Beauty in the Margins

I.
Since I started taking daily pictures about seven years ago, I've slowly learned to look beyond what's in the foreground and attend to the margins. Bokeh, I've also learned, is what it's called -- that beautiful fuzziness and blurring that lends richness and color and interest. Here are a few pictures from 2014 to demonstrate what I mean.

II.
In my childhood, black folks disappeared in the margins insofar as white folks were concerned. They weren't seen, just as I once didn't see the full richness of a moment suspended in time by my lens. During my youth and then in my adulthood, all peoples of color have stepped forward to take their places in the foreground, earning legal rights, if not always full respect of some others.

III.
Today, in some counties of my native state (Alabama), gay people are marrying because -- despite the Attorney General's plea to the Supreme Court and the Alabama Chief Justice's objections -- they can. And these folks, too, who have historically been backgrounded have come to the fore.

Judge Michael Graffeo and the first couple he married today

IV.
Beautiful bokeh is as much a part of the whole as a black person or a gay person or a Native American or a handicapped person or a female or anyone else is to the fabric that can make of all of us one beautiful picture of what's possible.

Sweet Home

Some days, I miss Alabama, for family and for food.

In summer, food means fresh peas and beans -- purple hulls, black-eyes, field peas, crowders, lady peas, cream peas, butter beans, limas, fordhooks. Collard, mustard and turnip greens and corn -- especially silver queen or honey and cream. And tomatoes (Tennessee homegrown tomatoes are tasty, but they're just not the same), okra, and blackberries. And . . . . peaches.

Oh, the joy of Chilton County peaches, like these.

My niece brought four as a gift on Saturday, and what a gift. We ate one while they were here. I shared another with friends yesterday.

Today, as a special treat, I are the remaining two slathered with cream for breakfast. Every bite, every bit, I savored -- the slip of flavor swimming with tart sweetness, the orange-red-maroon strings, the darkened nipple around the pit, the gooey goodness collected at the bottom of the bowl. I ate every morsel and licked every droplet.

Thank you, Jen, for your thoughtfulness and you, Chilton County, for supplying the best peaches I have ever eaten.

Rev. B. F Perkins

Today, looking at my Friday/Saturday mail, I read a beautifully illustrated folk art auction catalog. On the front is a painting of a bedspread I have been lucky enough to see in person.

I knew the artist, a preacher named B. F. Perkins, who lived in Bankston, Alabama. I first visited with a friend and her then-mother-in-law on a cold, rainy January day at least 20 years ago. The sight of his property was enough to bring all of us cheer and some spiritual warmth, if not physical.

His compound of buildings and sculptures consisted of a church called Hartline on the right, with a hand-painted clock reading 10:00; to the left, a clapboard building serving as a church hall; between them, a red-white-and-blue concrete-block-and-painted-gourd recreation of the tomb of Jesus (complete with opening); behind it, three life-sized crosses representing the site of the crufixion; and further up, on the left and at the top of the hill, Rev. Perkins' house -- a fantastic ramshackle two-storied building on which he had painted stars and stripes and flags in red, white, and blue.

We knocked on his door and waited, not knowing what to expect. He greeted us warmly and welcome us inside. What we saw defies description. Every surface, from floor to ceiling, furniture included, had been turned into art: yellow-gold Statues of Liberty; American flags; Biblical quotations and warnings and other texts; hearts for Hartline; crosses; globes; red, white, and blue stripes; paintings and signs with patriotic and religious messages. Everything was decorated. Rev. Perkins was painting his kitchen when we arrived -- appliances and cabinets and floors.

He showed us the entire house, which except for his art, was dark until we reached the treacherously perched cupola-like second floor, where his paintings on stretched canvas covered the walls. He escorted us to the balcony and pointed out the garden where he had planted gourd vines for his painted birdhouses, his workshed, the site of his "tombstone" in the front (he had been denied a church he helped to found).

As I sit at this computer now, blogging, through my study door I see four of the five paintings he created. When I select a book from my bookcase, I see two of his gourds. When I sit on my couch and watch the birds and deer outside my front window, I see a large unfinished painting I bought from him three months after meeting him (by which time his house had been stripped almost bare by galleries). Every object reminds me of his warmth and vitality.

The urge to create is, I think, the most ennobling of human urges, and knowing Rev. Perkins has ennobled my life and does so every time I see his work.