Friday night, we stayed up late and had our own private autumn party. We lit candles and turned off all the lights and drank hot tea and watched an old Vincent Price movie. It wasn't a horror movie per se...more of a Gothic suspense tale. Dragonwyck is the story of an 1800's Dutch landowner in upstate New York and the governess he brings to the estate to tend to his child. Pretty early on, we realize that old Vincent is as crazy as a loon, and his, um, tendencies begin to manifest themselves. The movie has some very interesting subtextual things to say about agrarianism, feudal land systems, and social stratification. It's also great fun to watch. I particularly enjoyed watching Mr. Price waltz with the leading lady. Tall, lithe, and elegant (in that sinister way of his), he moves with coiled grace.
We put the flannel sheets on the bed before retiring ,and slept with a window open. The air was very crisp, but the bed was perfect. We slept in a bit on Saturday for a change, because we just couldn't bear to poke anything but our noses out of the covers. MeeMaw put it best: "It's like sleeping in a hug," she said.
I went outside and looked up at the moon, setting like its mate the sun in the western sky, but in a way most unlike the ruler of the day. The moon was pale and aloof and chilly.
I went for a walk and kept humming a tune under my breath. It took me a while to realize that I was doing it, and took a while longer to recall what I was humming. It was Tannhauser, from the Ring Cycle by Richard Wagner, one of my favorite melodies. Here is a clip of the great Herbert Von Karajan conducting Tannhauser in his inimitable style.
Speaking of Wagner, here's another clip from the Ring Cycle, this one of Siegfried's Funeral March. Some of you may recall that this music was used to great effect in John Boorman's beautiful, brooding production of Excalibur in the 1980's. Wagner's music always makes me want to go out and do something; drive my frosted old truck across a pasture, cut down a tree, throw eggs at a Republican, something.
We've had tons of ladybugs at Possum Cough lately, and a family of them has moved into the dining room. They've taken up residence on the north wall, just where wall meets ceiling. As a military man, I'm intrigued by how they are formed into a V. A perfect phalanx of beetlery. We're leaving them alone for now. The cold weather is sure to do them in before long. Or Butternut, if they ever venture below the three feet line.
We had to do a lot of shopping and errands yesterday, and were gone all day long. We started out in Kingsport, in the antiques shops downtown, and then winded our way west to the town of Rutledge, TN, where we visited Ritter Farms. It was a gorgeous drive, and when we arrived, we were able to buy some very nice produce. Our purchases included some fresh, unpasteurized apple cider (very hard to find), some homemade Amish butter, a few very well-formed sweet potatoes (MeeMaw is trying to cultivate a taste for them), and some beans we'd never seen or heard of before: red-streaked "October Beans." The farmer at the store described them as similar to pinto beans, but more flavorful. We know a challenge when we hear one. Here you can see these items, along with a bowl of chestnuts my colleague Sandy gave us from her tree. I'm going to try and start a couple of seedlings from the ones we don't eat. Very good nut-meats, those. We also bought a book written by a woman who works at the farm, Nutritional Health From a Biblical Perspective. I wish I'd looked it over a bit more carefully before plunking down the five bucks. It's really not a very good book; it doesn't fully address what the title purports to address. In many ways, it's like a poorly-prepared Sunday School class, where the teacher just throws in a ton of scripture that happens to have the appropriate word in the verses.
On the way back from Ritter Farms, we stopped and ate supper at Fatz Cafe in Kingsport, then did some grocery shopping, and finally headed back to Possum Cough. We arrived home quite late (for us, anyway) and found that we'd missed some phone calls. It was too late to return them, so MeeMaw did some piddlin' in the kitchen while I reviewed my Sunday School lesson plan very briefly, and then we had another little autumn party. Hot cider and two old b&w horror movies, one good, one dreadful. The good one was The Spiral Staircase, a very atmospheric 1930's tale of a mute girl being stalked by a killer in an old mansion during a thunderstorm. The dreadful one was House of Dracula, a shlocky Universal Pictures release that managed to shoehorn Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein's monster into 90 minutes of overwrought ham. John Carradine looked very nice in his white tie and tails; that's all we can say about his performance. Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolfman was, well, very sad. And I don't mean that in a thespian way. And whomever was playing Frankenstein's monster got the good end of the deal, because he only had to embarrass himself for about 10 minutes of screentime. We had a great time making fun of it (and making up dialogue), though. Watching movies with us is sort of like Mystery Geezer Theatre 3000.
