How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land? If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy.
-Psalm 137
They said you're from down South,
and when you open your mouth,
you always seem to put your foot there.
I wanna go home with the armadillo.
Good country music from Amarillo and Abilene.
The friendliest people and the prettiest women
you've ever seen.
-London Homesick Blues
Jerry Jeff Walker
Autumnal equinox today, or technically 9:03 last night (9:04 if you ask the Brits, but we won that war and can put it wherever the hell we want).
Fall means something in the Southern Tier, so much more so than back home. Late September in north Florida is just more of the same stickiness, with weeks of lingering heat. I recall in the days after Hurricane Michael, soldiering through wreckage in mid-October looking for things to salvage in heat so oppressive and damp it broke body and spirit as much as the utter destruction everywhere around us. But the cypresses around Wyldswood and the Perry Golf Club have probably started to turn a little by now, the undersized squirrels gotten a little more busy, the deer sensing the shorter days now embarked on their fence-jumping searches for fornication.
But here. Wow, what a fall day! Forty-three degrees at sunup, with a promised high of 54 under brilliant blue skies, just a hint of color along the tops of the ridgelines. The orange and red will creep down the hills in the weeks ahead, until the snows come and the leaves drop sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving.
Here's my favorite spot to watch the colors change on lazy late afternoons with P.
We're getting old, I guess, finding more pleasure rocking and talking out on that veranda, where seven generations before us have sat and rocked and admired the same hills in a timeless cycle, only to go up the hill to join the Houghtons at the end of their brief ride.
So if we love it here so much, why so homesick last night? All we could talk about, it seemed, was how beautiful Wyldswood probably is right now, fading fall light outlining the Spanish moss and Peg's pine tree sentries. There was '80s country playing on Spotify as we cooked, an odd choice given that we didn't know each other then and Peg's never been much for the genre. We tried to place Keith Whitley's twang regionally (I guessed east Tennessee, but he was actually from Ashland, Kentucky). We repeatedly agreed to go see one of the performers as they cycled onto the virtual stage in our kitchen, only to find, over and over, that they were dead and gone. I'd always thought one day I might go see Hal Ketchum, with his powerful voice and lyrics that will bring a tear to your eye, but he's gone too. Tempus fugit.
You keep all that your fortune brings All your fancy words, all your precious things No matter what all your money buys It's in the arms of love that true treasure lies
I know where love lives I know where love lives She's sitting on the back step in the evening air With sea green eyes and her chestnut hair
You keep your mansions of gold Buddy, I don't care 'Cause I know where love lives
Like an addled Christian who'll tell you the Hebrew Bible was just one big adumbration of Jesus's arrival, I remember myself listening to those words twenty-five years ago but not being able to feel that until P arrived in my life. I know where love lives now, and it's right here at Tara.
But now I've become mawkish, as I was a little last night as I think of it. We're very happy these days, and my heart bursts at this place and this time. So why is the tug of Wyldswood so strong?
Maybe because that's where we really came together, trapped inside the fence for six straight months during the darkest days of the pandemic. Maybe it's oddly a little less lonely than Corning, with our friends at the Elks and the golf course always seeming happy to see us, hugging my neck (the ladies anyway) when we walk through the door. Maybe it's the fact that we're Southerners, and we'll always be sojourners here even though these are some of the kindest, hardest-working, most genuinely decent people we've ever met, the very best this country has to offer.
But they lack that Southern propensity to go off, that sometimes wicked sense of humor, that sense of community, or tribalism depending on how you see things, a society develops after enduring an invasion and complete destruction. And don't get me started about the cooking up here. No wonder they eat so damned much ice cream--have you ever tried to force down their barbeque, or worse yet nachos?
So we'll always have a foot in both boats, I reckon, loving this place but our hearts always back on that patch of dirt we call home. And how very fortunate are we to have the best of both.
Time to clean myself up, work a little, then fire up the Traeger to smoke some ribs for guests this evening. We'll serve pork, and beef to accommodate our Jewish guests, the beginning of a great weekend.
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