle, a hapless queen scoured the web for answers. The coolest geologist in the world (cough, Anne Wynn) gave us a clue- the boys were exploring the Cribb Mill Creek Watershed. And what do you know? A google search gave me the Cribbs Mill Creek Watershed Management Plan. The boys returned anxious to test the water and see the watershed plan. Cowabunga, let the good times roll.

We're off to test the water with our water testing kits. The mischief-maker in me says why not leave a geocache near the nasty pond to encourage others to bear witness but the fine, upstanding mom in me says what if some fool gets hurt. Who knows which side will win?

Rust a relic of Darden Cemetery.

Why not take our sketchbooks to a tiny cemetery and see what falls on the page?

As a prompt, the kids "collected" nouns- everything from oak leaves to infant tombstones. The Eldest settled into leaves and quickly began sketching the peculiar lineaments of lichen on stones.

Prophet copies the letters from gravestones- she feels confident when copying letters because they don't flip around on her as much. What is more difficult about dyslexia- the lagging behind on reading curves or the sense that letters play tricks with you, a fundamental mistrust of the written word?

Gnome abandoned her sketchbook to chase a squirrel. Something about the shadows and the silhouettes of a four-year-old's sketchbook wanted to become a story... but there is not time enough in the universe for all the stories I want to tell.

Upon her return, Gnome attempted various sketches before getting frustrated that her drawings "didn't match." The eraser washed across the paper.

"It doesn't have to match," I said, "just to capture the way you see it." Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

The Eldest sauntered through a corridor of graves and paused briefly to remind me how easy it is to get frustrated- and how hard to crawl out of it. There are moments when he takes life in stride (this one) and moments when he stomps hard enough to hurt.

The fence captivated all four of us so that we found ourselves sketch-collecting it together. Four people scrunched down like pinecones catching the fence from different angles.

I wondered who made the small fence- it didn't look like anything I've seen around Tuscaloosa- maybe a small business that passed away. Is there irreverence in attributing death to a business, in saying aloud what we believe at heart- that the life of a business bears more value than the life of children whose mothers raise them alone, scrimping every penny, worrying about whether they can afford the power bill this month?

How will they blend their colored pencils to capture the vagaries of rust?

We collected nouns and marveled over rust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, those with enough mullah may also earn rust.

The old cattle barn in Hurricane Creek Park.

Fred Fisher, the husband of Angelynn Parks Fisher, spent many happy days at Hurricane Creek where his father-in-law, the late Stanley Parks, owned a large chunk of property. Upon the death of the late Stanley Parks, this property was sold to the Trust for Public Land, a land trust, for the purpose of fulfilling Stanley's wish that the public enjoy this land for perpetuity.

This area is known as Hurricane Creek Park, though the Friends of Hurricane Creek (disclaimer: I am on the Board of this organization) would prefer the name be Stanley Parks Nature Preserve. If you walk the trails, you'll discover all kinds of stories. 

The North Loop leads through the area where Mr. Fisher once raised a barn and kept cattle.

You can recognize the premises by the mossy fence and the massive old tree, a survivor of storms and incubator of stories.

The relics of remain to be interpreted. Once upon a time, there was a barn built painstakingly by men to house and nurture cattle. 

A tornado whirled through and demolished the barn and the workshop, the hallowed family places and spaces, pockets of nature that begin to feel like home. What you see is the remains-- what looks like junk from here is the skeleton of a family story.

What was this? What can we read beyond the rust? How do we keep the past from haunting us by its incompleteness?

After roaming through the old stable area, remembering Mr. Fisher mentioned horses- horseback rides through the woods at family events- I think of how much care we put into places that disappear. How much we hope in our hearts that someone will keep these places from disappearing completely. How only stories keep breathing when material expires.

The Eldest looks for tadpoles in the lake created by Mr. Fisher as a watering hole for the cattle. If you're looking for stories written in trees, visit Hurricane Creek Park and wander through the North Loop. Do it for the late Stanley Parks, whose family left this land for you.

Thoughts on a late winter stroll through Hurricane Creek Park.

It's almost that time of the year when everything begins blooming at Hurricane Creek, and each walk brings encounters with new forms of life.

We took Bunica and Gary along the bike paths this weekend... because they'd never hiked the creek before and the weather begged us into the woods.

Paused for a precipitous view near a woodhewn bench. The water was high- perfect for paddling. "May God remind us greener grass is not cleaner grass," I think.

The kids gaze down at the creek, listen to the water churn over the rocks. We can count on the neverending jazz improv of Hurricane Creek's riffles.

"Look mom, it's a shelf fungus!" Our necks crane skywards, climbing the bark of a dead pine.

Drawing closer, the color is soft, the impressions feather. Watercolor or gouache. Pastels. 

How one hefty shelf captures a falling gymnast, a piece of pinestraw performing a perfect split.  

I have to admit that I kept hearing Amy's voice over my shoulder- and missing the time we spent exploring together with the kids. Hurricane Creek is one of our places but it doesn't strike me so poignantly until I'm there without her.

And then it strikes me again when I see something that would make Amy laugh or else just groan.

At which point I realize, again, how little time in the world for all the people I love and value. The people-I-love commune dreams return... how perfect to have everyone near enough that a holler would be all that stood between us.

Unable to hold people near, I wave from faraway, beckon "come here", whisper "look here, see what we found", and hope somehow that the spirit of love and friendship moves from one open palm to another, sustained through the seasons of life.

Cause the ice skating rink melted.

Last night's torrential rains brought down branches and created new "creeks" in the woods behind our house. There's no time like the time after a big rainstorm watch watersheds in action.

S. and Prophet try to zip up their coats.

S. flashes a debonair grin while Prophet shows off her riot grrrrrin.

J. demonstrated a slight bit of jealousy when presented with the King's outrageous Zappa.

For every lovely moment in life, let there be green porta-potties in the background.

There was the seven square foot jagged rock with puddles in certain portions that captivated the kids. I don't know how many times the climbed the rock, teetering to and fro, looking like they might bust their heads, and then pooling all the energy to let out a passionate "yaaaaaar" and leap from the side of the rock onto the gravel below.

S. atop said gnarly rock.

Be still, my heart.

Little G. and his amazing, expressive eyebrows.

Little G. won't take no, maybe, or later for an answer. He follows his geist.

They are wild, unruly, wacky-yum-yum, and really cute to their parental units.

Coryell Casa holiday playlist.

Anna and Prophet thought this was the silliest tree on the tinsel trail.

When it comes to trees and holiday decor, it's all a matter of perspective-- all about how we decide and agree to look at things. 

And while we're looking at things, don't forget to sit and savor the moments. Nothing is perfect. Presents don't replace presence. And love is an ongoing story..... Sing it.

Because everybody needs a holiday playlist.

Roamschooling Greenwood Cemetery in Tuscaloosa.

The historic plaque at Greenwood.

After reading a few poems at the downtown Dunkin' Doughnuts and meeting a man from Gujarat who longed to return to the bright colors and unanxious life of his Indian homeland, we wandered over to the Greenwood Cemetery. According to the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society:

Greenwood is one of the oldest cemeteries in Tuscaloosa County, having been laid out shortly after the first survey of the city of Tuscaloosa in 1821. In it are the graves of many of early Tuscaloosa’s most prominent citizens. Among those is Dr. John Drish, a famed doctor and landowner, and Solomon Perteat, a prominent free, black craftsman who lived in Tuscaloosa prior to the Civil War.

Only grass covers many of the older plots of African and Native Americans and white settlers. 

Greenwood is the final resting place of five veterans of the American Revolution as well as more than 2,500 other individuals in marked and unmarked graves.

The bitter cold left us prey to a sun with teeth. Prophet, Gnome, and the Eldest wandered through the cemetery looking for their favorite gravestone. It was intriguing to see the difference in their preferences. 

Prophet's favorite.

Prophet liked the "big ones with entire families." She said there was something "kind" about being buried side by side with parents and uncles and aunts. She also got very upset when she found "baby gravestones" tiny as cereal boxes. I read the dates- one of which went back to 1867- and showed her the mother's grave nearby. Both the baby and the mother had been buried on the same day. 

She wanted to know why. I told her about the influenza pandemics and how mothers sometimes died during or after childbirth when midwives were unable to attend their labors. Winter babies were especially vulnerable. The Eldest walked around to check the months on the baby graves

The Eldest said this one was his favorite for the fabric draping.

Gnome was busy pouting and declined to select a favorite. But this one was cool.

