On the McMinnville Highway, close to the town, is a beautiful garden-art lot filled with large and small, exotic and native, human and animal statues. I only wish I had had time to stop on my way into town. When I was heading out, the yard was already closed and the gates locked.
Among the many statues that looked nearly regal in the setting sun were a chicken almost as tall as me, a soldier carrying a wounded baby in the direction of a four-foot monkey (dressed like those drumming and cymbal-crashing monkeys on Daddy Will's wind-up toys), a red-and-white hunting dog taller than the brown pony next to it, a black horse, a fat and satisfied pig,a wingspread eagle, and a jumping fish. Across the way, a row of saints seemed to march in their direction, and all faced the zooming traffic.
These concrete fancies decorate another concrete construction, the strip of Highway 55 along which, happily, other gardens grow -- nursery after nursery after nursery filled with trees and shrubs of every kind.
As Alice Walker said, we are all gardeners of some kind.
I do not mind the presence of one deer: the one on my porch, made of cast concrete, painted, and left to weather in a garden art yard of a store on the outskirts of Scottsboro. Earlier this summer, I drove to Birmingham to celebrate Virginia's third birthday. Because I had no agenda, I took one of the long ways, turning after Stevenson onto 72 to the town where the nine famous black boys were falsely accused and tried and where today the unclaimed baggage store garners national attention. For me, Scottsboro has become a shopping mecca for concrete birds and gnomes and rabbits. When I saw a shoulder-high buck and his doe off the highway as I sped by, I took the first left, completed a U-eee, and drove straight back. Now when the deer nightly raid my garden for tasty morsels, another deer, a silent one without appetite, stares back. He is my welcome mat, and he always makes me smile.
