Driving home from the shredding of my personal written history, I took Highway 41 up the mountain from Chattanooga, foregoing the interstate. At the TVA sign for Raccoon Mountain, I thought why not? and turned off. Haze filtered the view of Chattanooga and construction closed the visitors' center, so I pulled off where boaters park. Before I even get out of the car, I saw more than a dozen Halloween Pennants, topping each tall grass blade in the twenty feet or so between me and the river. Golden females and burnt red-orange males balanced, lifted, re-balanced, lifted, their wings opening and closing like flapping sails.
I can't go anywhere these days without finding odonates, familiar spirits of the insect world to which I am slowly gaining admission.
2.
Atop the mountain, just past the entrance to Foster Falls, a front yard display included two large flags, one the American and the other the Confederate battle flag, one at half-mast and the other fully raised. I was tempted to stop and take a picture, but didn't, wondering what the homeowner's response might be. More strange this un-patriotic patriot's display of misguided loyalty, more foreign than the pennants' appearance.
3.
Five miles from home, atop "The Mountain," as folks call it, one sign loomed large in front of the liquor store: WELCOME GODLY PLAY. If I didn't live on the campus of an Episcopal college, I'd probably have the same reaction of most tourists who must scratch their heads and think or say Huh? After all there's nothing godly or playful about capitalist advertising, liquor stores, or insensitivity, though the pennants may come close to both godly and play.
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