Pick a gravestone writing assigment.

The Eldest had a creative writing assignment. He was responsible for selecting a grave, writing down the name and date and significant details, and then creating a story about the person's life based on historic context- historical records of what happened during that time in Alabama history. The historic context would include wars, epidemics, fires, economic development, environmental hazards, legislation, etc.

I can't wait for him to share the imagined history of Permelia S. Weger with us later this afternoon.

Other interesting historical gravestones at Greenwood include:

Solomon Perteet (1789-1863)
George Whitfield Crabb (1804-1846)
 Confederate General Phillip Dale Roddey (1826-1897)
Marmaduke Williams (1774-1850)
John Mason Martin (1837-1898)
The Leland Family 
Sallie Ann Swope
Jack and Jerry Winn
Dr. William Banks (d. 1877)
Richard C. McLester and family
James and Thomas Maxwell 
Captain Benjamin T. Eddins 

An opportunity to learn about the history of Druid City this December 3.

This semester, thirteen students enrolled in “The Nineteenth Century City,” an undergraduate course taught by Dr. Sharony Green of the University of Alabama’s Department of History, searched for “the nineteenth century city” in Tuscaloosa. The results of their efforts will be presented in a 12 minute documentary music video. 

As the students walk through downtown, they appear to be in awe of the idea of “the urban space “as much as they are in awe of the details on dwellings that date back to the nineteenth century like Christ Episcopal Church and Depalma’s Italian Restaurant, formerly the First National Bank.

Join them at the Jemison Mansion on Wednesday, December 3 at 5:30pm where they will continue their commitment to learning about emerging urban life, not only in Tuscaloosa, but America. It provides an opportunity to not only hear great music and see a student video-documentary, but an experience in an incredible mansion that paints the picture of Tuscaloosa’s past and present. Dr. Robert Mellown, a renowned retired UA art history professor, will be the keynote speaker. He will also stay after to sign copies of his latest book The University of Alabama: A Guide to the Campus and Its Architecture.

Pumpkins and costumes and creative loafing.

She told us they were called "troll homes".

It's been a fantastic past week with everything from pumpkins to leaf hunts to this afternoon's backyard wild leaf chase. All Hallow's Eve is upon us, and I can't decide whether to be one of Serge Gainsbourg's mistresses or the daughter-in-law-you-dread-having. Both costumes are easy ones to pluck from my closet.

Fall colors at the pumpkin selection in Northport.

Gnome balances a troll home on her head.

Funky, gnarled squash.

Gnome samples cool squash.

Everyone picked out their own mini pumpkin for our annual dysfunctional pumpkin family. Now for the rest of the rigamarole. 

Father's Day.

Father's Day was uniquely uneventful this year. Going into our second week without a dryer, the King meditated about various and sundry things while hanging out four loads of laundry. "There's something calming about having to hang everything, then wait for it to dry," he confessed later that night, comparing it to construction work and the way he'd get lost in manual labor. 

Bunica brought by a delicious soup, thus sparing me the opportunity to start fires in the kitchen.

When we took a sunset stroll, the King found what every 21st century father needs most- something to climb and no good reason to refrain. 

So being a father is the weight of the world and the lightness that comes with lifting it high in the hair and hearing it giggle.

It's looking down at the tracks laid by others and wondering if there isn't some heartbreaking limit in the places we can go if we agree to follow them.

It's knowing you can't fix the past but you bear a responsibility for the future.

For what you sow and how you sow it.

It's teaching your son how to love himself outside the emotional and spiritual confines of gender roles and assumptions. Discovering new paths and giving him a sense of self strong enough to sustain the adventures.

It's watching your daughters breakdance on a bridge and not feeling the need to "show" or teach them anything at all- only to watch them and learn from their joy.

It's knowing deep in your veins what Wendell Berry meant when he wrote:

We have ourselves to fear.
We burn the world to live;
Our living blights the leaf.

It's knowing all these things without knowing the sort of simple answers given by ideologies or self-help books. Learning to read the runes scribbled in spray paint. Finding yourself in what you leave behind.

A snapping turtle egg at Hurricane Creek.

A tiny snapping turtle egg found at Watson's Bend.

While helping to cut and move privet and other invasive plants along Hurricane Creek, I stumbled upon something that looked like a perfect little pebble.... and yet, there was a translucence or fragility about the creamy exterior.

So I grabbed my camera- which gave me one measly photo before demanding more battery juice- and snapped a picture. The closer I drew to the pebble, the more clear it became that this pebble was actually an egg.

When I asked other volunteers about what sort of egg it might be, Curtis scratched his head, peered at the egg, and then told me it was probably a snapping turtle egg that didn't get covered very well. Curtis didn't think the egg would survive and manage to hatch.

An hour later, the Eldest and Ellie emerged from their morning-long swim in the cool creek waters to describe having seen a teeny baby snapping turtle wallowing through the sand-gravel bar. In the Eldests' words:

"It was speckled, and looked alot like a rock. But we could tell by its bright back and litle legs that it wasn't a rock. The baby snapper had a teeny head with a teeny beak. We inched up closer in the water and watched it swim around. Then it settled again, laying belly-down flat on a rock. I doubt a predator would have been able to see it."

I only wish I could have seen it, too. Part of me thinks that little egg might survive in spite of the odds (they call that part "the optimist"). Maybe we'll sneak over to Watson's Bend early in the week and see if the egg has moved or cracked.

Thoughts on shadows through a shutter.

A walk along the covered overpass to Arcadia Elementary.

Even Aristotle knew that darkness is defeated by that tiny shard of light that squeezes through a small hole in the closed window shutters. 

And that the image of any object standing in liminal space between sunshine and shadow projects itself on the wall of a room, reversed.

We mistake the projections of the camera obscura for something concrete. I guess I'm just not sure yet whether that is the willingness to entertain our own illusions is tantamount to self-delusion.

Sunday silhouettes and cloudscapes.

What began as a plan to play basketball turned into an afternoon of cloudscapes. Looking up at the clouds and each other from the vantage point of a dandelion.

The King settles into a brief observation of Cumulus mediocris. 

Nothing occurs without a context. Our context was clouds- and the study of weather and sky Prophet declares her favorite to be the cumulonimbus- the one which portends a promise of thunder and lighting. 

She prefers the name "thunderhead". And she asks the Eldest, again and again, to tell her about the anvil at the head of the cloud and how it predicts the direction in which the storm is moving.

For the Eldest, the clouds make it hard to concentrate on other things- things of this world, things like basketball games. I like the way he prefers not to fight the daydreaming sky, adjusting his plans as needed. He's a person who acknowledges the leverage of a cloudscape.

Gnome sits astride the elephant and shakes it with her tiny arms. The effect is one of dispersion- each wave a break too soft to crest. The scattering and dispersion creates its own forms. Hail, little Gnome, ye shaker of clouds and creator of cirrus-scapes.

Each of us has his own way of interacting with the clouds. I incline towards the clouds- hoping to somehow scoop them into my body, where their mass mobilizes them into new shapes, always the yearning for new stories. 

"Tell me," I say to the Eldest, "which cloud formations strike you as the most stable and the most unstable."

"Sure," he begins to point and pontificate. Then he asks if I'm worried about the weather, or why I want to know.

"I don't care so much for the stable formations," I try to explain that the unstable clouds are the ones I want to follow, the ones which will eventually be forced by their own inner dynamics to spill into stories- some involving rain and backyard vegetable gardens, others revolving around the way pressure changes and reconfigures us as less than massive. 

"Wait", a poem by Galway Kinnell.

Art by a student of Westwood Elementary,
on display at the Bama Theatre.

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair, music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Searching for Franklin Daugherty and his Isle of Joy.

Franklin Daugherty’s wry Isle of Joy pits boosters against historic preservationists in Mobile. Excellent characterization that brings Lee’s Smith’s sardonic touch to mind, though Smith never manages to create a character as thick as McCorquodale, who admits, “Interior decorating was not leading to my full individuation”. It was one of my favorite books last year- one that situated me squarely within the social status seeking of the Alabama leisured set. 

