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finesmallstorm
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Name: Laura
Birthday: 7/5/1985
Gender: Female
Interests: books...and music of the celtic variety...and other stuff
Expertise: guess
Occupation: Student
Message: message me
Member Since:
5/5/2003
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| the purpose of my return to xanga is as follows:
1) in about one month's time i will be hopping a plane in knoxville and heading for the UK, from whence, i have promised myself, i will be sending pretty regular updates about how and what i'm doing so as not to fall grossly out of touch with everyone i've ever known, as is my current pastime. however, while considering this, i came to the tragic and sobering realization that such dreams of communication would be groundless and unrealized unless i went through a rigorous period of training beforehand, in which i was forced to compose updates on a regular basis. and thus i come running into the arms of xanga again.
2) i'm at work and really bored.
i also realize that my fear of not writing updates while in the UK is pretty groundless as well, seeing as how life over there will be nothing but one amazing adventure after another. if all goes according to plan, my updates from Wales will go something like this: today, while on a brisk 7-mile jaunt around the outlying crags and crevices near the farm, i struck up a pleasant conversation with a few sheep and several traveling knights of the round table.
on the other hand, updates from bristol usually go something like this: today while standing behind the nondescript counter at java j's, i was appalled and slightly amused when i had to refuse a 5'1" man 14 shots of espresso, telling him that if he wanted to commit suicide he would have to go another route because my conscience couldn't handle that responsibility right now (true story, except the entire last part about my reply).
so, here's hoping this update thing actually works...
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| Christmas Green
Just now the earth recalls His stunning visitation. Now the earth and scattered habitants attend to what is possible: that He of a morning entered this, our meagered circumstance, and so relit the fuse igniting life in all the dim surround. And look, the earth adopts a kindly affect. Look, we almost see our long estrangement from it overcome. The air is scented with the prayer of pines, the earth is softened for our brief embrace, the fuse continues bearing to all elements a curative despite the grave, and here within our winter this, the rising pulse, bears still the promise of our quickening.
(scott cairns)
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| it all started very innocently. i thought it was about time to hear the sufjan stevens rendition of an old hymn. that's it. nothing else. the christmas cd set emerged from the scarves and posters of my packing boxes. hymn was played. the rest happened in slow motion: the lunge toward the stop button before the christmas music could escape, the narrow miss. perhaps i intentionally miscalculated the distance to the cd player. perhaps i never meant to turn it off at all. who can say? but in moments it was unleashed: songs about ships and cities and torches and a cattle stall.
and now i can see the advent approaching, stalking through an underbrush of days a month and a half away.
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| it's been a week since the ten days of living out of a backpack. dc, maryland, pennsylvania, virginia, tenn/north carolina. interstate 81 is full of wonders. norse gods disguised as dogs, giant rabbits, duck pin bowling, kinetic vehicles, old men who have been swing dancing since the 1920s, trains, trains, anarchist plots, trains, good faces, trains, conversations, walks. home and stumbling 2 miles in the dark, dead headlamp, fortuitous patches of blueberries, views of 3 or 4 or 5 conquered peaks in the roan highlands, 14 miles.
now serving coffee to the good folk of the tri-cities. estimated date of departure from elizabethton homestead: oct. 6ish. more stories later.
it's fall outside. feels like the old greensprings highway.
and all manner of things shall be well.
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| we make this unintentional trip every summer (granny, her sister, mom,
me, and various and sundry cousins/ brother) but half of the
participants don't remember that it has been made the year before. my
mom pretends it's an accident, that she made a wrong turn or that a
sudden whim caused her to take the long way home from johnson city. we
visit old graveyards and sites of my great-great relatives' houses,
which have now turned into subdivisions or fields with stone chimneys
growing in the center. my granny's memory, which she curses daily, is
completely restored and she talks about cracking walnuts on the porch
of her uncle's old store and trying to sneak across the fields to spy
on the man who was rumored to wear women's clothing on occasion.
the trip gets longer every year.
so,
this year we finally visited the patton graveyard, resting place of the
great legend of our family, mary mckeehan patton. she is my
great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother. her headstone says:
1751-1836 and something about how she ground gunpowder for the
overmountain men and transported it to king's mountain and thus won the
revolutionary war for the colonists. there are a few other historical
figures who would challenge this claim, probably one in every county.
but when i was a kid i pretty much thought that she singlehandedly
fought the redcoats out of tennessee and north carolina. her large iron
pot/vat for making gunpowder is on display at the sycamore shoals
museum and says something about it being what mary patton carried the
gunpowder to king's mountain in. like all good children, i took
"carried" very litterally. so i always pictured her, bonneted and
aproned, strapping this 500 lb iron kettle onto her back and hiking
100+ miles into north carolina, hounded by wolves on all sides. it was
epic.
i had mostly completely forgotten about all that until today
when my great-aunt said: "now that's the decedent you take after,
laura." as if she personally knew her 5x great- grandmother and i was
the spitting image. i (i'm ashamed to admit) made some sort of
sarcastic comment about the last time i hauled gunpowder to the
revolutionary war soldiers at king's mountain. but she laughed and
explained herself, so all was well.
afterwards we tried to find
the small plot of land where their other grandparents were buried and
discovered it in the weeds/ bushes by a stranger's gravel driveway. the
headstones just looked like weathered piles of rock and i figured that
my granny and her sister were probably running through a list of
memories and allowing a moment of bittersweet nostalgia for all that
has passed, lost headstones in the weeds. i dutifully kept my silence.
and was, of course, wrong.
instead my aunt says: "well, when the lord
comes back we won't have any trouble locatin them graves then."
"why, yes," says my granny, "it'll brighten up in there and people'll just start hoppin out of their graves left and right."
well, glory. | | |
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