We managed to drag ourselves out of the flannel embrace this morning with great reluctance. I went for my walk, noting that the Texas thermometer out back registered 36 degrees. (The one in Gate City on the way to church said 33F.) A white rime of frost covered everything. I kept thinking of Dylan Thomas' lyric poem, apropos of the day:
Poem In October
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.
A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.
And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.
Walking around to the stone wall, I noticed the growing carpet of pine needles, and how they all seemed to face the same direction, as if planted by a tiny fence-maker.
I looked at MeeMaw's flowers to see if the frost had gotten to them, and I saw a sad and beautiful thing. A bumblebee, dead and cold, clinging to a lantana blossom. Did he die of old age while drinking his nectar? Or did he stay out past his time to return home, only to be caught by the killing night air? I am deadly serious when I say that when my time to depart this life comes round, I hope I am found like this bee: laboring, doing the thing I was created to do.
The sun on the valley looks like the air here smells: like apples and hay and deer musk. It is alive, and mysterious, and as elusive as a dreaming baby's thoughts.
Mr. Davidson continues to cut silage for the cows from his cornfields around us. Three of the silage wagons were sitting silent and empty this morning, organized piles of slumbering lumber.
One of the bulls was grazing up along the front pasture fence, and his black hide almost reflected the shimmer of the tree behind him.
The Arrington's other Bassett hound (whose name I cannot recall, since he is usually penned) came out to accompany me for part of my walk. He's as friendly as Gus, but much more skittish. He walks with me very contentedly, but if I stop and look directly at him, he bolts and runs as if I'd just pointed a Luger at him. Makes me laugh every time. He has a bad habit of depositing his foul spoor in our yard, though. I imagine I'll introduce his flanks to Mr. BB sometime soon. A little healthy fear never hurt anyone.
When I came back from my walk, Purrl was watching through the French doors. She seems to enjoy gazing at the pumpkins. I noticed that she looks with interest at a ceramic pumpkin candle holder we have on the hearth. Perhaps pumpkins remind her of Butternut. Perhaps she is waiting for one of them to mistreat her. Poor, tragic Purrl.
On the way back from church, we stopped and took several pictures in the Carter's Valley area.
We also drove to the top of the hill in Reed Holler, where the county park is. The foliage isn't nearly as spectacular as it's going to be in a week or two. But it's still beautimus.
Turning onto our road, we noticed one of Susan Greer's lovely horses lying down in the grass. MeeMaw knows a lot about horses, and she observed that healthy horses don't usually lie down like that. We watched him for a bit, and never saw him moving. We fear that he went the way of bumblebees and all flesh. I'll ask Ms. Greer about it next time I see her.
Seeing the horse reminded me of yet another Dylan Thomas poem, Fern Hill. The excerpt that came to mind was:
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his
Shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise...
This afternoon, we took sandwiches (MeeMaw's homemade bread and homemade tuna salad) and pickles up to the woodlot, along with chairs and books. We sat and ate and read in the absolutely perfect absence of man-made sound. When the sun shifted its angle just a bit, a breeze came up and chilled MeeMaw's little fingers, so we came back down to the house and started making our evening preparations. We hope all of you are as happy and content as we are tonight, and we hope each of you sleep as deeply and warmly as we almost certainly will, beneath a covering of flannel, beneath a brilliantly-starred black freezing sky in the Virginia mountains.
We love you all, and wish you were here with us, every one of you.