Publishers Weekly offered the following summary review:

Sexy, iconoclastic McCorquodale de la Rouchefoucauld (the natives say ""Roshfookle""), the niece of a poor woman obsessed with uncovering proof of high-born lineage, is convinced she is ordained to be the savior of postmodernism. When H. Sloane Wolfe, a sexually predatory, socially prominent sexagenarian banking tycoon, falls in lust with her, she determines to parlay his attentions into her own avant-garde sidewalk cafe, which she hopes will be the cornerstone for establishing Mobile as the New World Mecca of postmodernism. Her plans run afoul of a group of nouveau-riche young Rotarian types who hatch a scheme to level the historic district and build a supermall and a ""Six Flags Over Jesus"" theme park. As the new South meets the old South, it's not exactly a case of the barbarians versus the cultured, since just about everyone who has something to say is more pedantic than intelligent. But Daugherty liberally salts his tale with subplots and themes involving greed, petty social ambition, artistic freedom, gay rights and Bible Belt puritanism. Happily, earnest social commentary never gets in the way of vigorous burlesque

The Isle of Joy is a remote southward island discovered in the 1870’s by TC DeLeon, a Jewish novelist and Mardi Gras enthusiast. King Felix III lived on the Isle but undertook an annual voyage to see his Maubilian subjects for three days of “misrule” and set sail at midnight of Shrove Tuesday to return. Much of the plot weaves through the local folklore and self-made mythologizing of the Sunbelt types and "suburban polyps"- the same suburban polyps whose penchant for extensive commuting and strip-mall shopping causes the "proliferation of parking lots" bemoaned by Daughtery's protagonist. 

The real conflict emerges over schemes for downtown revitalization that somehow demand massive expenditures involving the Ten-Tom Waterway. The Tuscaloosa Eastern Bypass- with its plan to build six bridges through a public park dedicated to Hurricane Creek- was not far from my mind as I read this book.

Daugherty makes it clear that "convenience is the code-word", a far cry from the traditionalism espoused by lovers of local history and sustainable farms. The "terrible nightmares of elevated expressways” and “supermall schemes” run far too close to home to keep me from squirming a bit. Like the motto of the Hamburger Harbor Improvement Association (as if any organization with such a name should be allowed the dignity of even the most spurious motto)- “Improve through Improvement”- the thinking of local officials tends to be more directed at fast economic growth (i.e. Progress) than sustainable, long-term development. 

It takes McCorquodale, a hipster debutante intent on radical chic, to rattle the cages of ill-conceived progressive development. When she's not busy debating the "intellectual underpinnings of Mardi Gras”, McCorquodale is offering outlandish solutions to the problem of a glut in growth policy. Take, for example, the possible appointment of a  "Public necromancer” to predict which scheme which scheme on city plan would come to pass. 

Daugherty’s section of the postmodernist “Radical Chic” play that went unremarked until Orville Tidwood of the Baptist megachurch put it in the media as a “moral threat” reminds me of Soapy Jones’ popular showing of “Turn Me On, Dammit” and the scandal which packed the Bama Theatre. Obviously, no one billed the film as a family event. Yet scores of Tuscaloosa citizens found themselves absolutely shaw-ked and a-PAUL-ed to hear of a film with a female protagonist that presumed her right to sexual pleasure paralleled that of her male-gendered classmates. It was a sad day for girls in Tuscaloosa, especially those young girls still struggling to discover and reclaim their sexuality from a world that damns them to being boy-toys rather than individuals in their own rights.

The magic of nocturnal life.

Image source: Mental Floss with "10 fun firefly facts"

This weekend, the King cut the backyard grass for the first time in the spring season. At my begging request, he left a small patch of grass and wildflowers uncut under the shade of the pink dogwood trees. "It's for the fireflies," I explained. He shook his head, perhaps amused.

We read a dusty old book over a shared lemonade as the dusk insinuated itself around us. The fireflies gathered in the tall grass near the dogwood, that patch he didn't mow. "They need the tall grass because the female fireflies don't have wings," I whispered, my voice lowered in reverence for the wonder of the falling night.

The females lie down low in the tall grass and wait for their lovers to come calling. The flicker, itself, is the mating call. And response. As soon as the daylight dims, a female firefly prepares to answer potential suitors who happen to come calling. It is she who responds to his signal- not by rising up to chase him or follow him but by flashing her own light in response. And waiting for him to descend into the grass for a rendezvous at the location of her choice. 

The King seemed enchanted; my seemingly irrational supplications concerning strange lawn-mowing patterns rewarded by the haunting presence of firefly love nearby.

As the day grows longer, the night gains all the magic and mystery associated with scarcity. The melody of the owl wafts towards our bedroom window, the one to which the King has trained a confederate jasmine vine to crawl. There is nothing in the world that compares to a spring night in Alabama. 

When Gnome began to mumble something about being "scared of the dark" last week, I devoted myself to preparing a lapbook that might leave night's mystery intact while reducing the fear we associate with things we cannot see. I arm my kids with knowledge for lack of a better alternative- and because knowledge is the best form of self-defense I know.

NOCTURNES OF NATURE LAPBOOK(4 pages PDF)

MORE RESOURCES WE'RE USING TO STUDY NIGHT

NOCTURNES, a Spotify playlist
Nature Day and Night, a stunning book by Richard Adams
"Day and Night" video (Museum Victoria)
Living in Darkness activity and lesson plan (TES)
"As The Earth Turns" student web lesson (Beacon Learning Center)
How to demonstrate day and night (Learn Play Imagine)
"New study shows effects of prehistoric nocturnal life on mammalian vision" (University of Texas)
Nocturnal Life (BBC Wildlife)
Nocturnal Animal Fact Pack (Communication 4 All)*
5 animals you didn't know were nocturnal (WebEcoist)
Different adaptations between nocturnal and diurnal animals (TES)
Nocturnal animal noises video (Tom Woodward)

Visiting a local florist to learn about flowers.

After the girls' ballet recital, I promised them something (I secretly hoped) that would be better than a rose bouquet (which I somehow forgot to purchase). Specifically, I promised them a visit to a local flower shop to pick their own favorite flower, and maybe do a little roamschooling on the side. So we took a little trip to Stephanie's Flowers, a local florist that's been around since I was a child. 

The staff was super friendly and eager to show us inside one of the four freezers where flowers were stored.

Little B. wanted to know which flower she can choose.

"Any flower that looks like it grew just for you," I told her.

Inside the fridge at Stephanie's Flowers, and colder than we'd anticipated, the girls settled on two pink blooms (for Prophet and Little B.) and one yellow bloom for the Gnome.

Then the florist let the girls pick ribbons and tissue paper for wrapping their flowers.

As she wrapped their flowers, we talked about what it means to be a florist- how flowers are chosen and combined based on their colors and textures, how a certain taste for artistry and beauty is involved in the creation of every original bouquet.

Gnome skipped with joy once she had her flower in hand.

The Eldest fell in love with a $70 orchid. I told him good love didn't cost so much.

Finally, we toured the huge inventory and the Eldest kept making a point about how it wasn't fair that he had not earned a flower and how he would dance ballet if it scored a flower for him and that what he wanted most was a flower after his next piano recital, preferably an orchid he could plant and so on...

We are always grateful to local businesses that allow us to learn by visiting and talking to others. There's nothing quite like learning by exploring.

A boy and his hostas.

The Eldest has gone ga-ga for hostas. 

When we paid a weekend visit to The Plant Lady on Sunday afternoon, he managed to talk up such a hosta-appreciating storm that she gave him an $8 hosta as a gift. He promised to treasure it and guard it with his life.

I assured her that he was not kidding. Not at all. Meanwhile, the girls managed to score some free popsicles and I left with a blackberry bush. Hard to find anything to regret in such an outing. 

Painted faces and fresh strawberries at Homegrown Alabama.

Little B.'s free face painting from Homegrown Alabama.

I love Homegrown Alabama. The people are as locally-fresh and unfabricated as the veggies, cheeses, and craftmanship we find there.

The Eldest didn't shy away from face painting.

A few weeks ago, we went straight from ballet to the Homegrown Alabama market on the UA campus (located on the front lawn of our church). Prophet couldn't resist pointing out that we hadn't "been to church in years", by which I think she meant weeks. 

While the Eldest hunted down tomatoes, Gnome, Prophet, and Little B. hung out in the children's area in the hopes of getting as many animals painted on their faces and hands as time would permit.

I discovered a delicious new goat cheese, purchased a Left Hand soap gift for Bill's super-late birthday present, scored another bottle of Hewett's honey, and simply enjoyed being able to touch and sample local creations while the little people were otherwise occupied. 

Little B. is upset that I agree to take a picture of Prophet as well.

Then there were the strawberries....

Alabama homegrown strawberries for the taste test.

