The University Farm: Seasonal Charnel House

After parking, I watched two men get out of a truck and, while a third stayed behind the wheel, walk to the farm building's center back door, where they unlocked it and disappeared inside.

I minded my own business, wandered into the new hoophouse, ambled through, headed up the side of the larger hoophouse, then around it, all the time taking photos. 

When I noticed the dessicated butterflies, beetles, flies, bees stacked inside the interior folds of plastic, and, taken aback, thought of northern European still lifes of dead rabbits and birds and stacked fish on groaning boards, awaiting preparation and consumption, those reminders of fleeting time and death awaiting us all -- at that very moment, I heard a voice.

Looking to my right, I saw two of the men dragging a whitetail deer carcass (field-dressed and knife-slit-belly facing me) toward that very same door, swing it up the steps, go inside briefly, then come out, lock the door, and get in the truck. The third pocketed his smart phone, joined them, and they drove away.

Culling season in Sewanee, the season of darkness.

The Girl in the Painting

She stares
at another 
of her selves --
when at 3
she sat
at a table laden
with figures
across from the woman
who limn
the girl's
first portrait --
and she hangs
next to another
of her selves --
when at 16
she sat
with her Martin
00021 guitar
while her brother
sketched, then
painted her portrait.
This one, 
the 12-year-old
with the neighbors' dog,
and the others
watch the woman
descend the steps
and wonder
Who is she?

Lake Cheston ABCedarian: P

P IS FOR PHOTOREALISM

(see Deborah Rubin's Fall Leaves on Water, for comparison)

Beautiful Things

I

My niece, a floral designer, makes beautiful things beautiful anew through selection, arrangement, and display. A skill, an art, a calling, of a kind, to make herself and others happy. I admire her dedication to making an environment beautiful, no matter how prosaic and small or grand and large. She brings the natural to attention, making others attend to what she loves.

II

Hanging on my study wall, over and behind my left shoulder, a Jim Sudduth painting glows. Although many would call it crude or untutored, -- the product of an untrained painter or dabbler -- mud and housepaint, brush and finger marks and pencil create an addictive vibration of life and liveliness, wedding earth, hand and eye. Whoever dismisses the painting as "naive" does not appreciate artful creation.

III

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity" brings together paintings and objects of fashionable daily life -- men's hats, women's corsets and bustles, designer dresses. In her New York Times review, Roberta Smith writes, "A result is an intense, almost hallucinatory swirl in which art and artifact continually change places, and a basic wisdom is demonstrated: any well-selected thing can illuminate any other."

IV

I love the basic wisdom of well-selected things and the people wise enough to love them.

A Painterly Day

Julie wheeled her little red wagon to Lake Cheston, took out her materials, and headed down to the beach, where I found her.
 
"When I took out my palette, a dragonfly landed on it," she told me.

Her youngest child has just started kindergarten, so Julie has time again to do something she loves: paint.  She is by training and temperament an artist, apparent in the beginnings of her landscape.
 
"I'm glad you're doing this for yourself now," I said and walked on.
 
We're kindred spirits: Julie creates her vision on canvas, and I, in digital photos.

Both of us prove that autumn offers gifts for the eyes that see them.