Originally, I purchased the strawberries to toss with the hearty arugula from Snow Bend's farm, but my salad plans fell apart upon our return to the castle. You see, the kids decided the weather was perfect for the succulent sweetnesss, as indicated by their boisterous parade bringing grocery-store strawberries into the backyard.

"Why not turn this into a contest?" I inquired. "Let's pit homegrown strawberries against those of Winn-Dixie. The winner receives the Coryell Castle Seal of Approval."

More cheers and merry-making, a consensus to taste-test had been established. 

The results of the taste conclusively determined that the homegrown strawberries tasted better- "more tart and tangy"- than the grocery store strawberries.

In less than five minutes, two bowls of strawberries had disappeared from the planet known to its inhabitants as Earth. Alas, my arugula-strawberry salad with goat cheese will have to wait until next week- next Thursday, to be precise.

Officially, in the overly-concise language of nonprofit mission statements:

"Homegrown Alabama is a student-led group at the University of Alabama that seeks to educate students about the value of local produce, as well as to foster partnerships between local farmers and the University of Alabama".

You can visit the Homegrown Alabama Farmers Market at the Canterbury Episcopal Chapel lawn every Thursday, April 17- October 23 from  3:00–6:00 p.m. It's a lovely segue between school and dinner- a lovely way to fill in the blanks of what should be brought to table.

21st Annual Friends of Hurricane Creek community creek clean-up this Saturday.

You can play a part in keeping a local natural resource clean- and enjoy the beautiful spring weather and budding blossoms along the banks of Tuscaloosa's Hurricane Creek. This Saturday, folks who plan to canoe and walk through the park will meet at the Highway 216 Bridge entrance to Hurricane Creek Park. Activities and learning crafts for kids will be available. 

Then, at 1:30 pm, the festivities at Watson's Bend will commence with the bridge dedication followed by a potluck meal and good times with neighbors. If you'd like to bring a dish to the potluck, just add your name and dish to the Facebook page (where you can find what others are bringing as well). 

If you need help getting around, this map should tell you where to go at what time. 

There will be a ticket raffle fundraiser for various wonderful prizes as well as a mulch fundraiser. You can purchase your bags of mulch from FOHC representatives at any time during the day. If you drop by and we haven't met, please take a minute to introduce yourself to me- I love meeting new people, especially those who have a soft spot for preserving the wonder of the natural world.

The recent memory of camping with cool people.

The weekend before the last, we went camping with Matt and Sarah. 

A week later, the camping gear sits in the garage, still unsorted and unattended. I'm don't report this out of guilt- merely amusement that we managed to find a way to avoid it for the second week in a row.

How to build a fire, per family recipe.

I'm the kind of person that relishes looking back. Yet, writing about an event in the recent past is harder for me than writing about events long-past. The salient memories are still crystallizing, the cream hasn't had time to settle, leaving no outer layer to cull. And so the recent past is murkier than the distant past as my brain still decides what might be worth setting to memory.

Southern Gothic with corn.

I remember thinking, "Sarah is beautiful"- and wanting to tell her so. I remember sorting through the awkwardness of finding a way to tell her I also admired her courage without insinuating a context of grief. Because her courage is not born of grief- her courage is something that struck me from the start, the courage of a woman who dares to proble the complicated knots many of us prefer to leave untouched. Many of us, of course, then wonder why everything feels so tangled.

I remember, somehow, being reminded that the knots are always there. It takes courage to confront them, to ask if there need be a knot or a kink in the line.

Southern Gothic with corn and attempt at nurture.

I remember the abundance of goofiness and vegetables- the familiar goofiness indulged with friends who know the worst of you and choose, somehow, to overlook it whenever possible. Thanks to Matt and Sarah, the King and I had "What did the fox say?" stuck in our heads for most of the weekend. I remember wondering why the tiniest dog insists on being the loudest barker on the campground. 

When I first glimpsed this photo, I remember promising myself to make a slideshow with the words from Wendell Berry's "The Country of Marriage". Something about Sarah's ring caught my eye.

The memory replaces the performance of the action- the excuse for this substitution awaits our attention in the garage.

I remember Prophet's very, very chapped lips- and the search for a buttery ointment to relieve it. 

I remember the Eldest's thrill to hear the steady drumming of a basketball on a court somewhere across the way. "Hey Mom, can I go play pick up?" he asked. I remember smiling, nodding, and telling the King we were witnessing the dawn of a new era.

I remember the girls sitting in the "kids corner" watercoloring various pebbles and rocks. Then leaving them to dry on the rotting log, lined up like psychedelic little soliders.

I remember the expression of utter joy on the Eldest's face when he ran back to the campsite only to announce that his friends, Jack and Andrew, were playing basketball. "I miss them so much, mom- they're 'twilight friends'".

I remember the first time he told me about "twilight friends". "You know," he said, scrunching his forehead, "twilight friends are the ones you remember from long times ago, the ones that are always there, in the twilight." Because twilight is more of a state than a particular place. And twilight never goes away- not completely.

I remember the way the tents were set up on top of a small hill next to the site, where Gnome played imaginary games with Pinka, who fretted about collars and leads and the way freedom is never free.

I remember Linda dropping by for a visit- laughing like a little kid when she discovered we were listening to Pearl Jam. Of all things. I remember singing "Corduroy" aloud without a hint of the usual embarrassment.

I remember the marvelous dance steps of the Gnome.

Of all the ways for our Gnome to dance, it is the wacky steps she can never quite resist.

I remember deciding NOT to tell the Gnome to zip her fly. I figured she has plenty of time to be self-conscious in the future.

I remember the muffled excitement of preparing food together, how sentimental it always feels to watch two old friends tending a fire together.

I remember feeling grateful for Matt and Sarah, for people we can love and cherish without the expectation of unanimous agreement on every subject under the sun. Friends to whom you can pose large, unanswerable questions without needing an answer to know better.

I remember Sarah's expression- a "hobo dinner"- to describe our food being cooked on the campfire. I remember the kids falling asleep with Pinka in the tent as the big kids sat, sipping, around the campfire. I remember lots of Tom Waits, the early years. I remember lots of stars, the midnight version. I remember a mysterious barge, the conspiracy theory variety. I remember falling asleep in the tent, surrounded by little bodies and little puffs of breath.

I remember waking up at 6 am to discover a small thunderstorm and the Eldest, soaking, thanks to the holes in the tent.

I remember flying in the air, coffee splattering across the pavement, and landing on the side of my left knee. I remember why. I remember laughing and thinking the injury would have been worthwhile if I had only managed to meet my goal of kicking the King in the bottom as he carried the trash to the dumpster. 

Simone Weil finds hope in the unbearable distance between heaven and earth. She says that paying attention to someone is a form of prayer.

By this, I think she means that our heart's sustained, intimate connection to another human life is, in itself, a form of worship, an honor or reverence for God's creation. An act of faith. An extended supplication.

I remember my way into the present, and find the memories of that weekend leave a heart on the map. It's a intimate geography, this one. The key is ours to keep. 

What's blooming and budding at the UA Arboretum.

The clouds cleared a little towards the end of the day, enabling us to go for a what's-blooming-and-budding hike at the nearby arboretum. Rucksacks strapped to our backs, we set out on the Poplar Trail "to see what we could see", as Prophet explained.

The Eldest tried to sneak his special gift- Euell Gibbons' Stalking the Wild Asparagus- into his rucksack, but I convinced him to leave it behind and just roam the woods without a field or foraging guide, wander with only our senses and nature journals to to record observations.

Well, wouldn't you know, the left-behind book came up almost immediately when the Eldest spotted what he claimed to be none other than Podophyllum peltatum, or May apple. Since this wasn't the first "May apple" sighting of the season, I was skeptical. But the Eldest assured me these plants were "the real thing".

Also called American mandrake, the May apple is the stuff of magic and mystery. The Eldest buzzed with glee- "Look, there's a tiny flower bud!", he shouted, pointing to a small green berry under the umbrella-like leaves. In his best "old man" voice, he cautioned that much of the plant is poisonous, including the roots, the fruit seeds, and the unripe fruit. 

Prophet spotted the first solitary violet.

A division of labor emerged in which the Eldest identified various tall,gangly trees while the Prophet raised a hullabaloo over any flowers along the path. Never one to be left out, Gnome quickly took it upon herself to frighten every slumbering bird in the forest by shouting, "BUD! B-UUU-D! BUUUUUUD!" every time she spotted a leaf or flower bud. The ghost of Thoreau was horrified by the racket.

Unidentified wildflowers and buds.

"That's poisonous," chirped the Eldest before Gnome could pick one.

The beautiful vine and intoxicating scent of yellow jessamine that drives the insects mad come twilight.

The familiar three leaves of the trillium poked out from beneath autumn's dusky, decomposing blanket.

We marvelled over how the trillium unfurled its tie-dyed leaves, opening its arms wide to reveal a deep purple flower brushed with golden flecks. Should we stop to sketch it? 

The corky growths on a winged elm tree.

"Let's stop by the big magnolia tree," said I-can't-remember-which small folk. Somehow, we agreed to continue hiking, mystified for a moment by the strange (possibly fungal) growth Prophet discovered lining the branches of a small tree. Budmaster Gnome observed that the growth wasn't keeping the tree from budding at the tips of the branches. Carol suggested it might be a winged elm, Ulmus alata, for whom such corky growths are normal. 

We stopped and took out our nature journals- everyone except Pinka started sketching. Fortunately, Gnome brought along a charming little wildflower mystery for us to model. 

Prophet's middle name, "Magnolia", makes sense.

Saucer magnolia

On our way back to the space ship, we lingered over a few lovely varities of magnolia trees, including the Saucer magnolia (or what I called the "saucer cup magnolia") and the sticky-sweet Star magnolia.

Star magnolia

One of my favorite things about nature study is the anticipation of going home with our observations and then trying to identify what we saw. The temptation to plug into the iPhone or reference in the field is tremendous- but much good comes from waiting. It serves as a reminder that the details we capture in our journals are the only evidence that remains for the identification. So we must take thorough descriptive notes and do our best to capture the species in our illustrations.

Observing the white oak taking root.

One of the best parts of last Friday's nature hike was the spine-tingling sight of a white oak acorn rooting itself in the soil, aiming to become a tree. It happened by accident, of course. The little folks lingered to fill their pockets with fallen acorns. But something about these acorns made them very, very difficult to pick up.

On closer observation, the acorns had tapped into the soil, their plantly umbilical cords too firmly rooted to budge. We sat still and admired their way of growing and the connection a seed forms with the ground. (Later, as we re-capped the hike, the Eldest said the acorns added a "whole new meaning to the name Mother Earth for him.)

Amy showed us the inside of the acorn caps and explained how we could distinguish white oak seeds from other kinds of oak by the smoothness of the undercap. It made sense to note the GPS coordinates so we might return to admire the most successful saplings later on in the year.

Honestly, I never thought I'd feel such a wash of emotions over an acorn- but it was beautiful in that unspeakable, sublime sort of way, the way reserved for poetry and music, a way that transcends this world while being nurtured by it.

An early spring hike through Hurricane Creek Park.

We set out for a visit to Hurricane Creek Park, just off the Highway 216 bridge between Cottondale and Peterson. Rather than taking the awesome new PARA trails, we strolled along the stream using the old Eagle Scout trail. What we found was the commencement address of spring, sparing none of our senses.

A few years ago, a little bird named Hayes told us of the clay we could find along the banks of Hurricane Creek- a white-gray beautiful clay. Sure enough, the clay seeped from the dirt in the banks. I only wish I'd brought a bucket to collect it....

Our kids ranged in ages from 3 to 10- the youngest ones wore their own backpacks for the occasion. The unplanned presence of Pinka provided us with a four-legged mammal's perspective on the journey.

"If a rainstorm overtook you, which rocks would you use for shelter?", I asked at one point, remembering the old legends about Native Americans once find sacred spaces along the creek.

We hiked along, observing ferns, tiny buds, lichen, and any flowerings in the making.

The little ones stopped to dam and ford a slim tributary- if a slender sliver of water flowing down the side of a hill can even be called a tributary. They could have lingered for hours, pressing sticks into the miniature waterfalls and watching leaves make their way over the "rapids".

 Prophet watches her friends clamber over creekside rocks.

Creekside portraits abound.

The Eldest mistook the canebrake (or "hair cane") for bamboo. Fortunately, Amy quickly corrected him.

Resting along a bench donated by the Friends of Hurricane Creek.

Amy and I both paused to press our cheeks against the cold, mossy rocks, reminiscing about times in our pasts when only the cold, hard feel of a stone relieved the unbearable Alabama summer heat.

Gnome explains why she wants to eat something soon- and why eating acorns is something to which squirrels and Gnomes are inclined.

E. filled the sample jar with creek water.

Before we knew it, the grumble in our bellies meant water-testing time had officially arrived. Alas, we started testing without reading the instructions prior to our field tests. This means we learned much more about the importance of sampling methods than the actual water quality of the creek.

For instance, Amy found the oxygenation results rather hard to believe. When we sat down in the grass to review the how-to guide, we quickly understood that we had made the mistake of valuing the field sample itself over the rules of collection. "Isn't it better that we learn this the hard way so we can use our mistakes to better teach others?" Amy asked. It seemed to me just the right way to look at things.

A moment and its music: Resurrection ferns.

A little bird along the banks of Hurricane Creek told me this was resurrection fern.

The lyrics to "Resurrection Fern", a song by Iron and Wine that came to mind.

In our days we will live 
Like our ghosts will live...
Pitching glass at the cornfield crows 
And folding clothes 

Like stubborn boys across the road 
We'll keep everything...
Grandma's gun and the black bear claw 
That took her dog 

When sister Laurie says, "Amen" 
We won't hear anything...
The ten-car trains will take that word 
That fledgling bird 

And the fallen house across the way 
It'll keep everything...
The baby's breath
Our bravery wasted and our shame

And we'll undress beside the ashes of the fire 
Both our tender bellies wound in baling wire 
All the more a pair of underwater pearls 
Than the oak tree and its resurrection fern

In our days we will say 
What our ghosts will say...
We gave the world what it saw fit 
And what'd we get?

Like stubborn boys with big green eyes 
We'll see everything...
In the tender shade of the autumn leaves 
And the buzzard's wing 

And we'll undress beside the ashes of the fire 
Our tender bellies are wound around in baling wire 
All the more a pair of underwater pearls 
Than the oak tree and its resurrection fern

Free Alabama Blues Project concert tomorrow in Tuscaloosa.

Who: ALABAMA BLUES PROJECT ADVANCED BAND

Where: Mildred Westervelt Warner Transportation Museum in Tuscaloosa

When: Saturday from 12:00 to 2:00 pm

Why: Because it will rock your socks off. For FREE.

The performance is in conjunction with the museum's Mississippi Blues photo exhibit. Mississippi Hill Country Blues: Photographs by George Mitchell, curated by the Jackson Museum of Art, which will be on display at the museum through April 26.

Admission to the concert and the photo exhibit is free. The Transportation Museum will permanently waive its admission charge, making the museum free for all Tuscaloosa residents to tour and learn about the community’s history. Don't miss out.

"The Peace of Wild Things", a beloved poem by Wendell Berry.

Today was the perfect day for a hike in Hurricane Creek Park.

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The local history of "old Bryce" Hospital as told by Lee Bains and the Dexateens.

The first of 3 videos in this series, all produced by Elliott McPherson.
Lee Bains narrates. 

Growing up in Tuscaloosa has its unique rites of passage. One of them nvolves celebrating that newly-minted driver's permit with a night-time visit to the ghosts and haints of Old Bryce.

The entire journey- from the borrowing of the parental gas-guzzling unit to the illegal trespassing on Bryce property to the conversing with the spirits of Bryce's former residents- feels trangressive. And the intersection of local history with young adulthood requires the exploration of liminal spaces, unspeakable places only visible to those willing to venture out in the twilight. 

I confess to having visited the "old Bryce" five times during my high school days.

The first time was all chills and thrills and rumors of blood on padded walls.

The second time involved a group of us who waited for the full moon to illuminate our way.

The third time involved the company of my high school "sweetheart" (we were anything but).

The fourth time I went alone- with only my journal and a few names gleaned from tombstones.

The fifth time was a solo act, this time equipped with tape cassette Walkman technology and the haunting voice of Margo Timmins.

The Dexateens did much better- they went there to tell the stories of Old Bryce. Perhaps they even hoped to spill its secrets. But the ghosts of the past are easier to conjure than to capture.

On Halloween 2008, they traveled out to "Old Bryce", the abandoned Jemison Mental Hospital on the outskirts of their hometown, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in an attempt to conjure up whatever spirits might still lurk there. They took their guitars, recording equipment, and a handful of songs. Fortunately, "things did not go according to plan". Any story seeking ghosts is much better when it deviates from the plan or script. 

All three videos are worth watching- a great sampling of local history to share with middle schoolers and kids. 

In Part 1, the Dexateens learn the history of the hospital, the band arrives at the hospital and performs, and plans go awry. In Part 2,  a 2nd journey is proposed and carried out, another song is performed, and an unexplained encounter occurs. In Part 3, unexplained evidence is examined.

When I first got married, the King and I feasted in many a hidden local cemetery. Whenever the discussion got around to tombstones, I told him I want to be cremated, my ashes scattered over the village of Bran in Transylvania. But I also want an overgrown, weed-covered tombstone somewhere in Tuscaloosa- a tombstone that didn't have a coffin beneath it, a tombstone inscribed only with my name and the words:

All of it ends with in a ghost story.

Tell me a tree story- one about the ways roots dig and reveal.

When my dad came to visit last week, we took the kids to River Road Park and wandered around, struck by the way in which the exposed roots paralleled family reunions. The way family life leaves us exposed and vulnerable at our most tender spots, the areas which keep us connected to this earth and the world of meaning woven by intimate interactions.

Every family, like every tree, has its own adaptations to the soil and environment in which it grows.

There are ways, for example, in which my trunk is crooked with cravings for books and tender touch, desires so exorbitant that the native soil in which I grew could not possibly have met them. 

Over time, we reflect the way in which light and shadow crossed our path. Each new branch suggests a new growth- a new way of reaching towards something in life- so each hope becomes a possibility, a fork in the endless numbers of path defining who we are and how we grew into it.

"Tell me a story about trees and roots," I ask the Eldest, hoping the lilt in my voice will go unnoticed. He tells me about the way the tree trunks facing the river bear more moss on their sides. I am struck by the courage with which he tells a story that remains open to the question of "why".

There is a sense in which I am just an unintended audience, a woman on the banks of the Black Warrior River who happens to overhear a boy's conversation with the trees. A bystander inclined to read too much into the seeing the reflection of the ivy's burden staring back up from the water.

There is more to see. I find myself admiring the graceful tree whose roots are completely exposed. How the root stretches sideways into the bank, building strength into the horizontal axis.

I make a note to myself to journal the associations of the word exposed and horizon or horizontal.

I make a note to myself to honor the engravings of time in my dad's face, setting them next to the trunk of a tree, discovering how life marks us with the storms we have weathered.

"Hey dad," I say, stifling a laugh, "keep talking like that with your arms in the air..."

The professor expounds his contrarian views on climate change. I agree to let myself disagree with him, saying only that we are responsible for the ways in which we change the world, whether for better or worse. It is easy to argue with the professor- and easy to love him in spite of the disagreements. The Strawberry Shortcake sticker on the underside of his sleeve ends his serious lecture and leaves us laughing. 

Bunicu and the king, between beards.

Find a tree, survey the roots, and tell its story. The words you find, like the soil we cultivate, are held in common.

March 1st Yoga Workshop for you and a friend.

Based on the teachings of Dr Geeta Iyengar and Dr. Lois Steinberg, this workshop is open to women of all ages, either new to yoga or long-time practitioners.

You can try out different yoga sequences appropriate for various stages and particular situations in your lives. Learn how to create your personal practice or adapt your existing yogic routine to better fit your current needs. Expand your knowledge about yoga and connect with your practice at a deeper level of understanding. Come explore the warm and welcoming environment of The Yoga Center of Tuscaloosa, under the caring expertise of Metka Zupancic, PhD, 500RYT of whom I am personally quite fond....

YOGA FOR WOMEN: A Workshop at The Yoga Center
Saturday March 1st
1 to 3:30 p.m.

COST: $30 or $25 each if you sign up with a friend

For more information and to register for the workshop, contact Metka by email at [email protected] (you can click the link below), or call the Yoga Center at 205.507.7001.

How we "survived" the southern Snowpocalypse of 2014.

We played and cavorted in the snow as if it was just another miraculous day on this planet. Since we don't have cable or satellite TV (and we have only one TV in our home), we stayed fairly oblivious to the events of the southern Snowpocalypse.

Snow covers the garden plot.

Two frozen garden gnomes.

Cold and cute go hand in hand.

And so the snow fell, clogging traffic, stranding the King for a hour one drive over 8 measly miles. My sister got trapped at UAB; she and another resident tried to drive home, but couldn't make it through Birmingham's icy hills. Her husband saved the day by driving through the disaster to retrieve her. The King's brother walked three miles through the snow in Atlanta to get to a safe house where he could sleep.

Watching the snow from the front window.

Little B. enjoys a water-less campout by the fireplace with hot cocoa in hand.

Abandoned cars clogged the streets and roadways. Families wept, wondering where their sons, daughters, dads, and moms might be. The stories of kindness and courage continue, interspersed with heartwrenching tales of accidents and untimely deaths.

Students in Atlanta were trapped in their schools.
Helicopters searched the roads for stranded drivers in chilling conditions.
Students in Alabama spent two nights trapped in their schools.
The Washington Post shared photos of what it called "the South's disastrous response to a snow storm".
NPR describes the "rush hour from hell".
In Birmingham, helping others is described as "the way we do things around here".
Tuscaloosa businesses feel the chill.
Two drivers were killed when they collided with a train in Cottondale.
Local resident Brian Howard helped stranded drivers get home.
School bus driver Sylvia Anderson earned accolades for bringing little ones home safely.
City schools closed, and the Tuscaloosa city council meeting was cancelled.
Three Brookwood boys get caught stealing a four-wheeler when a rescue helicopter spots them.

Grandma Vicki called to tell me that Tuscaloosa had made the Athens, Ohio newspaper. She worried about us. I assured her that we were fine.

Of course, I did not mention the fact that our water pipes have been broken since last week- and that the front lawn was flooded by a broken pipe which could not be fixed until weather permitted. That's the sort of thing that would ruin Grandma Vicki's day. And ruining her day would ruin mine as well.

 

All the excavating in the front yard made it hard not to think about the significance of this day- the winter storm and how two inches of snow and ice can wreck an entire region of unprepared cities. We decided to make a time capsule and bury it in the front yard before the dirt was replaced.

 

And so the house gnomes scoured the house for trinkets and tidbits to add to the time capsule. The Eldest suggested we add a large letter "P" as a tribute to the King, who was unable to be with us during the auspicious ceremonials. Since the letter P stands for pedagogical and persnickety and piddle-some, I consented to the tribute.

Milla decided to donate her Hello Kitty lunch box as the vehicle for the time capsule. A few favorite collector's cards were included by the ladies as the Eldest did his best to pen the perfect time capsule letter- one which represented the occasion (i.e. the excavation of our yard during the 2013 snowstorm) as well as his current feelings on various friends, wood trails, dog breeds, etc. 

Finally, the time capsule was ready to bury, just around the time when the plumbing company approached me for a the smallest number that can be called a four-digit sum. I didn't dare disrupt the solemn burial procession with tears over the high cost of home ownership. The procession itself, of course, deserves a post all its own. Forthcoming.

Discovering Christmas decorating ideas along the Tuscaloosa Tinsel Trail.

Earlier this week, after discovering we were too early for ice skating, the kids, Angie, and I took a stroll down the fantastic Tinsel Trail along the Tuscaloosa Riverwalk. Each tree was sponsored and then decorated by different community businesses, nonprofits, or individuals.

Max found a sign that had fallen over. He quickly picked it up and staked it back in the ground. Because, in his words, "Duh, that's what boys DO, mom." I bit my lip and kept the "ideally" from coming out. One should appreciate the ideal rather than demand it. Or so I've read...

So many trees to see.... There were large, bombastic trees smothered in bows....

Angie strolled along, looking relieved that the ice-skating rink would not give her a chance to skate.

And there were many discoveries and inspirations for our own crafting plans...

1. CD ornaments painted with reindeer scenes.

  

2. Little yarn Dr. Seuss-ish ornaments....

  3. Lovely little critters cut from pinecones and brush....

4. A gauze-wrapped snowman tree.

5. Stockings cut from burlap and decorated with paint and glitter.

6. Candycanes also cut from burlap and painted.

7. Recycled aluminum can ornaments.

8. Aluminum soda can tree people.

9. Classic glitter-dipped pinecones hung with rope.

10. Instruments and horns adding glitter to the tree.

11. Laminated sunshine photos of children at the R.I.S.E. tree.

12. A rope garland lined with bells and pieces of bandana fabric.

13. Hand-painted glass globes with black and red backgrounds.

14. A collection of colorful handprints with glitter decorations.

15. A glue-covered and glitter-dipped CD.

16. A tree covered with toys- this was B.'s "favorite".

17. An Eric Carle inspired butterfly tree-topper.

18. Monopoly money and game pieces as upcycled tree decorations.

Our vote for the wackiest, "cutest" tree- the big mouthed Bama Fan?

As we neared the end of the Trail, Milla found a fellow she deemed intriguing. B. stopped to scope him out. Before I understood what was going down, Micah joined them..

The luckiest faux gingerbread man on the block earned a kiss from three little ladies far sweeter than himself.

We headed back to the spaceship with the words from one advice-giving tree still in our minds- "Peace on earth begins at home". 

Imaginary play: Victorians.

Dreary days do not eliminate the need for play. So we packed up the spaceship and set out for the Children's Hands-On Museum with the explicit purpose of imagary play revolving around life in the Victorian era.

As the ladies played dress-up, Max wrote a brief essay surveying the artifacts and historic information found in the Victorian display. He wrote it from the perspective of an 8-year-old girl who is spending the night with her grandmother and happens to venture into the attic. I will intersperse excerpts of Max's composition throughout the photos of the girls' imaginary explorations.

B. asked if she could be the one to pour tea.

"My Grandmother's Attic" by Max Coryell

This attic is full of 18th century things. I walk up and I see the windows. There are quite a few paintings in the stairwell. The windows have doily lace curtains, and in between a pot of ivy overhangs a picture of four kittens.

On the other side of the window there is a bookshelf. Over this bookshelf, a picture of five kittens and their mother is hung. There is a large locked trunk and, across from it, an old Victorian tea table complete with three chairs, a tray, and four cups of tea. A doll's rocking chair is also there. 

Marvelous whimsical Micah.

An old-fashioned carriage, complete with doll, sits next to a large trunk in the corner, with two more dolls on it. Under a lot of family pictures on a striped wallpapered wall, there is a bed with three more dolls.

Eminent Victorians.

Now I walk over to another window, with the same lace curtains. I notice two more trunks in front of the window. Next to them, a large amount of boys' clothes are in wardrobes, cupboards, and another trunk, but I am not interested in these. Instead, my eyes turn to the rug, then to the dress on a peg by the locked door I tried in vain to open, and lastly, to the many pictures on the wall by the antique cupboard.

The sobriety of Victorian life: Virginia Woolf's version.

There is a large mirror with a white dress hanging on it. Another tea table set and stools sit to next to cupboards, wardrobes, and trunks of clothes for women! There is a coat rack with purses, four portraits, and two dresses! Lamps are everywhere. When I ask Grandma about it, she says, "I keep it this way so when the Old Women's Club comes, we can have tea up here."

"Do you want to spend the night up here?" Grandma continues. "I can assure you my breeding cats will not hurt you." Grandma bred cats. 

I decided I wanted to stay up there. There was so much interesting stuff up there to look at that I wouldn't get bored.

Thus ended Max's story. But then he decided that he could set up a small hunt for kids visiting the Grandmother's Attic at C.H.O.M.- "important things they might want to find and learn more about". He couldn't resist adding a few follow-up questions.

Things to Look for in Grandmother's Attic

The large number of trunks
Were trunks a fashion in Victorian times? Why were they so popular?

Pictures of cats
Were domestic cats popular in Victorian times? Why or why not?

Furniture style
Do you notice any specific style that is popular? If so, what?

Lots of portraits
Why do you think portraits were so common in homes back then?

Types of clothing
What do you notice about the clothes from that time? Why do you think they were popular?

For further exploration, we chased butterflies around the following, among which the printables are marked with an asterisk:

Victorian Britain (Primary History, BBC)
Toys Victorian children played with in the 1800's (Victorian Children)
Rich and Poor Victorian Children 
Victorian Fashion Detectives activity (Teaching Ideas) *
Victorianopoly game (Teaching Ideas) *
The Victorian House with audio (Fun Kids Radio)
A Victorian Child paper doll coloring page (Helen Page)
What the Victorians did for Christmas (Victorian School)
The Great Exhibition of 1851 worksheet (Victorian Workshop) *
Victorian Inventions wordsearch (Teaching Ideas) *
Mind Your Manners Game (McCord Museum)
Victorian Lapbooking pages (Rebecca Black) *
Design a Victorian garden game (Geffrye Museum)
The 1900 House interactive (PBS)
Organizing a Victorian Day Experience (Victorian School) *
Aunt Mary's Primer (Victorian School)
Queen Victoria coloring page (Crayola) *
Victorian Walking Suit coloring page (Karen's Whimsy) *
Victorian Evening Wear coloring page (Karen's Whimsy) *
Victoria As a Girl: The Patient Rebel (BBC)
Victorian Christmas Play (Alex Wilkinson) *
Queen Victoria Timeline worksheet (Teaching Ideas) *
Queen Victoria Mind Map (Mandy Smith) *
List of kings and queens of England (Victorian School) *
Royal family tree from Victoria to present (Victorian School) *
Make your own Victorian school (Victorian School) *

Shrooming with the kids in Alabama: Identifying sample #1.

We divide our field survey of shrooms into "samples" for the purpose of identifying them once we got home and we able to to consult a few online resources. Unfortunately, we currently lack a field guide to the world of the fungi. But we make do.

Sample #1: "The Pretty-In-Pinks"

Cap was red on top and slightly upturned. The stem was white with no ring.The cap was a light red wash- almost pink- with a soft, velvety texture. We agreed the shape of the cap was umbilicate- the edge was flat and recessed in the center, almost like a bathing pool for fairies. 

This pretty-in-pink sample boasted a obvious striate margin (another way of saying it had a lined edge). 

As I used a twig to flip over the cap, we agreed the stalk was centrally positioned. Unfortunately, our flipping method did not allow us to get a sense of the shape of the stalk's base. We could only speculate that it might have been equal.

But the underside of the cap revealed a large number of crowded cream-colored gills.

The attachment of the gills to the stalk was "free" (or not attached). Max claimed the white ring in the center made this "obvious". We concluded that it would be accurate to say them stem was white with no ring.

According to David Fischer, gilled mushrooms, or agarics, have evolved at least four or five times according to DNA study results.

This particular manifestation of the phenomenon of convergent evolution has repeated itself because each spore has an exceedingly slim chance of germinating at the right time in the right place—and two sexually compatible spores have to germinate in proximity to one another in order for mating to occur. In order to be successful, each species has to successfully compete against numerous other species for habitat. 

Fischer says the gills keep evolving because they "provide the highest surface-area-to-mass ratio for the external production of spores". 

When we broke open the middle, we discovered whitish cream spores. 

Identification 

The white gills and red/white color combination suggests a mushroom in the Russula genus. But which one?

Option 1: Russula rosea

Also known as the Rosy brittlegill, Russula rosea fruits in late October and early November, depending on the temperature of the location. The cap is red or pink, often cream towards the centre; sometimes entirely cream; dry, either shiny or matt, sometimes slightly powdered. 5 to 12cm diameter, convex, later flattening or developng a slight central depression. 

The gills are a pale cream color, almost freely attached; forked; very brittle. It maintains a mycorrhizal association with deciduous broadleaf trees, particularly Beech, but occasionally also found under conifers.

Option 2: Russula emetica

This option came up only because I read a possible ID of a mushroom almost identical to our Pretty-in-Pinks that called it a Russila emetica. First described in 1774, the "sickener" has a wide distribution in North America, where it thrives in damp woodlands in a mycorrhizal association with conifers, especially pine trees. Alas, this species is poisonous and likely to cause stomach distress. 

Option 3: Russula betularum

Russula betularum is a small, very pale member of the Russula (brittlegills) genus of mushrooms. It is usually white to very pale pink, inedible, and grows with birch trees. It is commonly known as the birch brittlegill.

Russula (Wikipedia)
List of Russula species (Wikipedia)
 Russula rosea (First Nature)
Russula emetica, the sickener (First Nature)
Russula nobilis, the beechwood sickener (First Nature)

Shrooming with the kids in Alabama: Identifying sample #5.

The ancient Greeks and Romans were experts in wine fermentation but they had no modern tools to understand and imply that fungi were largely responsible for these transformations.

Sample #5: "The Old Man"

The cap of what came to be called "The Old Man" was filled with holes and spots. It looked like it had been around for a long time. 

We found another Old Man up near the road in a drainage ditch close to a group of pine trees- so much excitement and color taking place on its depressed cap. 

The purple-blue gills ran down the stalk in a decurrent fashion.

The stalk was centrally positioned. And the color of the gills blackened towards the edges. We wondered if blue dye might be extracted from a willing Old Man. 

Trying to ID the Old Man led us to seek mycorrhizal associations of various species with trees nearby. The main tree in the vicinity was the pine tree.

Interesting fact about mycorrhizal associations on fungal diversity: Few trees in the Costa Rican forest are able to form ectomycorrhizae while in Canadian forests, all the trees form ectomycorrhizae. Thus the Canadian forests boast a great variety of large mushrooms while the tropical forests in Costa Rica support a lessor variety of mostly small mushrooms.

Identification

Option 1: Lactarius indigo

Lactarius indigo range from adnate to slightly decurrent, and crowded close together. Their color is indigo blue that becomes paler with age or staining green with damage. They are often found in floodplain areas (that is where we found one of our Old Men) and around pine trees. Most are foraged in late August.

Max feels strongly that our Old Man is an indigo milk cap mushroom; he notes the decurrent gills. But I think that it looks so much browner on the cap that it would have to be a very, very Old, Old man (maybe from August) if this were true. Not to mention that all the Lactarius indigo seem to have indigo and white caps.

But no better options have entered the picture....

Indigo milkies (Mycologista)
The Bluest of Fungi (Forager Chef)
Indigo milkcap (Shakerag Susan)
Indigo milkcap for food (Prairie Infusions)
"Mycorrhizae and the American Chestnut: An Underground Tale of Mystery" by Jonathan Palmer (American Chestnut Foundation)

Shrooming with the kids in Alabama: The impetus and prepping.

Last night, the winds rattled fall leaves from reluctant trees. We woke to a clear, sunny day laden with leftover rain and the scent of wet decaying leaves enriching the air with what Micah called "that life smell".

The bright orange blurs of an Alabama autumn morning.

It didn't take long for us to discover the burgeoning mushrrom harvest covering the wet ground, nestled between the fallen leaves. Backgrounder before setting out into the field for observations and investigations. Thanks to The Alabamycologist, we found a ready resource for local fungal action.

Nature at Close Range, one of my favorite nature study blogs, discovered the stunning Indigo milk mushroom as well as the American Caesar's mushroom growing in her Alabama yard. Of course, her kids deserve credit for at least one of these discoveries, an acknowledgement that so many amazing things are found by the eyes of little people. A few more butterflies we chased while nibbling cherry tomatoes and Amish cheese...

Brian Folt forages for wild shrooms in Lee County (Farm Forests Foods)
A Mushroom Reader well worth the read (Strataspore)
"Puffballs: Overlooked Medicinals?" by Will Blackwell (Mushroom The Journal)
Renewable Resources Extension Act applications at Alabama universities

Then, with nature journals and colored pencils tucked in a bag, we set off down the street to find a few shrooms of our own.

Mushroom Cap Comparison Grid (Handbook of Nature Study)

 

We lacked a good fungus guide for identification purposes, so we settled for an online mushroom identifier.  And off we went....

Lamenting the post-tornado development of Tuscaloosa.

The plan for Tuscaloosa's future.

Since the tragedy of the 2011 tornadoes, Tuscaloosa has been rebuilding itself in accordance with the Tuscaloosa Forward Plan, a visionary document filled with the trendiest and most attractive aspects of sustainable development. Only the gnarliest curmudgeon would find the plan's designs unappealing.

The description of a winding greenway, lined with trees and sidewalks, connecting various parts of the town, opening the possibility of increased pedestrian and bicycle transport, was thrilling. Alas, areas previously designated for the greenway are now being sold to developers in the process of building yet another fancy Melrose-Place type apartment for university students. While it's nice that today's college students will have the opportunity to live in what could only have been sitcom-style luxury during my college years, all the massive new buildings and apartments are edifices of transience- a tremendous outlay intended to make fast money from temporary residents of what no longer feels like a town. 

Of course, "community" is not much of a concern to outside developers. Orlando's Pat Chisholm threatened the City Council with what might arise in the stead of his plan for a Hilton hotel in a heart of downtown Tuscaloosa. Unfortunately, Chisholm's one-track mind fails to see the costs of more hotels for local hotel owners- he has only to drive a few miles to see at least four abandoned hotels and lodging areas along McFarland Boulevard. And, of course, why should he care? Chisholm just wants to "develop Tuscaloosa", to "help recovery", to "provide consumers with the best possible product" and maybe to make a little money on the side. 

Filed as an LLC in the state of Florida on October 14, Chisholm's "The Balcony Tuscaloosa" promises to add nothing that does not already exist- except money that will flow into Florida, of course. And maybe a little cash for local contractors over a brief period of time. 

“The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.” 
                        Wendell Berry, What Are People For?

But it's complicated, this rebuilding process. Part of the complexity comes from the very fact that Tuscaloosa needs to be "rebuilt" in the first place. All the associations and memories related to specific places- all the insider landmarks and pieces of local history, all the evocations- must be reforged as well. In addition to the horrors of physical destruction, natural disaster tears open a hole in our sense of community and shared history.

Walking through the treeless streets of east Tuscaloosa where the ground was covered in power lines and homes turned to rubble, we were all disoriented- nothing we knew stayed the same. It was hard to recognize our "place" amid the turmoil and destruction. So many brave people, groups and individuals, struggling to find and create a new context in which the stories of Tuscaloosa lives could continue. So many humans fighting despair with a unassailable, generative hope. So many community activists finding ways to serve people outside their social circles and economic milieus. It was all the more stunning because the sentiments, undergirded by this fantastic hope- were genuine.

So it is all the more disturbing to see the endless assortment of lifestyle apartments and condos lining the streets. All the more wrenching to see the plethora of empty lots in Alberta City abandoned by businesses who can no longer afford to build or rent there. All the more disappointing to discover that, well, it's just business as usual here in Tuscaloosa, Alabama- and business as usual, of course, explains why the wealthy and the poor inhabit different parts of town.

Our values rub shoulders with our personal desires. A better way to express this would be to admit that we are so rarely ready with our recyling box that we find ourselves having to drive it to the drop-off rather than putting it out for the waste management companies to pick up. And that's on a good week. We are less perfect than we presume. Teaching my kids about sustainable living is a constant reminder that we could be living more sustainably. While we've managed to get rid of paper towels and napkins, we still can't get our act together on recycling. No one is perfect. If you catch yourself thinking that you might be the exception, sit down and read some Howard Zinn with your kids. That ought to clear your mind real quickly.

The inequality continues. The uneven distribution of educational resources diminishes the likelihood of the neighborhood schools which would require less cross-town traffic and less air pollution. Those who aren't zoned for Rock Quarry set their hearts on the Tuscaloosa Magnet School. Again, there are no easy answers. Every parent wants the best for their children. Every parent hopes their child will do "better" and accomplish more. Yet some children, born into families without money and time, are trapped by the inequality of opportunity. Every time a child hears adults complaining about "welfare moms" or "single moms", he is taught that kids from families on welfare are worthy of his scorn. Few parents say this directly, but no child is so dumb as to misunderstand the difference between what we say publicly and what we mutter in the privacy of our own homes.

"Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree."
                Marian Wright Edelmen

Marian Wright Edelmen, one of the most inspiring Americans that comes to mind, has always argued that being born into money is a matter of luck, not value. We agree in theory, but our actions often contradict our beliefs. It is living among other people- some richer, some poorer- that weaves a web of shared concerns and identity. We live in communities. Sometimes these communities prevent us from loving others in the world. 

Sometimes those communities require rebuilding. Sometimes those communities are torn in half by special interests who see dollar signs where others see a park for their grandchildren. And sometimes the profitable option is not the ethical one. 

As more condos and apartments sprout up to replace the trees torn down by the tornados, I wonder why not even tragedy teaches us the value of a tree. The homo sapiens sapiens has left a legacy of destruction and devastation across the planet. Just say the words "improved property values" and everyone will leave their ethics at the door. It's hard to be hopeful when I look around at where the post-tornado planning has left us in East Tuscaloosa and Alberta City. One thing is certain- the hope always returns. And the way in which it returns has nothing to do with the promises of local politicians and everything to do with the way my kids gobble up everything still beautiful in our world.